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I had a fellow on my latest podcast, released Sunday, who insists that the world population will crash 90-plus percent from the current 7.6 billion to 600 million by the end of this century. Jack Alpert heads an outfit called the Stanford Knowledge Integration Lab (SKIL) which he started at Stanford University in 1978 and now runs as a private research foundation. Alpert is primarily an engineer.

At 600 million, the living standard in the USA would be on a level with the post-Roman peasantry of Fifth century Europe, but without the charm, since many of the planet’s linked systems — soils, oceans, climate, mineral resources — will be in much greater disarray than was the case 1,500 years ago. Anyway, that state-of-life may be a way-station to something more dire. Alpert’s optimal case would be a world human population of 50 million, deployed in three “city-states,” in the Pacific Northwest, the Uruguay / Paraguay border region, and China, that could support something close to today’s living standards for a tiny population, along with science and advanced technology, run on hydropower. The rest of world, he says, would just go back to nature, or what’s left of it. Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.

I hadn’t encountered quite such an extreme view of the future before, except for some fictional exercises like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (Alpert, too, sees cannibalism as one likely byproduct of the journey ahead.) Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.

Both of us are at odds with the more generic techno-optimists who are waiting patiently for miracle rescue remedies like cold fusion while enjoying re-runs of The Big Bang Theory. (Alpert doesn’t completely rule out as-yet-undeveloped energy sources, though he acknowledges that they’re a low-percentage prospect.) We do agree with basic premise that the energy supply is mainly what supports the way we live now, and that it shows every evidence of entering a deep and destabilizing decline that will halt the activities necessary to keep our networks of dynamic systems running.

A question of interest to many readers is how soon or how rapid the unraveling of these systems might be. When civilizations crumble, it tends to fast-track. The Roman empire seems to be an exception, but in many ways it was far more resilient than ours, being a sort of advanced Flintstones economy, with even its giant-scale activities (e.g. building the Coliseum) being accomplished by human-powered work. In any case, the outfit really fell apart steadily after the reign of emperor Marcus Aurelius (180 AD).

The Romans had their own version of a financialized economy: they simply devalued their coins by mixing in less and less silver at the mint, so they could pretend to pay for the same luxuries they had grown accustomed to as resources stretched thin. Our financialized economy — like everything else we do — operates at levels of complexity so baffling that even its supposed managers at the central banks are flying blind through fogs of debt, deception, and moral hazard. When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top, the effects are likely to be quick and lethal to the economies on the ground below.

In our time, the most recent crash of a major socioeconomic system was the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. Of course, it happened against the backdrop of a global system that was still revving pretty well outside the USSR, and that softened the blow. Ultimately, the Russians still had plenty of oil to sell, which allowed them to re-set well above the Fifth Century peasant level of existence. At least for now. The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion. Apparently, the US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.

They seem to be pretty clueless about the fate of the USA these days, too. If you consider the preoccupations of two very recent Intel chiefs — John Brennan of CIA and James Clapper, DNI — who now inveigh full-time on CNN as avatars of the Deep State against the wicked Golden Golem of Greatness. Personally, I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s, but probably bloodier because there’s simply more stuff just lying around to fight over. Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. But it will become political and social soon enough, maybe all-at once. And when it happens in the USA, it will spread through the financial systems the whole world round.


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562 Responses to “That Collapse You Ordered…?”

  1. K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 9:45 am #

    “Alpert is primarily an engineer.”

    So am I. Why do Alpert and I see things so dire? It is all in the math.

    • Epicur April 30, 2018 at 10:08 am #

      I’m an engineer, too and see trouble ahead, but, barring all-out nuclear war, I don’t think the drop will not be anything like that.

      If the population drops anywhere near 90% resources other than oil will not be in short supply and maybe not oil. People will be salvaging materials from buildings and then felling them for the metals and recycling concrete for generations.

      • Zoltar April 30, 2018 at 10:42 am #

        “I don’t think the drop will not be anything like that.”

        Yep – you’re an engineer.

        • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 11:34 am #

          No he is a bullshitter. He said if populations drops dramatically then oil might not be in short supply. The population crashes because we don’t have oil to keep crop yields at stratospheric levels. Take away oil and crop yields will crash by more than 50%. Also there is no more oil that is not high EROEI so any left over people are not going to have the technological expertise to get to any of it.

          • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm #

            Right you are. Oil might well not be in “short supply” after a population collapse, but neither will it be useful. Refined oil is a product of and for an industrial civilization. Any agrarian subsistence society would have no ability to access it in meaningful quantities, nor would it have any use for it if it did.

          • hmuller April 30, 2018 at 1:34 pm #

            “Take away oil and crop yields will crash by more than 50%”.

            Oh K-Dog, A 50% crash would be highly optimistic, Without fuel for farm machinery, we’re reduced to a farmer, his plow, and his plow horse. But the only old-time plows are in museums, and there are no more plow horses. That situation can be remedied in time, but not before a lot of people starve.

            Then there’s the fertilizer, herbicide, & pesticide addiction of modern agriculture – products made from petroleum. I live in the middle of Illinois corn country. It’s unbelievable how close together those 7 ft tall corn plants grow. Nature would never allow it; super doses of chemicals enable it. (I can’t prove it, but I swear the corn was father apart when I was a kid 50 years ago.)

            Just out of idle curiosity I looked up some dairy stats. Today, the average American milk cow puts out 7 gallons per day. In 1952 it was one quarter of that. Soon there will only be a giant udder with a cow’s head attached. American agriculture is like a science experiment run amok. We get more and more at a cheaper price; but there are side effects.

          • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 1:52 pm #

            You are quite right hmuller but nobody can argue with 50%. If I put out more truth as you did it would be ignored. That you responded with the enhanced info makes it stick better. We could get 50% from the loss of pesticides alone.

          • Farmer Joe April 30, 2018 at 2:25 pm #

            Hmuller,

            A plow is not necessry for agriculture. All that is needed in the strictest sense is a shovel, a hoe, and good seed. The devil in the details is in that final point. Good seed is hard to come by. I don’t know if you have ever gardened, but most seeds sold at retail outlets where I am are subpar. Good seed takes years of selection and refinement to grow well in a particular locale. The exception maybe would be with hardy grains, such as rye, but how many people do you know who have thousands of pounds of that sitting around?

            If/when TSHTF there will be starvation, at least in the cities. In the first summer lawns will likely be converted to gardens, but will be deficient in topsoil in many cases and for that reason the effort will be fruitless. Poor soil and bad seed is a recipe for failure. I suspect by that first winter in a worst case scenario most people will no longer have pets, and yes cannabilism will probably be an issue.

            The good news is that skills can be learned and seed crops are generally abundant, and nothing is more motivating than hunger to learn how to grow food and forage on weeds. The bad news is that it will take a lot of pain to get there. For what I believe would be an accurate potrayal of that first year read, “One Second After” by Forstchen.

          • robert magill April 30, 2018 at 6:17 pm #

            This seems to be the engineer’s corner but with seven billion corpses to deal with maybe the Sanitary Engineers will do best.
            The energy problem will likely be solved as it was for thousands of years prior to the machines: Chattel Slavery.
            A slave with a Bill of Sale attached is good old Capitalism and we can live with that.

      • jean.baptiste.moquelin April 30, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

        the early 80s were another time of widespread doom and gloom. Unavoidable world-wide famine. Resource depletion. Soylent green. That vision was defended not by crackpot prophets, but by engineers and technocrats. Club of Rome. In those days, reading Julian Simon ‘Ultimate Resource’ was a perspective-changing experience for me. In it, he describes how the deeply pessimistic predictions of impending mass starvation were bunk. Why the predictions that we will run of of oil in 20 years (that is 20 years ago) were wrong. And not only was he right, he also described the fallacy that leads to making the doom&gloom predictions in the first place. He contrasts the engineering perspective and the economist perspective. The engineer is no idiot, he is impeccably rational. World reserves of this commodity (oil, copper, etc) is such&such millions of tons. Consumption is at such& such level. Conclusion: even generously providing for some new discoveries, we will run of this commodity in X years. Yet these predictions invariably turn out to be wrong. Because the resources are not the fixed and known supply of simplistic thinking. Reserves change, and technologies evolve continuously too. If there is already a 25 years reserve of known exploitable gold on the table, mining companies will stop spending limited capital on exploration. After a few years, when the reserves get low, the price of the resource gets higher and this sparks a new cycle of exploration for mining companies and, lo and behold, they find more gold. Or people find new processes to extract more of the commodity. Or a substitute is found that bypasses the need for the commodity at all – hello peak whale oil. Basically, you should pay more attention to the price of a commodity than to simplistic, engineering mindsets predictions.

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 12:31 pm #

          Jean,
          In Communism, the problem is production
          In Capitalism, the problem is distribution.

          I would opine that if you cannot afford oil, it functionally does not exist. The same for electricity, food, medicine, security.

          Every day, some citizen, or hundreds, in the US face the specter of the “Zombie Apocalypse” in real time. Our system of “Mature” Capitalism in our country is failing vast numbers of citizens…

        • RocketDoc April 30, 2018 at 3:08 pm #

          The early 80’s were doom and gloom because we were in a recession. The turmoil of the 70’s after the oil crisis made it clear what our task was: fix the externalities problem in capitalism, plan for resource limits, localize alternative development strategies for poor countries because $200/per year societies were not going to “catch up” with first world societies and $20,000/yr pc income. Reagan and Thatcher were “old school” and pandered to “Morning in America”. Nobody was interested in sacrifice or LESS. And that is still the case. Let the Syrians do the suffering, we will make dinner reservations for Friday night…

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin April 30, 2018 at 9:19 pm #

            RocketDoc,
            The doom&gloomers I refer to were not despairing about the economic cycle. They were sounding the alarm that the resources were about to run out, and mass starvation was about to decimate world population – including, in dead earnest, the USA. Needless to say this was somewhat off the mark

        • david higham April 30, 2018 at 6:43 pm #

          The world is full of surprises. I didn’t expect to visit JHK’s blog and find someone singing the praises of Julian Simon. Simon was lost in a netherworld with no understanding of ecology or physical reality.This is the bloke who claimed that the population of Earth could increase for the next seven billion years,and that
          copper could be changed into another metal. About as connected with reality as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow, who declared that ‘in effect,the world can get by
          without natural resources.’

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin May 1, 2018 at 9:38 am #

            Mr Higham,

            I don’t know where your quotes are from. But elements turning from one to another occur spontaneously all the time. Stars turn hydrogen into helium, then carbon and oxygen, then so on until iron through fusion, while radioactive decay turns heavier elements into lighter ones through fission. That is physical reality, believe it or not.

          • david higham May 1, 2018 at 6:56 pm #

            True but irrelevant. We have to deal with the cards we’ve been
            dealt. The mineral ores here now,and the energy constraints
            of obtaining the metals from them,are the limiting factors.
            Supply shortages of copper or another metal here on Earth
            cannot be addressed by transmuting metals,as Simon claimed.
            The quotes exist,you can do the digging.

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin May 2, 2018 at 10:43 am #

            “the energy constraints of obtaining the metals from them”
            Now you are zeroing in on a very good point, and exactly what I think Julian Simon was talking about.

            I can’t find the quote about copper. I strongly suspect, from memory, that it comes from Julian Simon talking about how energy is the master resource, how, given enough cheap energy, all other resource problems become easy to solve. So it is NOT a quote about how practical it is to obtain copper by nuclear element transmutation, but a recognition of the importance of energy in our technological societies and an illustration of how, in the hypothesis of more energy, society could solve other resource problems, even by what we now regard as outlandish and extravagant ways. Get fresh water through desalination of sea water, etc. In other words he is not really different from Mr. Kunstler. Both men think energy is what makes our technological societies possible. The only difference is that our gracious host thinks that we are on the cusp of running out of energy while Julian Simon thought we were not.

            Again, don’t read that quote as a proposal for an eminently practical way to get lots of quantity of copper – it most certainly is not. It is only a purely fictional illustration of what becomes thinkable if energy were to become too cheap to meter.

          • david higham May 2, 2018 at 4:38 pm #

            There is a mention of copper in this article.
            http://mahb.stanford.edu/blog/population-books/

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin May 2, 2018 at 6:54 pm #

            Mr Higam,

            Thanks for the link. My comments:
            – so it is not 7 billion years of population growth but 7 billion years of economic growth. Not quite the same thing.
            – we don’t get more details regarding the context of the original copper quote
            – I would not rely too much on the even-handedness of a man bitter from having been intellectually, publically spanked by Mr Simon.

          • david higham May 3, 2018 at 3:56 am #

            The Simon quotation,which you can read in this link is;
            ‘We now have in our hands–really,in our libraries– the technology to feed,clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years.’
            http://www.azquotes.com/author/43863-Julian_Simon

        • Ehrlich and the environmentalists were always and will forever be right long after that silly bet is forgotten… which will be all our lifetimes.

          Ya done fucked up, humanity.

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin May 2, 2018 at 11:05 am #

            I would certainly not claim Ehrlich has always been right.

            I would not accept unquestioningly as a guru someone who warned us that some 65 millions Americans would die of starvation in the 1970s, that India was doomed and that England would probably not make it to year 2000. It is 2018, what threatens Americans is obesity, England still stands and I’m back from India, its population has more than doubled since ‘The Population Bomb’, yet it’s never been richer or more well-fed – I can attest there are some fat mamas there.

            Or at least I would invest a lot of time pondering what thinking led him to so spectacularly WRONG conclusions and why exactly it’s different, this time.

          • Replying to jean baptiste below….

            Evidently you aren’t familiar with Ehrlich’s body of work in the last 30 years.

            Each one of those predictions would have come to pass if it were not for developments that changed the trajectory. In this case, North Sea oil field development and coal power in India. Both solutions, of course merely delay the crisis and create new problems (global warming).

            India is fed today largely due to fossil fuels and a much lower energy requirement for food production (vegetarians). Even now, though, the situation is changing.

            Peter Thiel: “Think of the famous 1980 Paul Ehrlich-Julian Simon wager about resource scarcity. Simon may have won the bet a decade later, but since 1993, on a rolling decade basis, Ehrlich has been winning famously. This is something that has not registered with the political class at all. ”

            Prediction is difficult. Critics of forecasters tend not to recognize the better guesses when when they appear and are too quick to dismiss the qualified reasoning when the critical point is called too soon. For every change in circumstance, new features can be added to models to modify forecasts.

            Yes, many events can intersect to change outcomes but the hard facts are the 2nd law of thermodynamics, joules and calorie requirements, and what technology can be delivered and sustained. Modelled forecasts based on calculation and data should be more accurate than a collection of guesses. Both are valuable.

            Based on the conclusions in 1990, in if taking Simon’s prediction as prima facie evidence of not just a trend but a fundamental fact about resources, you might as well have sold off your commodities believing prices would forever decline. They did not. So Ehrlich in this sense is vindicated, as is quantitative modelling.

            Assaults on the man’s personality or competence pales in relation to his body of work, which were revised and updated, and I would suggest taking a look. Simon is dead, and so it is even less admirable to hold up his bet in 1980 as a monument to his views, since, if he were alive, he may have modified them. I frequently see this sort of resurrection of a dead man’s views in debates on climate change. Crichton died before being able to weigh in on its veracity in this decade.

            I

          • jean.baptiste.moquelin May 2, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

            Lil Debbie,

            I never held up the bet at any point. YOU did. And I never said anything about his personality – I wouldn’t,, and couldn’t since I have no clue whatever what it might be. Yes, I did say that his predictions were cosmically, galactically wrong. Because they were. Unless it’s just me: how do YOU rate his prediction of the imminent death of tens of millions of Americans from starvation in the seventies?

            And your weak rebuttal, “he would have been beautifully right if there hadn’t been all those pesky discoveries of oil… and improvements in food production… and in logistics… and communication… and extraction technologies…” is in fact the core of Simon’s argument about why people who predict doom have been systematically wrong for the past couple of centuries. Peak wood! Peak whale oil! Peak coal! And his argument is: for better or for worse, people never bother to invest much thought or capital to solve problems that will only hit a century from now. It is only when people start to see a problem getting near – in the coming 20 years, say – that people start to get moving and wrack their brain and search. And then, generally, someone manages to find something. And the trajectory changes. That’s his point: the trajectory always changes. Basically, linear extrapolations 50 years out fails. It’s like an n-body problem with 7 billion bodies.

            Anyway I certainly do not hold Simon as a guru. He was definitely an optimism extremist. I actually think we may be at a point at which the easing of the human condition that has held for the last 250 years might hit a wall. But in a discussion about engineers stepping outside their area of expertise and going, “trust me, I’m an engineer, resources are finite and near exhaustion, that’s all there is to it, we’re all about to die”, I thought it would be worthwhile to say: “hey, wait a second, haven’t we heard that before?”.

          • It isn’t really saying anything to say “we’ve heard this before” anmd point to Ehrlich, because prior to Ehrlich, you’d point to Mathus, and today, its Alpert.

            Op ed in nytimes from 5 years ago about ehrlich, the bet., and climate change: betting-on-the-apocalypse

            Anyway, the tenor of criticism in here, to my ear, sounds entirely too conventional: hand waving dismissals.

            Its all good. At any rate, after ya’ll ARE in fact dead (well before the critical point) its more likely than not CO2 ppm concentrations will be higher, and fish populations worldwide, lower. The ocean pH will be lower and the coral will probably be totally gone. There will be way more than the present 7 billion in all probability and there will be more than enough events to observe. You may go to your deathbeds, and indeed, have etched on your tombstones, a message to eternity, that you were unbothered to the very last and suspected it was all a bit overwrought.

        • Too bad Lanthanum is a rare earth. sure it will scale, make a big one. Will it clean itself? I’m guessing not. About that hydrogen (its explosive) you have to leverage energy from somewhere to compress it because its not very useful because of its lower energy density as compared to a hydrocarbon. On the big plus side it

          Don’t get me wrong, the future can be saved by research science like this. It must be properly funded. And in the meantime all these other dumb apes have to plant trees and find other hobbies besides uselessly mowing lawns and drinking fermented grains (produced with fossil fuels)

          Kidding aside, Alpert is correct. You may have some catalysed hydrogen generation to achieve a kind of energy storage in your survival cell (town) for your hydro / wind / methane pig pens. It will be quite a town, somehow manufacturing its own iron to provide the 3000 psi containment vessels.

          Without the ability to order off the shelf parts from China I’d say the future will have its hands full

          • Forgot to add there are methods of storing hydrogen that are more efficient than pressurizing gas cylinders but we’d probably have had to devote a lot of resources a decade ago to make it a reality in ten years.

            Too little, too late.

          • Forgot to add there are methods of storing hydrogen that are more efficient than pressurizing gas cylinders but we’d probably have had to devote a lot of resources a decade ago to make it a reality in ten years.

            Too little, too late.

    • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 10:08 am #

      Because we engineers have committed our lives to the creation of systems and providing the maintenance and sustainability of same. Consumers consume, engineers build and maintain.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 1:31 pm #

        The Roman Way was better. They understood water wheels and windmills, just didn’t use them even though Western Europe is superb for them. They had people to do it all. People, you know – what it’s all supposed to be about? Engineers will happily make us obsolete since they don’t “do” philosophy. They just fix problems for money. Thus they are an Enemy in service of the Enemy.

        The slavery thing was a bummer of course. Our machines could be our slaves if we would fucking stop where we are. But there is not stopping this juggernaut until it crashes.

        Mysticism (the real experience of God) is above Theology. Theology is above Philosophy. Philosophy is above Science. Science is above Engineering. A humble path for humble men. Instead of taking orders from the Global Slave Masters, they should be taking orders from Philosopher Kings.

        • Tate April 30, 2018 at 3:16 pm #

          The ancient Romans couldn’t conceive of a life without slaves. Just as we cannot conceive of a life without cheap energy.

          At least oil won’t rise up and conquer us.

          • hmuller April 30, 2018 at 3:52 pm #

            No, but watch out for Artificial Intelligence. It’s coming and I don’t think it likes us.

          • Tate April 30, 2018 at 5:45 pm #

            Will AI require cheap energy to effect whatever purpose it decides or is programmed to pursue? If it does, maybe all the talk about AI is alarmist. If it doesn’t, then things will certainly get interesting.

        • pequiste April 30, 2018 at 3:44 pm #

          ” Our machines could be our slaves if we would fucking stop where we are. But there is not (sic) stopping this juggernaut until it crashes.” Janos Skorenzy

          Robotics plus the Artificial General Intelligence revolution will put human civilization on a proper Terminal trajectory much sooner than even Dr. Alpert’s conjecture.

          Janos gets a cigar.

      • The vast majority of engineers today are not doing basic, fundamental research.

        No- they are frivolously wasting time and resources to collect a paycheck… (in most cases, to support women and children, the biological entropy generators)… to pay for rents… and a consumer lifestyle.

        The consumer lifestyle is OF COURSE one of the MAIN reasons for becoming an engineer.

        The “Engineer” is as noble in truth as the “immigrant” or the “patriot”, or the “Teacher”, etc.

        All of them some sort of confused and victimized little ape.

        • Walter B May 2, 2018 at 6:40 pm #

          The worst are the automotive engineers who sold us all out years ago for the increased profits of their lords and masters. In the olden days we had a saying, See It Big And Keep It Simple. Yes, the golden age of engineers in American is past, though some of us old bastards still cling to the principles of value. To what end, I am not sure, but I’ll be damned if I am going to change now.

    • DrTomSchmidt April 30, 2018 at 10:20 am #

      I think it’s the inability to see things that are exponential, even among engineers. No one could imagine 21st century technopia in 1800. We see the linear effects of what cannot go on eventually stopping.

      I’m not sure that we cannot use the one-time burst of fossil fuels to boost us to a permanent plateau. I am sure, however, that a debt based economy where debt grows exponentially due to interest is unsustainably without at least S-curves of resource growth. Those S-curves are in our past. We need to move to a world that doesn’t require exponential growth to pay for its financial and sociopolitical arrangements, and I think the engineers see that we are out of time.

      • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 11:29 am #

        Modern economics require growth. Modern economics cease without growth. The reason? Population! There will be more people here next year than there are this year. If the capital pool representing those people stays the same or shrinks, which it is slowing now, people have to do with less. Simple as that. How they volunteer to do with less is not so simple. It is the basis of every revolution in history including ours. The capital pool growth rate must grow as least as much as the folks it represents or recession starts. Much of the nationalism in the US, Europe, and China stems from a desire to maintain their capital pools. Sorry. Liberals, our desire to spread the wealth will decline, as it is right now, as the capital pool starts to shrink. The last dollar of the national capital pool will be spent trying to build a wall to keep the indigent out. The economic decline will change the attitudes of everyone. Maslow’s hierarchy will come on like gangbusters. The violence of the USA reaction will depend on how voters feel about the boys and girls in DC and states respond to their discomfiture. If the vote doesn’t work, stand by for heavy rolls.

        • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 11:42 am #

          Exponentially less, at that!

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

        I think it’s the inability to see things that are exponential, even among engineers. No one could imagine 21st century technopia in 1800. We see the linear effects of what cannot go on eventually stopping.

        Albert Bartlett made a career and his reputation stating exactly that.

        • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 3:39 pm #

          Some Engineers!

          • A lot of engineers, I suspect, don’t think about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, except when they have to.

            Most at-hand problems are approachable because the law can be assumed as a limit.

            As the actual CAUSE of the problem at hand is a different story. They start out as Mr. Alpert does, with an analysis, and experiment.

            At this point experiment is the only avenue available toward this problem. If engineers cannot or will not work on this problem, what possible source of hope do these “Doomer Deniers” rely? Faith? Economics?

            Research science is the only path to a real solution. The economy is gigantic destructive force that acts to increase the problem at all times.

            I do believe we are past the point of no return guys. When people are more likely to construct an edifice of hope than do useful and honest work on a problem we are no different than the Easter Islanders creating more stone idols. A cargo cult.

          • K-Dog May 2, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

            As in many things the 80-20 rule applies.

    • Eoin April 30, 2018 at 10:53 am #

      Ah so Mr. Dog! Only in your case you would take care that it was not “fuzzy math”, yes ?

      Guys like Mr. Alpert make me think of the statistics, derived from tax data by IRS, that indicate a person’s probable success at farming is inversely proportional to their level of formal education.
      To put it another way; thinking about being hungry and how you would eat is different, and easier, than putting a squirrel, or your recently deceased neighbor, on the table in a way that will not sicken and kill you. Such folks get far too much exposure; their thoughtless negativity becomes pervasive and ultimately disruptive.
      Intrarectalcranialitis rules the day.
      600 million people left ? Sounds like he finally looked up the Georgia Guidestones.
      The lack of faith, in almost anything, by the intelligentsia is stunning. Aren’t these the people that are really supposed to lead in times of trouble? With the exception of our host, who is there? where are they?

      Regarding the news from last Friday, did anyone see this?

      https://usawatchdog.com/trump-is-doing-what-kennedy-tried-to-do-kevin-shipp/

      • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 11:11 am #

        Yes I did, USA Watchdog is one of my few sources for news. Do you recall the talk of assassination of President Trump after the election and during the first months of his term? Did you notice that this disappeared after he gave the green light to more war and more “defense” spending? Coincidence? I think not. Give the MIC what it wants and you are allowed to live. Fight it and die, that’s how it works, or rather, fails to work..

        • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 12:22 pm #

          Give the MIC what it wants and you are allowed to live. Fight it and die, that’s how it works, or rather, fails to work..

          That would indeed appear to be the plan. How much you wanna bet this is what was discussed in Cheney’s Top Secret hush-hush White House Energy Summit back in the spring of 2001?

        • Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 5:08 pm #

          Walter B,

          I heartily agree!

          Greg Hunter’s ‘Watchdog USA’ YouTube channel provides an outstanding variety of guests on economic and geopolitical matters on a weekly+ basis. Hunter is a former major cable television network anchor and his interviewing abilities are excellent. His show is fast-paced and to the point:

          https://m.youtube.com/user/usawatchdog

          Very recent guests include one of my favorites, the brilliant David Stockman, on 14 April. Others over the past month or so include Kevin Shipp (4/28) mentioned above by Eoin, Catherine Austin Fitts, Warren Pollack, Bill Holter & Michael Pento.

          Try it, you’ll like it. YouTube or USAWatchdog.com

          -Sticks

    • Martymcfly April 30, 2018 at 11:11 am #

      Okay, enough with the doom and gloom. Some might recognize these passages; some should recognize yourselves. The fact is, we are going to be okay.

      My new theory on the Guy McPherson crowd: Why would anyone go out of their way to believe in something (near-term human extinction) that’s both depressing and unsupported by the evidence? It’s because these are people who are already depressed and despairing for a variety of reasons, and by telling a story about the whole world, they can all be depressed for the same reason, and feel a sense of community.

      The reason I’m no longer a doomer is simply that I got tired of being wrong. And I started to feel contempt for other doomers who shamelessly made the same wrong predictions year after year. And you have to make precise predictions because otherwise what does “collapse” even mean? Do you think we’re still going to have internet? Container ships? Large scale grain farming? Banks? Taxes? Electrical grids? Hospitals? Stock markets? Elections? These are all different subjects that require different specialized knowledge. Even something like “manufacturing” could have vastly different answers for different products. And for each thing that’s going to go away, how long will it take, and by what chain of events?
      Everyone wants to be right, but people who persist in being doomers want to be right in a different way than I do. I want to say what’s going to happen, and then it actually happens. Some people want to feel like they understand the mechanism for how things happen. But the real world is much too complex for any one person to understand, so we make simplifications. In the context of collapse, the simplest idea is business as usual plus sci-fi extrapolation. The next simplest idea is total collapse: every one of the above things goes away, because they’re all part of the same One Big Thing, and some of the conditions that made the One Big Thing possible are disappearing.
      Everyone is stupid, but smart people know how they’re stupid. I know that modern civilization is only One Big Thing inside my head, and out in the world it’s billions of people I don’t know, their knowledge and habits and intentions, plus trillions of physical objects and all the connections between everything. I know that you can’t have perpetual economic growth on a finite planet, that renewable energy is not coming online fast enough for a smooth transition out of fossil fuels, and that presently fertile regions will become deserts; but it would be arrogant to think that large complex high-tech society cannot adapt to these conditions, just because I can’t personally imagine how it can adapt.
       

      They have different obsessions, of course: we’re about to run out of water, or run out of food, or run out of energy. The economy’s on the brink of disaster and their 401Ks will turn into pumpkins. But in truth they’re afraid of dying. And because when you die, the world dies too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It’s a failure of imagination, in a way – an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That’s why old people get apocalyptic: they’re facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real.  So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there’s almost a spitefulness, sometimes, I swear, for some of those bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn’t a fear but a fantasy.. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can’t have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one, either. They want to take everything else with them- down to the olives and the toothpicks. But actually everything’s fine. Life, and civilization, and the United States, are all going to go on and on, and that’s really what they can’t stand.

      • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 11:38 am #

        There is a lot of truth in what you say to be sure, but there is also much more. It is true that as we get closer to our own end many of us spend more time considering that event, but for some of us it is like studying harder for a test as the test date comes closer to happening. Have you ever noticed how some of us start giving away our possessions, sometime, prized possessions, to those that will survive us years before we die, while some seem to hoard even more? There is an element of preparation that many of us engage in and we have done it for just about everything that happens in our lives. At least for the important things.

        THE most important message that I think is ALWAYS overlooked in discussions is the need to CONSERVE, to USE LESS, to allow for those who shall follow to have stuff too. Even Jeramiah Johnson had to care for more humans than himself for greed, selfishness, and “Me first, screw you” are the archenemies of all civilizations. Those diseases eventually destroy all that adopt them and the best message is to not go there That is not doom and gloom, it is simply wisdom and can never be shared too often.

        • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 1:16 pm #

          Did anyone bother to listen to Alpert?
          To read him?

          No.
          That would get in the way of a quick pithy comment.

          The man is giving a rather simple recipe for succes.
          A way forward that preserves humanity, our way of life, and this planet.

          Attrition.

          Problem is, he understands man’s cognitive blind spots
          The temporal.

          They would rather choose pretending that a problem does not exist.

          That’s where the doom comes in.

          When people fail to act.
          Fail to find a solution.
          Fail to progress.

          How ignorant. To comment without taking the time to listen or read first.

          Because it’s inconvenient

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 11:45 am #

        Nice sentiments, but really so much rationalization. Americans can’t see the forest for the trees of their own temporary short term prosperity.

        • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 11:49 am #

          No they cannot Scratch nor will many ever go there. Many are called but few are chosen.

          • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 12:12 pm #

            We’re of one mind Walter! And the “afraid of dying’ accusation above is ass-backwards. It’s the cargo cultists’ own fear of dying that prevents them from looking at the facts objectively.

      • ozone April 30, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

        The near-to-death envy of the young-and-alive and “they’ll think of something”?

        Well, we’ll just have a small adjustment to our various delusions to conform to these two simple constructs and, voila!, all will be well. (I had no idea this could be so easy, why, it’s almost like voting.)

      • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

        Reads like someone is whinging away for an old man to soothe them.
        Angry that they’re not.

        Tell them everything is going to work out for the best.
        Be all right.

        “Go on and on”.. the US(?)

        I bet the:

        Aztecs
        Sumerians
        Incans
        Romans
        Egyptians
        Mongols
        Goths
        Mayans
        Greeks
        etc and etc

        told their kids the same.

        Look where that got them.

      • Elrond Hubbard April 30, 2018 at 12:19 pm #

        There’s a fair bit of truth in what you say, Marty. Not a few around here (particularly our host) seem to be not so much expecting the apocalypse as jonesing for it, trying to urge it into happening so as to satisfy their expectations.

        The thing is, not to panic or give in to despair. Remember the parable of the two frogs that fell into the milk barrel: one of the frogs looks around, sees his situation is hopeless, and drowns. The other frog, too dumb to realize there’s no way he can climb out, just treads milk until he inadvertently churns up some butter. Then he climbs on the butter and floats there long enough for the milkmaid to come and let him out.

        Michael Ruppert could have learned something from that tale. In any case, the future belongs to those who don’t give in to despair, either because they’re too dumb, or because in their own way they refuse to choose failure.

        • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 1:03 pm #

          Did you bother to listen to Alpert?
          He’s giving a prescription for survival.
          For a way for humanity to live a quality existence.
          But MorRond would rather find an excuse for his parable.

          Humanity cannot continue to churn-on on this planet with total disregard.

          It’s impossible for billions upon billions to live a life worth living without destroying the planet and humanity in the process.

          Because you don’t like it
          Because it makes you uncomfortable
          Because it’s not “positive” enough for you
          Get over yourself

          • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 1:54 pm #

            Yeah cuz all “the nations” are going to go down with only your nation surviving as is predicted in the Torah.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 30, 2018 at 2:39 pm #

            Avatar, I haven’t gotten round to listening to the podcast yet. I will soon enough. Meanwhile, if I didn’t have a clear idea of what’s at stake, I wouldn’t have spent the past mumblety years reading and posting around here, would I? Now kindly don’t give me crap if I suggest it’s still possible to focus on the positive, and not only the negative.

          • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 5:51 pm #

            Manet, ManJanet or Morond: Of course you haven’t, it gets in the way of you gettin’ ’round to commenting on the TOPIC F*****G PRESENTED FOR DISCUSSION and your endless quest at reaching a higher summit of smug and sanctimony. Your wife must despise you. Bet her knees have been locked for the last 15.

            Vlad, you need to get your head out of that asiatic Abrahamic bullsh*t that meme-infected you and a large portion of humanity.
            Rather ironic.
            Maybe you despise them because you can’t stop believing?
            I know hatin’ on hebrews comes only second to hatin’ on blacks for you, but up your game already.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 1:52 pm #

          And the milkmaid kissed him and he turned into a prince, married her and made her into a princess.

          Your romantic liberal fantasies are so bourgeois.

      • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

        “The reason I’m no longer a doomer is simply that I got tired of being wrong. And I started to feel contempt for other doomers who shamelessly made the same wrong predictions year after year.”

        A decision based on emotion… However, the rest of your comments, especially regarding the aged, have a ring of truth. Thank you.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 1:55 pm #

          Good summation of Elrond’s friend, Marty.

        • Speaking for myself, my predictions were always farther out and certainly far more sympathetic with Mr. Alpert’s approach.

          I suppose I could brag about being smarter than Marty McFly, but the truth is I don’t fault anyone for (gasp) using less resources, or trying to build a better life… by wasting less, and practicing some virtue in existence even if it was with a touch of miserable hysteria.

          Which are all parcel to my appreciation for the courage to actually point out problems, because I am absolutely convinced if problems aren’t named or recognized they will not be addressed.

      • JMR April 30, 2018 at 2:02 pm #

        Well said. I’ve come to the same basic conclusions. My favorite latest doom and gloom: Fish will be extinct by 2045 or some such thing according to some study. Yup 1 trillion fish that live in an area that covers 7/10s of the planet and in areas we humans don’t even know about will all be gone in 27 years. Never mind we don’t even have knowledge of many species in the ocean. Never mind that fish tend to reproduce in large numbers. YEs, some areas are overfished and we have some serious pollution problems in the ocean, but every fish extinct? Ain’t going to happen.

        I’ll be curious to see where the whole peak oil thing takes us. Yes, we’ll run out of oil eventually, but when? That’s the tricky part. I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. The thing is, when we finally run out of oil that doesn’t cost more energy to extract than it’s worth, we’ll go back to coal. Look for a whole bunch of technologies developing to address using the original fossil fuel. We have several hundred years of coal left easily, so I doubt the doomer fantasies will ever come true.

        • pequiste April 30, 2018 at 3:56 pm #

          Excellent point about the fish.

          On a not too recent visit to the Magdalen Islands of Quebec in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, there one is astonished to see the number of commercial fishing boats rusting and rotting in dry dock.

          1990 Atlantic fishing ground landings according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada:

          http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/stats/commercial/land-debarq/sea-maritimes/s1990aq-eng.htm

          25 years later the landings (pay special attention to the Cod and Herring tonnages):

          http://www.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/stats/commercial/land-debarq/sea-maritimes/s2015aq-eng.htm

          The rest of the world is busy using gargantuan fish processing ships to vacuum up the remainder of the once bountiful North Atlantic fishery.

          Now who can tell me what goes best on/with Soylent Green? Elrond?

          • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 5:35 pm #

            But that thar’s foolish pequi! There fish in ’em oceans.
            Trillions of ’em.
            You mean to tell me that people got rid of all ’em fish?
            That’s tree-hugging’ crazy talk.
            UN plan to take away my fishing’ license.

            Granted, majority ain’t the eatin’ kind, but by golly, there’s trillions of ’em swimmin’ round in there.

            It’s a bottomless buffet. Like the strip-mall chinese shack that I frequent, Lucky Kitchen Number 1 Tops China Buffet..

            Bountiful.

        • michael May 1, 2018 at 3:20 pm #

          Worry not.After we have eaten all the pelagic fish we can turn to bristlemouth and anglerfish the

          largest biomass of vertebrates on the earth
          .
          Admittedly they don’t look so appetizing but we’ll get used to it.

        • Fish stocks are down over 90% worldwide. I had a fishtank for many years, keeping it in equilibrium was difficult. pH and temperature changes, even slightly, were enough to kill all the fish.

          I don’t know where you stand on knowledge of physical sciences, but, Mr. Alpert’s scenario and your own (“I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. “) aren’t different.

          Burn coal to replace fossil fuels? There is incompleteness I think to your understanding. Have you made any calculations resolving energy (joules) and mass (kg), have you constructed any models beyond taking a the base statistics generated by single variable extrapolation and actually applied it?

          For example, how many joules of a unit of coal is furnished toward the end product of food calories sufficient to sustain average body weight human beings at projected masses? How does a unit of joules get from chunk of coal to a lightswitch? How does it replace the various fossil fuel engines and products that comprise modern life?

          To simply say how “curious” you are is kind of insulting, to be honest, in the presence of real scholarship. You’re a dunce, with dumb flip theories about stuff you know nothing about

      • Farmer Joe April 30, 2018 at 5:11 pm #

        Marty, I have a hard time agreeing with you on this one. For me personally, I became interested in these subjects in my early twenties. Doing so helped me personally cope with the reality of my own mortality and change my mindset towards life. I believe that this change has helped me to live a more meaningful and fruitful life over the last 13 years than I may have otherwise. Conversely, the one person who I know well who refuses to consider these possibilities is deeply fearful of death. For some people this being a fear of death thing probably is true, but I know for a fact that not everyone thinks that way.

        Now I’m going to echo something I’ve heard JHK state a thousand times. This collapse is a “long emergency” and not something that is going to pay out like some Romero flick. From what I can tell that is true. Many people are finding it harder and harder to maintain a middle class existence. The last time I visited Seattle, back in November, there was a homeless person for every non-homeless person. Some guy walked up to me and tried to sell me drugs. That has never happened to me before outside of my trip to Amsterdam where tourists flock to do drugs because the laws are so lax. This is what a decaying society, a slow collapse looks like. You were wrong in your doomer years to expect a fast collapse. So was I. But to say it’s not happening because you were wrong then is equally wrong.

      • Here, have a tissue, McFly

        If the reason you were a doomer was only because you wanted to be right about some near-term prediction, and weren’t, doesn’t follow that other predictions aren’t more plausible inferences.

        The next time you want to spit on someone’s scholarship or hypothesis you might as well oblige yourself to spend a few minutes thinking about why you might not be correct in your assumptions, especially if your own track record is so poor.

        It incumbent on your side of the argument to show how humanity pulls the rabbit out of the hat without relying on your premise being self-evident.

    • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 12:01 am #

      Still not sure what the cause would be for a sudden 90% die off.

      Thermo nuclear war? infectious disease epidemic? Massive famine?

      In McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ the author never really made clear what it was that rendered the world barren and cold.

      Right now we are at a moment in history when oil demand is is poised to top 100 million bpd. Just recently it has got a little more expensive but i don’t see shortages anywhere — yet.

      brh

  2. Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 9:47 am #

    “When that vessel of pretense slams into a mountain top…”

    Exactly how I feel after reading your pleasant Monday morning missive.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

      Like the wingless cruise missile shaped plane that hit the Pentagon.

      When will wingless men fly? I was terrified on the monkey soldiers in the Wizard of Oz as a small boy. I had to get out of that room. The Witch too!

      • Walter B May 2, 2018 at 6:50 pm #

        I recently saw a website that “debunked” the small hole in the Pentagon by posting a picture of the small. smoking hole with a fireman in front of it taken before the walls collapsed, claiming it was made by a landing gear (which must have conveniently fallen off at just the right time). They then posted a picture of what they called a “bigger hole” though it was taken after the walls collapsed and did not appear to be a hole at all anyway. It amazes me that the crap they feed the distracted idiots out there is able to work for even one dope, but then, there is no cure for stupid, is there?

        I’ll bet in the future, “debunkers” will be able to do what they do simply by claiming that “Joe said it ain’t so”, and leave it at that.

  3. lsjogren April 30, 2018 at 9:52 am #

    Thanks for that headline “that collapse you ordered”, it reminded me I wanted to try a chick fil a chicken sandwich today, never had one before and it turns they do have one restaurant in my city.

    Sorry for the rude interruption, I will now read the column.

    • teddyboy46 April 30, 2018 at 10:44 am #

      I live in Greece New York a Chick fila opened 3 weeks ago and it is still backing traffic up. I can not even get near the place must be a good sandwich.

      • thenuttyneutron April 30, 2018 at 11:02 am #

        There is only 1 day of the week that I don’t like Chick Fil-a and that is on Sunday.

        Their chicken is awesome. They fry it in a peanut oil. They use a separate oil for the waffle fries and I don’t like this. The fries are still good but they would taste even better if they were also fried in peanut oil. Ever go to Penn Station for their fries?

        I wish they would just post an enormous peanut allergy warning on the front door and fry everything in peanut oil!

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 2:01 pm #

      No doubt Puck will talk about ordering “Collapse Pizza” or folding the slices to create a Mobius strip.

  4. shotho April 30, 2018 at 9:55 am #

    Utopias, both positive and negative, have been written about for a very long time; at least going back to Plato’s Republic. Depending on one’s outlook, none of them has happened yet or all of them have occurred in some form or other. They all seem based on a priori conclusions that, essentially, mirror the fevered imaginings of their creators and have very little to do with reality.
    In this case, mathematics, as powerful as it may be, is a thin reed on which to hang the obliteration of eight or nine thousand years of human history. Fortunately for the author, we will none of us be around to attest to his prophetic skills.

    • Elrond Hubbard April 30, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

      A “thin reed”? You need to learn more respect for math, my friend. Used properly, the very foundations of the earth are as so much Jell-O compared to the fastness and reliability of the very hardest of hard sciences.

      Of course when I say that, “used properly” is doing a lot of work. You have to be constantly checking against the real world or you end up in Cloudcuckooland. But still.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 2:04 pm #

        Yeah, math is real solid, man, like the Bell Curve. And how few are in the golden land even one standard deviation to the right of the dome – thus invalidating Democracy as a viable system.

      • shotho April 30, 2018 at 2:16 pm #

        Philosophy is the peak of human knowledge, when used properly.

      • cbeard April 30, 2018 at 2:19 pm #

        Albert was right. Its all relative.

        • cbeard April 30, 2018 at 2:20 pm #

          Even mathematics.

          • cbeard April 30, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

            AlBert not AlPert.

  5. lsjogren April 30, 2018 at 9:58 am #

    Hey I like this Alpert guy. I have figured a world without fossil fuels could support a few hundred million human beings, but perhaps I was too optimistic.

    Not clear it will be at a low standard of living, though, as Kunstler suggests.

    But I guess a lot of things might push it in that direction. While I just think of the “post fossil fuel world” and picture that a small remnant of today’s human population will be able to survive, and at a prosperous standard of living on the much smaller base of energy resources, exactly what the post Peak Oil world looks like will depend a lot on the transition. If the human race “burns the furniture to stay warm” during the transition then indeed the post fossil fuel world may be bleak, at least initially, even if the human population will have declined to a level that theoretically could live at a prosperous standard of living.

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    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 2:09 pm #

      I can’t wait. I’m training to go into hibernation like the guy in Looking Backward. Already have my sleep room. I fully expect to wake up in a new world like Hip Van Krinkel. If I can find a girl to sleep with me, we will be the new Adam and Eve, complete with pitchforks and Ak’s.

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

        LOL! Always the optimist!

  6. Walter B April 30, 2018 at 9:59 am #

    James you sentimental softie you, of course your ideas on what may happen remain a very possible way for things to work out in the event of big time change for the worse and it would be a pretty nice place too by comparison to other possibilities. I will be headed over to the podcast when I am done here – thank you, I love these.

    The Roman collapse was rather smooth because even though the government and economic systems collapsed, the aqueducts still fed water to the cities and the roads were still functional (and almost remain so to this day) and farms still produced crops. Our reliance on oil and energy, as you have always reminded us, is a fragile supply line that is easily disrupted by bad weather much less cataclysmic events. It will always be this system’s greatest weakness. Once the shelves are bare at the stores, which occurs during some of these week long power outages, waving piles of worthless green paper will get you nowhere because there will be nothing to be had.

    One of the best scenes in The Road for me is the one where Viggo walks past a pile of greenbacks left a-blowing in the wind. Money finally assuming it true value – ZERO. So when people ask “Where is that collapse of yours”, I tell them that when I think back to what this place was back in the late 1950’s and ’60’s and compare it honestly to NOW, why the collapse is right here, right now, hidden in plain sight. Heck, even the people have collapsed, they just are not observant enough to realize it. Great work again – thank you!

    • DrTomSchmidt April 30, 2018 at 10:24 am #

      “So when people ask “Where is that collapse of yours”, I tell them that when I think back to what this place was back in the late 1950’s and ’60’s and compare it honestly to NOW, why the collapse is right here, right now, hidden in plain sight. ”

      I think the same thing obtained at the end of the Roman Empire. People didn’t know they had collapsed, they just adapted and went on. Jane Jacobs has a great definition of a dark age in her book Dark Age Ahead: it’s when the memory of what was lost is lost. With the passing of people who recall the USA circa 1948-1971, that will happen here.

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 11:05 am #

        They weren’t playing “Leave It to Beaver” and “Ozzie & Harriet” re-runs after the Roman Empire collapsed. 😉

        • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 11:26 am #

          And a good thing they did not. Never could stomach those shows myself.

      • Elrond Hubbard April 30, 2018 at 3:17 pm #

        1948 to 1971 is not even a quarter century — but during that time, the most fortunate cohort of human beings the world has ever known (and quite possibly ever will know) were born, and had their expectations established.

        “Never been lonely
        Never been lied to
        Never had to scuffle in fear
        Nothing denied to

        “Born at the instant
        The church bells chime
        The whole world whispering
        Born at the right time.” — Paul Simon

        The cost of living out their expectations will never be paid in full, sadly.

  7. lsjogren April 30, 2018 at 10:01 am #

    “Obviously, my own venture into the fictionalized future of the World Made by Hand books depicted a much kinder and gentler re-set to life at the circa-1800 level of living, at least in the USA. Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.”

    Heh heh, that’s always been Kunstler’s weak spot. A “don’t worry be happy” outlook!

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 2:15 pm #

      But there’s a steel ball underneath the soft glove. The Judge in the novels is no fool – he doesn’t take on the redneck criminals because he doesn’t have the power to do so. When the Fundamentalists and their veterans arrive, he does. There is no Peace without Power. Kunstler gets that. And even the characters in the novel know they’ve lucked out, with the South and mid-Atlantic states awash in racial strife, with racially based nations forming in the years to come. Upstate New York is a backwater. Realistic? Maybe not. Too close to New York unless the dying came on quick and strong.

  8. Tate April 30, 2018 at 10:05 am #

    99% of the current human population couldn’t survive at 5th century AD Roman living standards, let alone 90%. But there will be time for adjustment over the next 82 years.

  9. wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 10:06 am #

    Wasn’t there some guy with a slightly more intense collapse message that was publicly disemboweled (figuratively speaking) within the last few years?

    by the way, Chernobyl has a new hat

    • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 10:12 am #

      An the North Korean nuclear test mountain is going to be needing one too apparently….

      https://www.cbsnews.com/news/north-korea-nuclear-test-site-mantapsan-mountain-collapse-unusable-kim-jong-un/

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 5:41 pm #

      One gay lawyer set himself on fire a couple of weeks ago because he was so upset about the indifference to “global warming”. Silly and Sad. Guess he died.

      • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 9:45 pm #

        The world lost a lot of potential future hot air that day.. so that makes him net carbon neutral in the end

  10. malthuss April 30, 2018 at 10:14 am #

    What happened to the financial collapse of the [not so] Free World?
    When DOW 3000?

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    • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 10:43 am #

      It was preempted/delayed by QE I-infinity.

  11. fred April 30, 2018 at 10:19 am #

    We’re in uncharted territory and as Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

    For one, I’m amazed that TPTB have been able to hold things together as well as they have since the GFC in 2008/9. Underestimating their ability to wield the shims and jacks necessary to keep the system propped up and running is fraught with risk IMO.

    My expectation is that decline will occur in a series of steps; crises punctuated by emergency measures, followed at unpredictable intervals by more of the same. And the crises will be of varying severity as will be the length of the periods of stability that follow. John Michael Greer has talked about this at great length. He calls it “catabolic collapse”.

    I think that using words like “collapse” is problematic. Collapse Implies suddenness to most people. I think “decline” is a much better word.

    The greatest risk, I believe is that things will get bad enough for enough people that social stability cannot be maintained. I think the election of The Donald is the opening shot. He got elected because enough people are in bad enough shape economically to start grasping at straws. The socio-economics driving this can only worsen as time goes on.

    • wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 10:31 am #

      fred, from where I stand it looks like it is the sheer force of the human imagination that is holding things together. Those I live among so want the stories they were told when young to be true they are willing to sacrifice their children and granchildren’s humanity to maintain the illusion. We are unable to build a future, all of our energy and intellect is consumed in sustaining that illusion.

      • RocketDoc April 30, 2018 at 3:25 pm #

        The problem of sacrificing one’s children is a knotty one. My youngest, a daughter, wants to be a doctor. Well and good. In any kind of scenario I can imagine, we will need doctors but what about the high tech and high cost training? Is it useful? Decline means she can get a “degree” and ride the system down. Collapse means something else. She can get into medical school and we can afford it without excessive debt but once she graduates next May–she has 4 years until she is academically deemed a doctor and then 3-5 years training as a resident before she is a competent provider. Should we assume that she will be ordering MRI’s in 10years or forecast that “doctoring” will be glorified first aid? What is illusion and what proper planning?

        • aibohphobia May 1, 2018 at 5:57 pm #

          At some point, I think we will see the return of apprenticeship in Medicine and everything else. We will see loss of knowledge and skills at the top end of things. In fact, it can be safely said that surgeons and GPs are already less skillful in practice than the docs we had 25 years ago. A curious mix of more gadgets and more information with less-talented practitioners who generally can’t see the big picture….

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 5:45 pm #

        Ditto the Japanese. They are too exhausted to have sex and aren’t reproducing much. But they can’t let go of the vile careerism and cult of self sacrifice to the group, be it the corporation or family. Yet no deep sacrifice can be made without prior development of self – and the “selfishness” implicit in that.

        Yet they are doing better than us because their ethnocentrism remains strong and they still reject the globalist demands to accept 3rd World Invasion. And their population decline will ease their way into the New World to come.

        • malthuss April 30, 2018 at 7:44 pm #

          Accepting Koreans and Chinese may save them. Is China poaching North Korean women?

        • GreenAlba May 1, 2018 at 9:13 am #

          “They are too exhausted to have sex and aren’t reproducing much.”

          The women, who tend to be very educated, lament the lack of decent partner material. Young Japanese people are addicted to screens and the men, in particular, to pornography. Japan only made child pornography illegal in 2014 and manga child porn is still legal. The obsession among men of all ages with schoolgirls is beyond creepy.

          Why bother making the effort with an actual woman?

          • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 10:57 am #

            “Why bother making the effort with an actual woman?”

            Fantasy. Men are driven by it.

          • GreenAlba May 1, 2018 at 11:26 am #

            Well, yes, elysianfield, but that doesn’t solve Japan’s birth rate problem.

            I realise men aren’t good on reality when it comes to sex, but most of them aren’t ‘driven’ entirely by fantasy to the point where they can’t function with an actual woman or we wouldn’t be here. Men who are addicted to pornography often can’t function satisfactorily with an actual woman. No woman could compete with the cornucopia on offer and nor should she waste her precious time trying to.

            And pornography isn’t 100% fantasy. That’s an actual prostitute you’re using. She’s actually doing what she’s doing as a service to you, the punter, who creates the demand. So it’s 50% fantasy on your side and not at all on hers. She gets the diseases so you (and your wife) don’t have to. And you have the nerve to look down on her.

            I’m generalising when I say ‘you’. I wouldn’t presume to suggest that you use prostitutes by proxy yourself. Obviously. Given the opinions expressed hereabouts in regard to prostitutes.

            Still, in a WMBH, think of the fun you’re all going to have scribbling tits and willies on cave walls again and pretending it’s just like internet porn, as the excuse has gone for some time now. Good luck with that 🙂 .

    • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 10:41 am #

      How about a series of collapses, each a smaller version of a larger ongoing collapse(s)? Think fractals. To any particular observer living through them, though, they’ll all seem monumental.

    • draupnir April 30, 2018 at 12:21 pm #

      Fred, I for one was not grabbing at straws when I voted for the Donald. I never believed he could do what he thought he could do. I was intent on throwing a wrench into the system and robbing the feckless Democrats, He has served admirably in this regard and provided hours of entertainment as a bonus. One thing I have never seen mentioned, though I am sure there are those in DC who are well aware of it, once your enemies start seeing you as ridiculous and laughable you’re finished.

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 3:05 pm #

        Great points! My sentiments as well.

        • draupnir April 30, 2018 at 11:27 pm #

          I don’t think we could have found a better avatar.

  12. tahoe1780 April 30, 2018 at 10:29 am #

    Arctic sea ice is at the lowest level for this time of year in the records. Virtually no multi-year ice exists. We could sea the Arctic ice-free this summer, followed by dramatic ocean warming and jet stream disruption. The new weather patterns will no be conducive to growing grains and global crop failures could occur next year.

    http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2018/

    http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/

    http://www.fasterthanexpected.com/blog/

    http://www.tpk.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=360181&nodeid=44807&contentlan=2&culture=en-US

    https://guymcpherson.com/2017/02/faster-than-expected/

    • lost-in-north-dakota April 30, 2018 at 10:52 am #

      Yeah, this scares me, too. Recently, Dar Jamail gave a very good interview on the Nature Bats Last podcast about his upcoming book, “The End Of Ice.”

    • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 12:00 pm #

      The ice caps are the world’s air conditioners. The Pole stays at ice temperature, the equators warms up and the flux across the temperature differential increases in intensity and velocity. I.e. Jet streams intensify and storms, the transfer of heat to higher latitudes, intensify. Increasing storm intensity is a sign the earth is working harder to blow off heat. The real problem is what happens when the ice is gone and the heat pulse is locked in with higher methane releases from the melted tundra and ocean methane hydrate releases. No one knows what will happen, because human history has not witnessed these changes before. Predictions vary from an ice age due to the Gulf Stream shutdown, to thermal runaway. Neither one sounds too promising to me.

      • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 12:56 pm #

        “No one knows what will happen….”

        “Bad things, man…”~Dennis Hopper

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 5:47 pm #

        The South Pole is colder than ever to balance it out.

        • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 10:43 pm #

          Nope! The South Pole is insulated from the equator by a circumpolar sea current and the atmospheric isolation that goes with it. It is not invaded by heat pulses from the equator like the Noth Pole is. The North Pole is surrounded by land and the sea currents and winds all dead end by dumping their heat loads on the ice pack. The Northern ice pack will go first. Winds blow tending south in the souther hemisphere and north in the northern. The poles do not talk to each other.

          Sixty five million years ago, the earth was a lot warmer than it is now and had been that way for a couple of hundred million years.
          Something happened to start the cooling that has happened since. .??

          The last ice age was 10000 years ago. They say that ice was a mile thick over New York State. A mile thick! What kind of a climate allowed that much ice to accumulate? Certainly nothing like we have today. I have noted that the shape of the polar vortices lately seem to fit the spread of the ice sheet. Does it get so cold that snow falls 12 months of the years with little melting? Is it zonal? Is it exclusive to the Atlantic area because of the effects of the Gulf Stream shutting off? Does Continental drift have anything to do with it? We know so little!

          • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 10:59 am #

            ” We know so little”

            John,
            Exactly.

  13. JustSaying April 30, 2018 at 10:31 am #

    Systems will collapse because they will become too complex to maintain, especially when the level of intelligence is in rapid decline.
    And the debt level will kill us all.

  14. wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 10:35 am #

    tahoe1780
    Remember when a member of the US Navy predicted an ice free arctic summer for 2016? I seem to recall that prediction got about as much traction here as a bald tire in a puddle of Chlorox.

  15. Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 10:37 am #

    Great post Jim! I’m in agreement with Alpert on the numbers, although I doubt a purpose driven human engineered path will what gets us their. Instead, we’ll continue to stumble into it based purely on denial, just as we’re doing now, all along the way. And in the end, isn’t that the most scenic and enjoyable route anyway? We “engineered” our way in to this industrial nightmare. It’s only fitting that our path back out of it again should be its antithesis.

    Now, off to listen to that podcast.

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    • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 11:37 am #

      This podcast is simply amazing! Alpert expands on Catton’s work and unflinchingly walks right up to the brink and looks into the abyss. Very nice!

      A link to Catton’s seminal work:

      https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VVH4UGG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 12:09 pm #

        Alpert’s ideas about population control were simply fantasy, though. His engineering background betrays him there.

  16. FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 10:40 am #

    The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion.

    Could not disagree more.

    The economy that created a system of education that still far superior to modern American one, the economy that in 1970s created weapons systems that proved superior to American “new, smart and beautiful” missiles in recent test run in Syria, could not obviously run on just pretense and coercion (and that’s just one example).

    USSR collapsed because of the betrayal of the elites – both party and KGB – and their desire to become owners of the Soviet property, not just the managers, and join the Western Elites in the luxury living (Oh, boy, were they wrong in that regard!).

    Actual collapse of the USSR happened not in 1990-1991, but in 1982 when the Chief of KGB Andropov organized coup d’etat in Moscow, assassinated Chief Party ideologist Suslov and de-facto removed Brezhnev from power (he died few months later).

    US Intel Community completely missed the signs that political collapse was underway.

    Wrong again.

    US Intel Community if not organized, than closely coordinated all Perestroika processes with their Russian counterparts.

    Our land is plentiful, but there is no order in it…

    That phrase according to the chronicle of The Tale of Bygone Years by Nestor, the ancient Russian historian of the Middle Ages, in 862 Slavic ambassadors told Rurik, Varangian (Viking) from the Rus tribe, the grandfather of Prince Hamlet, shortly after Slavs expelled Varangians from the northeastern lands of present-day Russia.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rurik

    • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 11:40 am #

      The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion.

      Dmitry Orlov contends similarly. I don’t disagree with the statement itself, but I don’t think it’s the whole story either. There were numerous factors involved.

      • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 11:48 am #

        Yeah, just a “small” factor of 30 – 40 trillion dollars – the approximate valuation of the Soviet public economy by the beginning of privatization in the 1990s.

        Anybody who is trying to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union without taking into account that factor, is either does not know much about the matter or is intellectually dishonest.

  17. lost-in-north-dakota April 30, 2018 at 10:41 am #

    A collapse of society + melting down nuclear power plants = a world human population a lot lower than 600 million.

  18. teddyboy46 April 30, 2018 at 10:48 am #

    If the engineers had their way we would be living in a Matrix type society. where non productive people are used as batteries to power the computers. which may not be a bad idea. all depends on which side of the productive line you on. I am retired and have a good income but i am not productive.

    • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 3:47 pm #

      If engineers were in charge of what got made the world would be a better place.

      • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 5:47 pm #

        Dog,
        What about the old adage;

        Sales wants it released NOW.

        Engineering wants it released NEVER?

        • K-Dog May 1, 2018 at 4:17 pm #

          Exactly right.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 5:52 pm #

        No, they’re factotums in general: they know the how but not what much less the why. They do as they’re told. If put in charge, they would keep doing what they were doing the last time anyone told them what to do. Complete inertia.

        Again, some people fulfill Marx’s ideal of not an Engineer but a Man engineering; not a Farmer but a Man farming, etc. This blog has many such posters, which is why it’s great.

        • K-Dog May 1, 2018 at 4:19 pm #

          Screw yourself Janos. A good engineer can be as creative as the bests of artists and as hard to control.

          • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 11:58 am #

            Quite so, K-Dog. It is not for nothing that the word ‘engineering’ in French is ‘génie’ (genie if the accent doesn’t work).

            Genius. Génie civil, génie mécanique etc.

            It has etymological links with ingenious (c.f. French ‘ingénieur’ – engineer)

            ingenious

            (of a person) clever, *original, and inventive*.

            In the UK the word ‘engineer’ has been degraded by its use to sometimes mean ‘technician’. So an ‘engineer’ comes to fix the photocopier and people end up not knowing what engineering is. I suspect this is Janos’ error.

            I’d loved to have seen Janos describe Thomas Telford, George Stephenson or Brunel to their face as a factotum.

          • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 1:57 pm #

            Of course. But that’s not my point. Whom do they serve? Are they morally “creative” or are they just in it for the money or their personal pleasure at creating things that diminish humanity? Not that they want that – they just never even considered the implications of their work. It’s far more serious than art per se, though that’s important too. If you don’t like a painting you can look away. But if you are replaced by a machine there’s no easy remedy.

        • Tate May 2, 2018 at 2:12 pm #

          Herbert Hoover was a great engineer.

          Oh, wait…

          • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 2:57 pm #

            Didn’t he invent the vacuum cleaner? 🙂

            To hoover up jobs or something?

  19. volodya April 30, 2018 at 10:56 am #

    I’ll bet that after Odoacer told Romulus Augustulus to take a permanent vacation it took months for the news to percolate to the various nooks and crannies of the empire, especially in the outer regions.

    In any case, can you imagine people in farming villages in Basque country giving much of a shit? No matter the gang occupying the manor house, the peasant still had to plant and harvest and pay tax.

    It’s not that one account of why things unfolded as they did is as good as any other. Having said that, it’s been 1,500 years so it’s not like we’ll ever have a complete picture.

    But I think it’s a good bet that it took such a long time, 300 years as JHK suggests, because there was a natural resiliency built into a relatively decentralized political and economic and financial system. And especially because such a large proportion of people were farmers and therefore in large measure self sufficient and so you didn’t have such long and complex and easily disrupted supply chains like we do today. A Flintstones economy as JHK sez.

    Nonetheless, resiliency or no, Rome DID collapse and the continental system of roads and bridges WAS abandoned and those supply chains and trade and travel WERE disrupted and, as a consequence, cities were partially or completely deserted, trade their reason for being.

    But the collapse was incomplete. The eastern empire survived I think mostly because it was so much larger economically and militarily and population-wise. The west, based in Rome, was a comparative back-water.

    It’s an odd thing, it’s like historians and archeologists say, a violent upheaval from a mass incursion by barbarians isn’t attested to in the archeological record. It probably wasn’t all roses because the Huns weren’t a figment of the imagination. But it’s not like there’s all over Europe layers of rubble that indicate flattened city walls and blackened remains of looted and burned houses and public buildings.

    Maybe local polities and long-settled tribes took matters into their own hands and set up kingdoms and principalities as they saw fit. The post Roman map of Europe after all follows the ethnic contours of pre-Roman Europe. And somehow the Roman Senate continued meeting into the seventh Century. I wonder what that last meeting was like.

  20. Robert White April 30, 2018 at 11:22 am #

    The world ending macroeconomic crash is already here, and we are merely riding the tail of Quantitative Easing into the whiplash of Quantitative Tightening. War will break out before the six sigma event crash on the NYSE.

    I fully believe that not even the 1% will be able to survive nuclear winter.

    RW

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  21. capt spaulding April 30, 2018 at 11:23 am #

    There is really little to worry about. All we have to do is lower taxes and deregulate. End of problem, right?

    • ozone April 30, 2018 at 11:32 am #

      Capt.,
      Yep, that’s what I’m hearing too. (Could it be that consuming my Kool-Aid via intravenous drip is affecting my outlook here? Nah, not possible.)

    • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

      At least he is trying to get economic impediments out of the way of the entrepenureal elements in society. The real question is whether enough of that spirit still exists, or if the debt levels and lassitude of the population have corroded to the point that it is a moot point.

  22. ozone April 30, 2018 at 11:25 am #

    “…Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal [sustainable population] outcome.”

    Sure, an interesting intellectual exercise, but I’m not sure any engineered path is going to make much difference, inevitably.

    Energy, climate, resource wars, habitat destruction, pandemic rampage…… and, best of all, poisoning for profit. Everything will be fine — once the humans do away with themselves.

    Hey now! Non-viable human reproduction via endocrine disruptors; wheee! Monsanto should get out in front of this glyphosate kerfuffle with a new ad campaign: “Too many humans around? Don’t worry; we’re Monsanto and we’re here to help. Round-Up; it’s in your dinner.”

    Stop hiding the studies boyz; think *positive* and turn this into continuing profitability well into the future!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/30/fda-weedkiller-glyphosate-in-food-internal-emails

    See there? The engineering has already been done for us by deliberate accident.

  23. chipshot April 30, 2018 at 11:27 am #

    I’ll be surprised if such a scenario doesn’t happen by 2040.
    The oceans are showing signs of near term (10 yrs) collapse.
    That alone will trigger enormous worldwide ecological collapse
    and starvation.

    Then there’s the issue of climate change, which appears to be
    accelerating. When bats, bees and plankton are all undergoing
    massive die offs, how long before humans do as well?

    • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 11:37 am #

      Actually, were are slowly entering new ice age (completely normal cycle), it’ll take hundreds of years to fully manifest itself.

      In a meantime, the temperatures in Western Europe, US and Canada are getting colder (by a few degrees), in Russia they are getting by few degrees warmer – I think it is due to the changes in thermodynamics of Gulfstream after Deepwater Horizon disaster.

      That explains record crops that are now harvested in Russia. Western Europe and US will have to think about principally new methods of housing construction, more insulated and energy efficient (like they build now in Russia)

      • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 11:45 am #

        I have read some on that theory myself, and a valid argument for it can be put forth. I found a site years ago that is since defunct that was titled Escape to the Phillipines.com (fortunately I did print out a copy) that postulates exactly that. If you have noted that the intensity of the Sun has increased dramatically over the course of the last decade or so, going from a Yellow Giant to now a White Giant, is this not just like a light bulb that glow brighter before it diminishes and then goes out? If they did not do such a thorough job of eliminating history, people might still recall that all these things are cyclical and that yesterdays warming turns into tomorrow’s cooling.

      • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 12:11 pm #

        Right, the real threat to peace in our times is the shift of arable lands from today’s power nations to other areas. Food, water and oil are still the basis for society.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 5:57 pm #

        Typically it comes on quicker than that, accelerating as more snow and ice fail to melt. Full ice age conditions can manifest within a few decades – a human lifespan!

        My God if I could only live to see it! This is like the Archdruid yearning to see the Asian/Hispanic Civilization that he predicted would arise on the West Coast. Needless to say he got out of California a few years ago – too many Hispanics, but no doubt raving about looking for “good air”, etc.

    • Farmer McGregor April 30, 2018 at 12:02 pm #

      “I’ll be surprised if such a scenario doesn’t happen by 2040.”
      –chipshot

      I’m with you, Chip. Chaos by the 2040’s.

      The Limits To Growth authors certainly agree. In their 30 year update, they moved their estimates from the later 21st century to pre-mid-century for catastrophic limitations of vital resources to cause serious disruptions to industrial society.

    • tahoe1780 April 30, 2018 at 2:02 pm #

      No ice, no krill? No krill, no fish?

      http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/big-ideas/krill/index.html

  24. Newton Finn April 30, 2018 at 11:50 am #

    Am I the only one out here in computerland who has grown tired and bored with dystopian thinking? When JHK’s world-made-by-hand novels (very enjoyable stories, by the way) are among the most hopeful visions of our future (and they are), I sense that whatever civilizational collapse may occur (be it slow or sudden) will have been more a consequence of the diminishment of the human spirit and imagination than of diminishing physical resources and planetary pollution. The most dire environmental threat lies not so much “out there” as “in here.” This observation, if even partially accurate, provides genuine hope, which is crying out for expression right now in a more profound and powerful form than the lurid fantasies of technological cornucopians. William James, for example, describes a mountain climber who comes to a deep cleft in a blinding snowstorm. If he remains standing on its edge, he will freeze to death. But he is trembling in doubt and fear that he cannot make the leap across the chasm and will fall to his death if he tries. It’s what James calls a “forced option” in which inaction is itself a choice. James’ advice is that there is only one thing to do in this situation–summon all your hope and courage and jump with everything that is in you, willing and believing with all your strength that you will be able to make the leap. In this late 19th Century scenario, James put his finger on where humanity is right now. Do we stand still and freeze, jump half-heartedly and plunge, or leap like we’ve never leaped before and maybe, just maybe, make it? And even if we don’t get over the chasm, if even our best effort at this point is not enough, James tells us that there is no nobler way to die. Unfortunately, to find such hope today you need to take an intellectual time machine not into the future but into the past, when, to be as politically incorrect as possible, men were men.

    • draupnir April 30, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

      I have noticed this loss of imagination in the fairly recent past, that we seem to have run out of stories and they are recycling the old ones. I see it in movies and TV and it is a cause of concern to me. I find it symptomatic of decline.

      • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

        “I have noticed this loss of imagination in the fairly recent past, that we seem to have run out of stories and they are recycling the old ones.”

        Draupnir,
        Yeah…this started about…oh, 2000 years ago. Nothing new under the sun….

    • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 1:15 pm #

      William James, for example, describes a mountain climber who comes to a deep cleft in a blinding snowstorm. If he remains standing on its edge, he will freeze to death. But he is trembling in doubt and fear that he cannot make the leap across the chasm and will fall to his death if he tries. It’s what James calls a “forced option”.

      Newton,
      If you are describing the decision making in the light of Climate Change, I cannot accept your/his premise without a bit of massaging.

      Consider the Mountain Climber, at the edge of a bottomless precipice, but who cannot see the other side due to an intense white out condition…. We know just as little about the macro causal effects of climate as we do the distance to the other ledge…is it only a few feet away, or 100 yards? To jump would be an effort required of religious fervor…the chance of survival at the edge better.

      • Newton Finn April 30, 2018 at 3:46 pm #

        You alter James’ scenario, of course, by removing the forced nature of the option, implying that the mountain climber can successfully wait out the blizzard, do nothing and still survive. Because I suspect that this is indeed what we will do, take little to no substantial action to address our mounting environmental challenges, I can only hope you’re right. I doubt, however, that we’re basing our decision not to act on a rational assessment of our precarious situation but rather on the myopic self-interest of those with the most advantageous toehold on the edge of the abyss.

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:02 pm #

          Newton,
          Well, self-interest seems to be the order of the day.

          But, the issue is to gamble dying immediately, or probably at a later date. Of course, apart from the analogy, our leap of faith regarding current climate change models would not be immediately fatal, but most probably futile…expensive, non-productive, and life changing for a vast number of people…especially the poor and middle class (and yes, I’m in there somewhere….).

          I’m all for taking substantive action, however painful, if there was a clear path to success.

  25. akmofo April 30, 2018 at 11:54 am #

    Most industry today is completely superficial. The automotive industry, the airline industry, the petro-fuel industry, the petro-pharma industry, the petro-agri industry, the petro-plastics industry, petro-paints industry, etc. There’s nothing to fear with the end of oil.

    My guess is that our standard of living will improve after such. We will be replacing oil carcinogens with clean organic electric living. Electricity is infinite, and we’ll be harvesting it from the skies once the monopolies of petro-chemicals industries are gone.

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    • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 1:19 pm #

      “My guess is that our standard of living will improve after such”

      Mofo,
      Christ, I hope you are being sarcastic….

      • akmofo April 30, 2018 at 2:38 pm #

        Nope, I’m quite serious.

        The pharmaceutical medical industry is a racket and a farce. Same for the farming/phood industry. Same for the transportation industry. Same for the construction industry. Same for the military and all the geopolitical nonsense we endure, because of oil. No, a world without oil will do us a world of good.

        I’m also quite serious about us harvesting electric charge from the sky. I know why we don’t do this, but I don’t know why can’t do this.

        I wouldn’t worry about oil. I’d be much more concerned about the moral and ethical degeneracy in our world. Moral and ethical bankruptcy always precedes societal bankruptcy.

        Kunstler is correct. Ordinary Russians thieved most everything they could lay their hands on, long before the KGB mafia stole the rest.

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:10 pm #

          “I’d be much more concerned about the moral and ethical degeneracy in our world. Moral and ethical bankruptcy always precedes societal bankruptcy

          Mofo,
          We can agree upon the state of our culture. However, it seems to me that the degeneracy of which you reference is a constant in any late society that has enjoyed several generations of peace, civil order and wealth…the Human Condition. It is as natural as sodomy…(referencing comments of months past).

          • akmofo April 30, 2018 at 10:45 pm #

            I’ll keep to the basic message I gave Yuri. If we can understand and acknowledge the corrupt nature of man, we can also understand and acknowledge the prescription in the TaNaKh as the antidote to the corrupt nature of man. Consequences follow action. We know what consequences follow bad action and what consequences fellow good action.

  26. Farmer McGregor April 30, 2018 at 11:55 am #

    Another great Monday morning post, Jim.

    “I expect our collapse to be as sudden and unexpected as the USSR’s…”

    I suspect much worse. Theirs took many months, if not years, to unfold.

    The soviets had not centralized their food supply the way we have. Once the financial incentives evaporate for Wally World, Kroger and others to continue sending refrigerated trucks rolling nation wide, the chaos and mayhem will eclipse anything the ruskies dealt with; according to Orlov, the basic food supply stayed pretty constant in most areas through their collapse. Ours will definitely not.

    “Apparently, I’m a sentimental softie.”

    I have long recognized and appreciated that about you.

    –Greg

    p.s. Not to go all Q on you, but paragraph 2, line 4 (on my browser): “…may be a way-station TO something…”.

    • kimmasad01 April 30, 2018 at 12:12 pm #

      You’re forgetting one thing Mr. Kunstler, and that’s the Creator. Someone created this place (earth) and created it to be inhabited.and inhabited it will be, but not by fraudulent predators like Bill Cosby, and the in-your-face types like the Clintons, the Weinstein’s and the Soros types. Then of course the religious-clergy frauds of various stripes and colors will be missing (to the blessing of mankind).

      These are the ones that won’t make it. It’ll take about 1000 years and of course God’s blessing on the land, to see a paradise through. There’s going to have to be a lot of healing and a lot of repair work to dismantle the disaster mankind created on his own.

      • Farmer McGregor April 30, 2018 at 3:49 pm #

        Hey kimma, for the ultimate cleanup/repair process see II Peter 3:10 and Revelation 21:1.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:08 pm #

          The fire passage? All of the elements melting? Things must be destroyed before they can be made new.

  27. redeye April 30, 2018 at 12:04 pm #

    Long time reader and first time poster. I’ve enjoyed your writings over many years.

    My point is that I think our collapse is going to be closer to the catastrophe of 1187 BC (late Bronze Age collapse) than the Romans. A similar highly integrated world economy broke down under the weight of migration and breaks in the entangled supply chains. There’s a really great lecture by Eric Cline that describes it in an easy, slightly humorous layman’s terms. Here’s the link on YouTube: https://youtu.be/bRcu-ysocX4.

    Have a good one!

    • PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 1:15 pm #

      hey thanks for link to the vid. Good stuff.

  28. FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 12:06 pm #

    I mean, c’mon people!

    To talk about USSR collapse without mentioning 30-40 trillion dollars of public property set to be carved-up into the private ownership, is like setting a herd of elephants in a china shop and 3 hours later crying:

    What happened?! What happened!?? We didn’t know! We didn’t know!!

    • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 12:13 pm #

      Finca

      Denial by the populace is the no. 1 obstacle to effective response.

  29. JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 12:17 pm #

    I see a diverse response to JHK’s prediction about the future. I wonder how many of the optimists were around to witness the debacle of the oil crisis in 1973. The import of Peak Oil is a basis for many folk’s realistic viewpoints.

    • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

      Those of us that believe that oil exists in a finite amount and cannot magically appears out of nowhere in the nick of time, see not only a problem, but a need for conservation and solutions for when the supply runs too low. Those who believe that there is an infinite supply to be had and/or that a magic solution will arrive just in time, do not care to address the concern. For me it is a glaring piece of evidence supporting the diminishing supply theory that the USA has currently deployed it’s entire military might around the globe to specifically target places where oil is still plentiful so we can secure these resources for US first.

      While it mat be true that somewhere out there, there is a great new wonderful source of energy as a replacement for when oil runs out and nobody is going to let it out until they have cashed in on all the profits with what they sell us now, I am not buying into it. I was never one that believed in magic, much less Too Much Magic…..

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:09 pm #

        Isn’t it great how the initials for the US spell US too?

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:47 pm #

          Janos,
          Yes, and DOG is GOD spelled backwards….

  30. volodya April 30, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

    The USSR collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system. Are Wall Street and its foreign counterparts any better? This is a financial system built on lies, and if that wasn’t enough, it’s one where stark lunacy abounds.

    If you look at the Dec 31, 2017 Deutsche Bank Annual Report you will see in the write-up titled Credit Exposure from Derivatives, 48 trillion Euros worth, in “notional” amounts, whatever the fuck that means. If you want it in US dollars you can look up the Dec 31 exchange rate, I can’t be bothered. OK, I looked it up. One euro was worth 1.2 US dollars.

    Now, boys and girls, in greenback terms that means D Bank had on its books close to 58 trillion US dollars worth of derivatives contracts.

    Now, if it means anything to you, they did burble on about Dodd Frank and EU regulation. So my question is were the regulators asleep at the switch? What about the D Bank Board of Directors? What breed of maniac puts pen to paper and sez, with a straight face, 48 trillion or 58 trillion, who in their right mind acquiesces to a business practice that allows the accumulation of financial contracts in one bank that comes close the GDP of the entire fucking world?

    Fifty eight trillion is a number that cosmologists might use in their measurements. For instance, the nearest star system to our own is Alpha Centauri which is 4.4 light-years away. A light year is the distance light travels in one year. Light travels 186,282 miles per second. So, do the math, that’s close to 26 trillion miles to the closest star to the Sun. D Bank has twice that figure in derivatives on its balance sheet. If you stretched the dollar bills that denote this derivatives idiocy end to end, they would go to Alpha fucking Centauri AND BACK. And THEN some.

    If you think these guys know what they’re doing, from the bellowing traders, to crazy-assed bank management, to the brain-dead Board of Directors, to the know-nothing chair-warming – cough – regulators, you’d be dead wrong. Nobody who has a clue would have allowed this dementia. It’s like JHK sez, and that D bank number is testament to it, debt, deception and moral hazard. And also delusion and psychopathology.

    And this is just ONE bank.

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  31. michael April 30, 2018 at 12:32 pm #

    Rome did not collapse. It fragmented and then the fragments contracted toward their respective centers.
    This is the natural process of the decline of an empire.

    The only historic example of a collpase properly so called is the breakdown of the bronze age empires about 1200 BC. That seems to have been quicker but still not instantaneous.

    The pace of change has quickened in recent times but sudden collapse is still not the natural trajectory. We can milk oil and gas for quite a while still.

    Expect fragmentation and contraction. For many now beyond the reach of central control this may not be a bad thing. In asmuch as the US empire has neither fragmented not contracted very much or indeed at all even the beginnings of the collapse are not visible yet.

    • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 12:49 pm #

      Did Louis the 16th’s government collapse in France in 1789? Did King George’s American empire collapse in 1776? How about the Romanov government 1917? Perhaps it is all just a question of semantics, no?

      • michael April 30, 2018 at 1:05 pm #

        Collapse implies a significant loss of skill and activity.
        Central governement cannot assert authority, tax collection passes
        to local authorities. Armed forces split into several competing groups
        each with its own sphere of influence.
        In later stages we would want to see large cities abandoned since they are no longer supplied. Electricity first intermittent, then nonexistent. Long distance travel (say 300 miles or more) rare and unusual.
        Public education reduced to four years (reading and writing)
        then abandoned. Health care reverts to simple surgery and home remedies. No more organ transplants, sex change or cosmetic surgery. Finally natural processes are allowed to take their course.
        Significant population decline.
        Rise of superstition.
        Principal mining operations take place in land fills until such time as the artefacts unearthed can no longer be interpreted by the existing culture and prove useless to the prevailing technology.

        This is what I would call a full blown collapse.

        • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 2:55 pm #

          In light of your assertions of what constitutes collapse, the chances of such calamity should be slim indeed. Degradation of course will continue and to what degree and how fast is what remains to be seen, but as I am aware of no real solutions to any of the problem we face, improvement is not something I foresee.

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:45 pm #

          Michael,
          In your list there is no mention of civil unrest…

          A full-blown collapse could be immediate… a few weeks with something as mundane as massive regional electrical power disruption. What might end your life is not dysentery or lack of vitamins, but rampaging ferals.

          With all respect, if you have never personally experienced a riot, or an intensely lawless period, you cannot envision the issue. Think Katrina….

          Michael…every government on earth fears mobs in the street…you should too.

          • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 7:17 pm #

            We lived in South Plainfield during the 1967-’69 Plainfield riots after a black mob killed Officer Gleason in the streets with broken bottles and shopping carts. The ensuing violence lasted a week or more and at night we went to bed listening to the sounds of 50 caliber machine gun fire as well as other small arms fire a mile or so away. It was very disconcerting and something that we keep with us for the rest of our days. They were dirty, dark and ugly times and much evil was carried out on both sides. Let us hope and pray that we are not subjected to such evil again.

          • BackRowHeckler April 30, 2018 at 9:01 pm #

            same here Walter B outside Hartford in ’68; we could see the city glow from the fires when the blacks burned the city (parts of which have never been rebuilt). There were threats that they would come out over the mountain into our towns after us, which is when i saw the Garands and M1 carbines come out of the closets in the hands of our fathers and uncles, all vets of korea and WW2.

            brh

    • RocketDoc April 30, 2018 at 2:01 pm #

      My image of collapse is running people. It doesn’t happen everywhere at the same time. We are in decline and can call it collapse when 1) no cash from ATMs or 2) No lights when switch is flipped or 3) no gas without lines you don’t want to bother to join or 4) internet down or so bollixed with security dangers you can’t use it. You may have other indicators such as losing your job or pension….
      Empty store shelves viz. Venezuela would be more than a big clue that the economy is down for the count..

      • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 3:08 pm #

        If you want to see the US or the world in about fifty years, look at Venezuela today. The strong will survive.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:11 pm #

      Was the Mt Thera explosion part of that?

  32. Yuri Sowryteski April 30, 2018 at 1:11 pm #

    Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a “New World” like the one found by Christopher Colombo and claimed “by Divine Right” by the Monarchies of Europe? Ya know, when Salmon (to mention only one kind of fish) ran in the Connecticut River, and all the other rivers? When, in Monterey Bay, the breath of so many whales, of all kinds, made the air smell so bad, you could barely breath? But all that people ruined, like they did Europe, and the Mediterranean. People of two types: Masters, and Slaves. City builders. Empire Builders. For awhile, coal and petroleum replaced slaves, but made the masters more omnipotent. Yes, there are middle class people mixed in there, usually playing guitars. Artists, if you will. Enablers, Consumers.

    Well, the world is always changing, changing, changing. The word is hardly up to describing what the planet does without ceasing. I nominate this planet Earth, if that’s its real name (currently) for honors for being the most creative and unstable planet in the Galaxy. (Since it has been so extensively desecrated, it is no longer the most beautiful – but wait till we are put in our proper place!)

    And what could be more ironic than we ourselves are the agent used by the Earth, to put us in that place? A better word might be “Just”: What could be more just than people destroying themselves, thinking they will, by their weapons, master themselves, as part of the Earth we inescapably are.

    The beauty of accepting this all, is you will no longer be vexed by the news in it’s details. But even better, we can all go on, not only doing what we have always done, but doing it more, right up to the day mushroom clouds appear on the horizon! Or whatever it is that shows up on your doorstep, or the gate of your community, or hardened mansion.

    http://www.hardenedstructures.com/bunkers-for-Sale.php

    And for those who can appreciate the Earth and it’s ways, they can walk the path of beauty, where ever it leads.

    • akmofo April 30, 2018 at 4:15 pm #

      Yuri, I don’t know if you speak Russian, but if you do, this is for you:

      https://youtu.be/y4qBS22COVc

      I wish more people knew and understood this. Literally the secret of life.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:30 pm #

      Glad we don’t have smell that whale breath. We used their oil to start the industrial revolution.

    • Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 9:39 am #

      Yuri, what are your politics? Say Trump, racism, Me Too, Christianity? Just to get an idea of justice and beauty.

      • Yuri Sowryteski May 1, 2018 at 3:20 pm #

        Politically, I’m anti- tyranny, in all it’s forms. There are as many ways to fight tyrants, as there are people. Context is necessary to realize which way works best for you. I choose the pseudonym “you’re so right-sky”, in this context since all commenter’s here agree on this point, and since this is a virtual context.

        My Mother lived according to the sermon on the Mount of Olives, and my Father gave me a copy of “Age of Reason”.

        What is “Me Too”?

        “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” got me started on Mark Twain; “Puddin’in Head Wilson” delineates the ligaments of racism.

        Trump seems in a dangerous position. I had a daydream after the election where he called up Goldman Sachs, and said “Hey, send over your team …. yeah, whatever, just one thing, OK? You crash my Presidency like you did Obama? I’ll get Ralph Nader to come in, and break you up into so many pieces, you can keep the toenails, OK? …. Yeah, you do numbers, right? … You wound it up, right? … So you wind it down ….. I don’t care how, you figure it out. (click)”

        Then in my daydream, he fired the Secret Service, and bivouacked the Ist Marine Division (my bias) in Trump Tower and paid them out of his own pocket, and lived there with his family.

        After that daydream, I went back to getting ready for Winter. Spring is almost here, and peace is breaking out in Korea, I presume so as to reduce the number of fronts by one or two, so that all those weapons and more, can be aimed at Iran, as per the Neo-Con plan, or since Russia is backing Syria and Iran, an easier target may be Venezuela, Although China may want to buy some oil in Yuan there, and tell us to keep out, though the Korea deal may be an agreement to each play in their own sandbox.

        As for Clinton, she doesn’t need enemies, because where ever she goes, she’ll always be there. As for Bill, same thing.

        As for politics, if Americans had more imagination, we would have a multi-party system. That would mean our policy of digging the hole we are in, would proceed at a slower pace. Yet, show me the political system dealing with problems at hand. Show me one with an architecture of beauty.

        As for beauty, show me wisdom, and I’ll show you beauty.

        • Sean Coleman May 3, 2018 at 7:02 am #

          Thanks Yuri

          Me Too is a movement that was formed after the recent hysteria around the Harvey Weinstein ‘revelations’ to express solidarity with those who have suffered similar abuse, whether in real life or, much more likely, in their imaginations.

          Are you in Russia? Do you have a similar phenomenon there?

  33. JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 1:16 pm #

    Advanced technology involved high degrees of specialization. Each individual acquires a limited knowledge base, very limited. Survival skills are not acquired especially as the populace dumbs down. When the shelves start to empty, the panic starts because of ignorance.

    Ford has announced that it will discontinue the manufacture of cars and produce SUV, crossovers and light trucks. Just an indication of how stupid the American public is. In a couple of more years like the last two, they will not be able to give those trucks away. In 73, the big cars were going for pennies on the dollar. I think Ford may be responding to the failures in the driverless and Testa technologies.

    • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 1:48 pm #

      In Third World countries I do believe that the bulk of the people operate bicycles, mopeds, scooters and motorcycles. Looks like I have a head start on where we are going. Of course as the average obese American commuter continues to grow in size, I suppose they DO require larger transportation devices. I am beginning to wonder if people are not in fact growing into the size that their cabins will allow from what I see around me.

      • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 4:39 pm #

        I’ve often thought the same. Not as far-fetched as it sounds.

  34. FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 2:04 pm #

    Scott Adams tells you how Kanye showed the way to The Golden Age. With coffee.

    https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/988066942593331200

  35. JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 3:06 pm #

    Stormey and her attorney are at it again. Filing a defamation law suit because Trump downplayed the picture of the man who threatened her supposedly. I cannot figure out what he and she are getting out of this. Notoriety and money I suppose. I wonder how much the New World Order is paying her to raise Cain. It is the only large source of money that would explain her persistence. How, otherwise, could she offer back $130000 that was given her, the same money she must have already spent. A woman scorned and a bad lawyer to encourage her. This one needs to go to court to get the lowdown on what these two are up to, and who is funding them.

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    • BackRowHeckler April 30, 2018 at 8:55 pm #

      Stormy, a prostitute filing a defamation lawsuit.

      Think of the irony in that.

      brh

  36. Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 3:07 pm #

    RE: The Soviet Union collapsed because it was a thoroughly dishonest system that ran on pretense and coercion.

    “Could not disagree more, etc.”
    FincaInTheMountains
    April 30, 2018 at 10:40 am #

    Wrong!

    I visited the U.S.S.R. years before its collapse. It was a complete basket case. I will never forget how exciting and alive Helsinki looked in springtime later the same day I concluded my trip to Russia and departed St. Petersburg, or whatever the hell you commies called it back then. Glorious in color and tulips compared to your dingy, dirty, “most European” of Russian cities. Billions of dollars of artwork on display in the Winter & Summer Palaces, and other state art museums, ransacked from Europe during and after WWII of course, “guarded” by babushka ladies sitting by the doorways, hose on their legs rolled down to their knees, who couldn’t waddle across the room to “guard” if they had all day. The places looked like such firetraps I’m astounded they didn’t burn to the ground, priceless art and all. Drab city streets lined block after block with the same ugly French’s mustard color buildings with zero landscaping or flowers. Listless citizens clad in tweedy clothes of the earthiest of earthtones, devoid of all color, standing in long lines waiting on meager subsistence and services. Electric streetcars that looked like America in the thirties –– that’s right –– during our Depression.

    The dogfood and ‘fresh’ produce served in the dining hall of the finest hotel in the city was so old and unappetizing I went out and waited for the rest of my group in the hallway outside the restaurant. There, I happened to be situated across from a hallway leading down to the restrooms. From that perch, I watched another babushka sitting behind a table, her hands under it engaged in some mysterious activity, concealed from my view by a tablecloth. I watched, but could not figure out what she was doing with her hands beneath the table. Every few minutes she would get up and waddle into one of the restrooms. Finally, I could no longer contain my curiosity, so I strolled down toward the restrooms to take a look. She had a basket of empty toilet paper rolls and would roll a few sheets of paper onto the tubes, then install them in the bathroom stalls. (Bathrooms with an overabundance of flies, I might add. This in “the equivalent” of a five-star hotel.) Apparently her little under the table ritual served two ends. First, it prevented extravagant use of a precious commodity by the hotel guests. Second, it prevented purloining of otherwise valuable rolls of toilet paper by locals unable to acquire it in stores, which were typically bare of most of the consumer goods needed in a normally functioning economy. Presumably, this had a great deal to do with the emphasis on the production of the same military hardware you so frequently boast of here — unfortunately, to the exclusion of the consumer goods desperately needed by the poor, deprived Russian citizenry of that era. Outside the hotel, on the streets, I observed another indication of the sad state of the consumer economy. When the drab, cheap little cars driven by the local citizens were parked along the street, the drivers would hop out and remove the windshield wipers. Inquiring minds wanted to know, so I asked. Seems the rubber blades were another precious commodity in severely short supply, so the drivers removed them to prevent theft. This was observed everywhere we traveled. My final noteworthy observation from the hotel lobby was the brisk level of black market activity engaged in by young Russian men, who I was told, were the only ones brash enough to do so in broad daylight and in such close proximity to the watchful eyes of the police. Seems a hotel frequented by foreign citizens provided them a rare opportunity to acquire valuable foreign currency, one that required a high level of testosterone to overcome the justifiable fear of law enforcement.

    Finca, this is just the tip of the iceberg of the vignettes of daily life behind the iron curtain I could report, and these from a city that due to its proximity to the Baltic, was arguably much better off than other Russian cities, rural Russia, and certainly other Soviet “republics.” Your capabilty for self-delusion seems to know no bounds. Perhaps this is because your years as a Russian advisor during the Cuban Revolution, or elsewhere in “the Caribbean” as you have alluded to here, made the “superior” economy, education and life you reminisced of back in the motherland positively idyllic by comparison. I just don’t know. Of course being called out on this, along with your endless capacity for spinning political intrigue and conspiracy theories ad nauseam, on a daily basis, will not discourage you in the least. It never has. So keep spinning away, and rolling cigars, dreaming of past glory, from your “*small, crumbling concrete, sunshine yellow finca near the sea, in the shadows of the Sierra Maestra mountains…”
    [*See April 25, 2018 at 6:26 am at:
    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/stop-and-assess/#comment-349927 ]

    •Sticks-of-TNT

    P.S. Although my warrior father, a ‘Mighty 8th’ Air Corps vet of WWII & infantry officer vet of Korea & Vietnam, would roll over in his grave, I have had many positive things to say here at CFN of today’s Russia and its people. In an assortment of ways, they are doing many things better than we are. Putin has shown enormous restraint and patience despite our many misdeeds, insults & indignities. I would prefer we not be in ME at all, as I am anti-empire. If we have to be there, I would prefer US being a partner with Russia. We are headed for a comeuppance, Russia is rising. We need to clean out the neo-cons & deep state from D.C. & build bridges with Russia (of the “trust, but verify” variety) But I am dreaming in Technicolor, cause that ain’t gonna happen. And so we spiral down, circling the drain. Meanwhile, I’ll watch it unfold on RT. -,Sticks

    • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

      Good, honest post….thank you.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:35 pm #

      His dad worked for Stalin so that makes him a great guy, Stalin that is. Just like the people in Bush’s small town though he was great because he lived near them. Small people and their small minds crucify reality every day.

    • Tate April 30, 2018 at 7:43 pm #

      Sticks,

      Helps to be reminded what communism was like in reality. Thanks.

  37. Dumbedup April 30, 2018 at 3:09 pm #

    2007-2008 gave us a glimpse of how this will go down. After Lehman went under the “almost collapse” was in just a matter of days or weeks. (Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson was heard to say, “there will be tanks in the street.”)

    The next time banks get nervous about overnight lending no amount of “Maiden Lanes”, TARP loans or access to the “discount window” will be enough to calm their nerves. We now have head winds of bad auto loans, a resurgence of low or zero down home loans and 6-figure student loans facing us. Something is bound to give. So, when Citibank can’t or won’t loan Boeing, Proctor and Gamble or Microsoft enough to make their payroll will the Federal Reserve step in again as the “lender of last resort?” Will that be enough? If not, there will be a domino effect cascading all the way down to monthly pensions and social security payments.

    Keeping gas in gas stations and grocery store shelves stocked will prevent immediate panic. The public might even stomach cash controls if their debit cards keep working. If there are widespread gas and food shortages, pension/social security payments stop and debit cards stop working then the riots and looting start. Once that happens people will start dying. There are not enough National Guard or army troops to stop it.

    I still think it is a far-fetched scenario (and I’m not convinced it would have happened in 2007-2008) but if it starts and cannot be stopped the economy could collapse very quickly – likely within days or weeks.

    • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 4:17 pm #

      Then the Chinese troops come to restore order.

      • Dumbedup April 30, 2018 at 4:33 pm #

        “Man in the High Tower”

        Russia takes the east coast and China takes the west coast.

        • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:22 pm #

          D-up.

          Why would they come in and take the responsibility to feed and police a populace as well armed as ours? We can’t take care of Iraq…they couldn’t tame Baltimore.

          • Dumbedup May 1, 2018 at 9:20 am #

            Good point. But there are 1.3 billion Chinese. They could post an entire division in LA. Then, if things get unruly, they would just take out the bad neighborhoods. Just blow them to smithereens. The Russians would have a tougher time with Baltimore.

          • K-Dog May 1, 2018 at 4:36 pm #

            Since by then they would have better arms historically the answer is to kill all the men. A recent example is what the Serbs did. In our case being as many of our citizens are grotesquely overweight the women will be sorted with the grotesque being killed too. Those remaining will be used for other purposes.

        • Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 7:03 pm #

          I think you probably meant “The Man in the High Castle” the alternate history novel by Philip K. Dick, in which the victors of WWII, Japan and Germany, divide the world, and the United States, between them, with Japan getting the western half and Germany the eastern.

          CFN; Catch the television adaptation on the hit Amazon Prime series. In that story, if I had my druthers, I’d definitely, “Go East young man!” WWII POWs fared much better with Germany than Japan. Our Jewish friends here might argue otherwise, but faced with Germany vs. Japan, they can make their own call.

          Asian countries do not have a good track record with our POWs; Japan, Korea & Vietnam. I had (now deceased) a very close personal friend who was held by North Vietnam > 5 years. Unbelievably cruel treatment.

          Your Russia/China split would be much more problematic. Both were neck and neck during the 20th Century for the tens of millions of THEIR OWN PEOPLE killed, not to mention foreigners. I haven’t checked the books, but I believe Mao bested Lenin/Stalin. On the other hand, he had more product to work with, population wise, so I guess we’d have to evaluate them on a per capita basis. In the final analysis, I guess I would stick with race and pray they might be willing to assimilate (my tribe) at some point. Again, other races/groups might see things differently.

          It’s what my grandmother used to call a devil or the deep blue sea kind of question. It’s an ugly world. Maybe I’ll watch Nickelodeon instead.

          -Sticks

          • Dumbedup May 1, 2018 at 9:48 am #

            Thanks. I did mean “High Castle.” I read that book years ago, but found Philip Dick’s writing to be mostly dry – almost barren.

            I’m a bit like elysianfield; they would most likely miscalculate their ability to occupy the US. They did so in Dick’s novel too. But they have weapons at their disposal – sonic weapons and the like they could use to subdue an entire neighborhood.

            It is the countryside where they would have the most difficulty. This country is just too big. I live in the south – there are places that don’t show on maps.

      • Dumbedup April 30, 2018 at 4:37 pm #

        What is ironic is that they will use the same subterfuge we have used for more than 100 years.

        It is important to world peace and our geo-political interests to secure the United States from anarchy.

        -or-

        People will die without our assistance.

        -or-

        We are here on a humanitarian mission.

        -or-

        The government of the State of California invited us in to assist.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:48 pm #

        When Wormwood falls into the Sea, there will be Tidal Waves hundreds of feet high. You’re gonna wish you lived in a skyscraper then.

      • PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 1:13 pm #

        ha ha, yeah.

        Maybe they’d bring with them the parts to retool American manufacturing as well since they have all that over there now, too.

        They could it call it the ‘Ming Plan’. LOL

  38. rhys12 April 30, 2018 at 3:09 pm #

    The reason we live at the technological and social level we do is that we were able to provide for a population large enough so that specialization was possible. Some could be soldiers, some scholars, some inventors, some scientists, etc. Lifespans were long enough to accumulate and pass down knowledge. Even recently in the early days of settlement of the Americas, over 75% of the population were farmers. If the population suddenly crashed to 50 million worldwide the survivors would most all become hunter-gatherers and/or small farmers, serfs living around defensible points protected by a warlord. There would be NO city-states! 50 million is probably less than the number of native-Americans in the Americas alone before Columbus, and the great majority of them were hunter-gatherers. The few civilizations they did create weren’t something you would want to live in, and didn’t last too long – largely due to climate change (self-inflicted through deforestation and otherwise).

    • PeteAtomic April 30, 2018 at 4:07 pm #

      good points there.

      Yeah, our relationship with the soil would come roaring back in very personal ways yet again.

      Is there enough soil that hasn’t been destroyed by big Ag companies like Monsanto, is the next question.

      • Farmer Joe May 2, 2018 at 1:02 am #

        Without some sort of organic/permaculture society wide Apollo project, no. Besides, such a solution is not politically feasible, at least in the USA. Monsanto et al have too much to lose.

  39. FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 3:58 pm #

    2007-2008 gave us a glimpse of how this will go down.

    No, it didn’t.

    If the US, instead of settling political scores, just followed the British example (nationalizing the Northern Rock Bank), there would be no crisis.

    Crisis 2008 began just after, as a result of attacks by Goldman Sachs, the hooligan, risk-taking Bear Stearns still received an economic assistance, and the conservative Lehman Brothers did not!

    And the initiator of this decision was the senator from New York State Hillary Clinton.

    She herself talked about it, repeating during the election debate all the accusations against Lehman Brothers, that had already been exposed many times as false by numerous investigations into these circumstances.

    • Ol' Scratch April 30, 2018 at 4:21 pm #

      I think you’re overstating your case a bit here, Finc. As much as I detest the Clinton’s, they’re not the root of all evil, although they certainly run with the crowd who is. The great fraud Obama held center stage at the time, if memory serves correct.

      • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 4:42 pm #

        <i.As much as I detest the Clinton’s, they’re not the root of all evil

        Not they, SHE.

        The only crisis we have right now is the crisis of overproduction of American dollars, and it happened in the 90s under the Clinton watch, during the Dot Com bubble.

        The whole mortgage “scham” in early 2000s was in fact the government policy targeting the overproduction of US dollar and channeling the un-backed dollars into a mortgage bubble. That’s why nobody went to jail.

        The alternative was US default as early as 2001- 2003 and going to Amero (which Bush actually actively considered).

        • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 6:50 pm #

          Oh I get it now: he’s trying to get all the Jewish Bankers off the hook with his Clinton mania.

    • Dumbedup May 1, 2018 at 10:01 am #

      Conservative Lehman Brothers?

      The government miscalculated the risks at the time and believed it contained after Bear Stearns. When Lehman failed they tried to find a buyer. None could be found. The closest was Barclays, but British regulators would not allow it. The reason was because of the balance sheet. It’s assets were not considered to be of good enough quality to lever a buyout – or a loan by the Federal Reserve.

      In the end, it was the inability to find a buyer that resulted in the Lehman bankruptcy. That single event nearly unraveled the entire economy. Everyone who did business with Lehman (Citi, JPM, Merrill, Washington Mutual – the who’s who of 2008) was at risk.

      Overnight lending rates and LIBOR jumped because no one trusted the other. When money velocity slows so does economic activity. The slow down was almost immediate and created a worldwide cascade.

  40. PeteAtomic April 30, 2018 at 4:03 pm #

    There are many, many possibilities out there for the future outcome of the US, obviously. I don’t believe anybody can magically see an end result at this point. However, I gotta agree with Mr. Jim there and others about economic contraction. Consumption of remaining raw materials of every shape will most likely ramp up in the near future, not down, as populations in places like Africa explodes, and everybody wants to live like Americans have enjoyed for decades now. The “West” at this point is like an old house, and like all old homes– it takes a lot of maintenance. So, we’ll see how well that goes. Maybe society collapses fast, maybe not. However, I certainly think that the possibility that people will be existing much more on scavenging, and repairing, and crafting their own whatevers…. is quite high. So, in that regard the World Made By Hand series are optimistic.

    I’m not sure, as someone on here as alluded to, that “people who post on CFN want a downfall” necessarily are looking for that. I find many of the comments on CFN from people who view the world in reality, and not from some SJW/ideologue handbook.

    But who knows? Maybe Musk & Zuckerberg get together with some Chinese math genius and collectively pull a rabbit out of a hat.

    Or more likely, move to a heavily wooded area and start getting that old cast iron wood stove out & winterize the cabin. Just in case.

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    • K-Dog April 30, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

      While the subject may attract the touched it is unfortunately also the consequence of the lives we have lived and choices that were made. There will be a great reckoning and madness will rule the land.

      • PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 1:11 pm #

        yeah I’m hoping for a slow burn over an explosion, that’s for sure.

        • K-Dog May 2, 2018 at 12:05 pm #

          yeah death would deny us some well earned back-slappin mirthful irony mixed in with the pain. Slow is better.

    • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 11:21 am #

      “But who knows? Maybe Musk & Zuckerberg get together with some Chinese math genius and collectively pull a rabbit out of a hat.”

      Pete,
      This might be the case if you do not believe that Zuckerberg would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes….his treachery towards the Winkelvoss twins is not forgivable.

      • PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 1:10 pm #

        yeah, you are right. I hadn’t known that about the history of Facebook. Interesting.

        Maybe many of our ‘wunderkinder’ are actually more Wizard of Oz, then Albert Einstein.

  41. PeteAtomic April 30, 2018 at 4:18 pm #

    BTW, If a possibility is a Roman way of life, then that would be a good outcome. Being a Roman citizen was greatly treasured and sought out by people in the ancient world. To be a Roman meant a very high probability of living out a peaceful & productive life inside the Empire, then out: There were good roads, an effective bureaucracy that administered everything from business to mail service, police forces, schools, libraries, etc. Even as a slave, you had a possibility to gain your freedom and have a productive life for the times.

    Remember what much of the rest of the world was doing at the same time (not all, but a lot)– living like the ancient Germanic tribes in squalid conditions, brutish, short, illiterate lives full of capricious tribal justice & religions that were based on human sacrifice.

    So, Hail Caesar. 🙂

    • michael April 30, 2018 at 5:18 pm #

      At least that is what they teach you in school.

    • Dumbedup May 1, 2018 at 10:04 am #

      Exactly. Government can work and be effective. Unless we are ruled by people who believe government is bad. (as in, “we can’t make any money cheating people with these agencies peering over our shoulder.”)

      • Farmer Joe May 2, 2018 at 12:50 am #

        What gets me are the ones who say, “The world is not a utopia, but if you give the government a tiny (and exponentially growing) amount of money, power, and sacrifice of your rights and sovereignty, then we’ll get there!”

        ….meanwhile things only get worse.

  42. wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 4:23 pm #

    Finc – The sun activity perspective is popular, Google Sunspot Activity at 8000 year high. May or may not affect climate.

    We do have the Mauna Loa observatory and we do have an accurate measure of the composition of the atmosphere. We also have ice cores as a record of the atmosphere. The rate of change in the crysosphere places an unknown variable in all of the models. My bet is we do not have a clue where this is going, …..past performance is no indication…..

    • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 4:54 pm #

      The Christian position on these matters is simple – humans are not entitled of knowing or predicting the future and should live every day of their lives as it could be their last.

      So, instead of preparing and reciting our own eulogy, let’s try solving some concrete problems which we still could.

  43. wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 4:33 pm #

    How about a tip of the hat to the religious fundamentalists? Let’s get the homeland to the Nile, the necessary capital has been recognized, the temple is pre-fabbed and ready, all that is needed is to get out on the plain and get the battle started.

    The bright spot is a messiah will show up after the conflagration.

    I was always worried about the sheep and goats deal myself.

    • BackRowHeckler April 30, 2018 at 8:53 pm #

      mocking Christians won’t get you anywhere. Take a trip to Dearborn-istan and mock Moslems, see how long you last.

      brh

  44. pequiste April 30, 2018 at 4:36 pm #

    The collapse you ordered could start innocently enough ( as many here probably suspect) with a jam up, whether intentional or not, of the infamous Electronic Benefit Transfer , EBT for short, system. Feral Urban folks – 40 plus millions of them – could cause some shit to go down in a U.S.A. mini-collapse sneak preview.

  45. amb April 30, 2018 at 4:40 pm #

    All this silly speculation is a waste of time. No one is intelligent enough, nor has the historical data base, to make any sort of informed forecast economically, politically, etc. There are way too many variables involved. You can’t predict the outcome of an emergency or chaos. Whatever unpredictable events happen, they will be unexpected and will move the population to take whatever actions they can to survive. Articles like this are just intended to sell news and keep the readership up. What a waste to spend time reading a speculative article or blog by some “expert”. Everything on this planet is upside down, inside out, backwards and fiction becomes fact. For all we know we could go into another golden renaissance despite all the “logic” that it would be impossible. Just live a good life, contribute, do the best you can, flourish and prosper, support the social people and groups and decry the bad guys.

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    • elysianfield April 30, 2018 at 6:32 pm #

      “All this silly speculation is a waste of time. No one is intelligent enough, nor has the historical data base, to make any sort of informed forecast economically, politically, etc. There are way too many variables involved. You can’t predict the outcome of an emergency or chaos”

      Amb,
      Well, what of entropy…the train that is never late….

    • cbeard May 1, 2018 at 6:43 am #

      I have a personal anecdote that may surprise and enlighten you. I don’t know where or what kind of circumstance that you live in, but social collapse is a much likelier future scenario than a golden renaissance. My story would be long and take up an inordinate amount of my time, which would probably be wasted at that. Maybe later.

      • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 11:24 am #

        Cbeard,
        Personal anecdotes are most appreciated…by me, at least.

  46. Luhrenloup April 30, 2018 at 5:06 pm #

    I am a writer and a counselor/advisor, trained to focus on the minutiae, not the system but its promulgators. The Collapse, as it is presented relates, always, to the advanced countries. I see it more as an ongoing late 20th, early 21st century spiritual decline.

    Germany’s degenerate art of the twenties foreshadowing the advent of the Nazi era is instructive of what is happening in the Western world when the stakes have been juiced to the nth degree. I offer Korean artist Gimhongsok’s Trashbag Teddy Bear, plopped merrily in Tribeca.
    http://www.mashalund.com/teddy-bear/.

    Too blatant? There is always Jeff Koons’ shiny Balloon Dog, http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon-dog-0, to puzzle over.

    Louise bourgeois’ Spiders on the other hand get straight to the point, https://www.christies.com/features/Louise-Bourgeois-Spider-6639-3.aspx. We are dominated by malevolent oversized creatures, which children and adults find delightful.

    Then you have the banality of Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans, that, yes, have become the artwork of our current 15-minutes culture, https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/pop/v/andy-warhol-campbell-s-soup-cans-why-is-this-art.

    Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, a cheery bright-red letters square with its lopsided O seems a shouted command, do it! https://www.moma.org/collection/works/68726,

    and lastly and most illustrative is Damien Hirst’s Diamond Skull, appropriately named “For the Love of God”, http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god, as we traipse to our own Bethlehem to be counted.

    • pequiste April 30, 2018 at 5:26 pm #

      Excellent selections. Happy to see that you are not among the throngs of anaestetized lumpen, Luhrenloup. But then again you are a CFNer which speaks for itself.

      Might I also suggest the feedlot fashion of Botero which, via humor, informs the West – particularly the American model of consumption or even the scatological Black Madonna of Chris Ofili. The falling away of the Church personified via the medium of elephant shit:

      http://people.com/celebrity/chris-ofili-elephant-dung-painting-valued-at-2-3-million/

      The subject matter of today’s missive requires a sterner peek over the horizon by a long look at the past. The genius of Pieter Bruegel the Elder shows nothing less than an astonishing clear vision of The Collapse, ordered or not, its effect on people, and how it looks:

      https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-triumph-of-death/d3d82b0b-9bf2-4082-ab04-66ed53196ccc

      • Luhrenloup April 30, 2018 at 7:30 pm #

        The Bruegel painting is excellent, rich colors, passionate, straight from the heart.
        I remember the Ofili paintings in Brooklyn and Giuliani froth such filth and degradation? This from the man who after a major calamity befalls his city on 9/11 urges us to go shopping to put the city right again. We are very far from Bruegel’s world.

    • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 7:28 pm #

      In this sense, the famous Fountain of Marcel Duchamp, which was created in 1917 as a bet with Man Ray, that the Open Society of Independent Artists would refuse to take it to the exhibition, is noteworthy.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

      Then this used urinal was thrown out, but in the 40s and 50s Duchamp again argued for that he would make it a great work of art and sell for a million dollars just to prove that the main quality of any work of art in America is a price tag.

      Together with his friends from Yale University, he developed a whole theory about a special artistic space, getting into which the urinal turns into a work of art, and won a bet by selling several urinals immersed in the artistic space for obscene amounts of money.

      But the funny thing is that this theory has become stronger, has taken root, has spawned other trends in art that develop or refute this theory, and now telling serious art historians that it was originally a joke is useless – what kind of jokes can be if a person sold an ordinary used urinal for a million bucks?!

      • Luhrenloup April 30, 2018 at 8:42 pm #

        Yes, I had a friend, a sculptor, who was a follower of Duchamp, of his school of art. The art was called readymade. Obviously, reflecting a readymade era.

  47. Billy Hill April 30, 2018 at 5:24 pm #

    We interrupt the collapse with this important news:

    http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/19652/lockheed-martin-now-has-a-patent-for-its-potentially-world-changing-fusion-reactor

    Or if you wish google Skunk Works Compact Fusion Reactor Patent

    In fact this showed up about a month ago, to no particular notice, and maybe it’s all just flight of fancy, but wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

    It won’t solve the credit crisis, cultural decadence, spiritual anomie, pollution of the oceans, or degradation of the soil, but at least we will have HVAC and live out the end times in style and comfort.

    • FincaInTheMountains April 30, 2018 at 7:39 pm #

      Actually, it showed up a few years ago.

      Judging by F-35 reputation of Lockheed Martin and by me listening to a few lectures by leading Russian scientists on the subject, it is most likely a “duck” story perhaps designed to lead the competitors on a wild goose chase – that happenes all the times – remember Ronny Reagan Star Wars?

      However, there are some promising developments in this department – one of which I wrote about – the Linear Compact Proton Accelerator on Reverse Wave that will allow to burn normally not-fissionable metals like Thorium and Uranium 238.

      • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 8:29 pm #

        The problem with fusion is that in a star, gravity so crushes the plasma present that it cannot get away before the hydrogen fuses into helium. Gravity is so crushing that it can turn an old star into a dimensionless black hole, a phenomenon we cannot even conceive of. Trying to keep all the plasma close enough together at a high enough temperature, 10 million degrees, is what it is all about. A star is created when gravity is strong enough at a site to overcome the expansive characteristics of the super hot plasma fusion explosion. I sense a boondoggle to pour money into.

        • Billy Hill May 1, 2018 at 8:47 am #

          Glad you brought up gravity. Aye, there’s the rub!

          What strikes me about the compact reactor is that not much has changed beyond the 19th century: thermodynamics, steam turbines, coils, magnets, rotating machines.

          Sapiens may not be intelligent enough to grasp the logic of that which is most obvious in nature. Beavers build dams, wasps build nests, humans build machines. That may be all there is.

        • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 11:39 am #

          John,
          Is it possible that Lockheed-Martin’s patent is broad enough to claim ownership of certain necessary processes?. Sort of a tactical move allowing it’s massive wealth (which translates to lengthy litigation) to subsume further development by 3rd parties?

  48. tucsonspur April 30, 2018 at 5:28 pm #

    It’s an interesting point that Alpert wrote to Obama, at the beginning of his second term, asking him to do something like fireside chats to make us and the world more aware of the dangers of our current hyper-complexity, limited resources and ever increasing population.

    Obama declined. If even he would, or could do no such thing, who in the near future might? Certainly not Trump the “Kardashian”.

    The simple fact, and the unpleasant reality, is that we are on this unsustainable road to the end, with not much mitigation beforehand.

    And we have yet another precious metals push, ICA Investments in this case, preceding the doomsday scenario. In the extreme case, all the gold and silver in the world will do nobody any good. But the case is now far from extreme, so it’s business as usual.

    I guess we have enough weapons promotions, and it seems that this investment niche just doesn’t have the same prospects or lure as gold and silver.

    If it were positively known that these drastic reductions in population would take place under the most horrific of circumstances, and that the chances of survival of a particular nation were extremely slim, would that nation be justified in killing say 5 to 6 billion people preemptively?

    A new policy. SAS. Solitary Assured Survival. Or maybe an alliance of say the US and Russia, assuring their global longevity. This alliance would be most formidable, and result in a world population well under that 600 million figure.

    How to do it, that’s the question. Time for the engineers and scientists. Will they be able to say, “I am become Life, the Saver of Worlds”?

    Playing God with a gruesome nobility? Or Satan playing the Savior?

    • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 6:23 pm #

      Rather conveniently, serendipitously, or ironically, technology – everyone’s great hope – will provide further downward pressure on human fertility.
      But merely as a consequence.
      With more automation there is less work, less labor, to be done by people.
      The lowest of society provide labor. They do work.
      They also have the least voice.
      The least say.
      They are the first to go.
      But it doesn’t end there. It only begins there. As AI progresses, and as it replaces “thinking” jobs, so goes the petite bourgeoise.
      The little professionals. The service people.
      Capitalism will expand into the niche of people replacement.
      A new market. Removing humanity from the labor equation.
      Why pay for a farmer, warehouse worker, taxi driver, cleaning person, financial planner, policeman, fireman, accountant, family practitioner, computer programmer, college professor and all their attendant needs and benefits when you can simply own one?
      That runs 24-7, 365. Money to be made servicing them, and programming them, at least at first.
      The savings is too big.
      The greed is too much.
      AI will use a fraction of the energy. It will consume a fraction of the capital. Compared to a person.

      And for all you positive types.
      You’re right.
      The system will win. The status quo drivers of humanity will continue to seek. Profitability. Savings. New markets.
      It will lead us to the answer.
      It already is.
      Humanity as it is is just too expensive
      Superfluous.

      • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 8:17 pm #

        Our host was in a TV show with a couple of other guys called the Prophets of Doom. The subjects were water, oil and AI with each telling the tale of why their subject was going to do humanity in. The conclusion I drew watching the show was that any of the three had the capability of ending things as we know them, but the combination of the three make it a certainty. Just a matter of time.

        AI really sticks in my craw though. This is one group of humans literally destroying another for no good reason. AI gets mankind nothing, cheaper labor costs for consumers that cannot afford anything. More power for the jerks promoting AI and for those solely benefiting from its use. Hey, all you proponents of AI, what are you planning to do with all the folks you are putting into permanent poverty with your damned machines. Oh, I forgot, the guvment will take care of them. And the spirit of America sets in the West.

        • 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 9:33 pm #

          If there weren’t too many people, and too many people only caused by burning through too many resources too quickly, we would have a world with plenty of:

          fresh water
          arable land
          seafood
          petroleum
          rare earths
          living soil
          megafauna
          flora
          ice caps
          and starry nights.

          • tucsonspur May 1, 2018 at 2:07 am #

            Back to the Garden. I still think about Henry Hudson and the New York harbor, city of my birth, back in the early 1600’s, when there as elsewhere, Earth was just that, Earth.

            Skyscraping trees. Wooden boats under sail. Black nights with diamonds in the sky. The brutal but pure fight to exist.

            Back to the Garden of Manhattan.

        • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 10:42 pm #

          Thank you so much John for making me aware of this show. I checked it out on You Tube and really enjoyed it. I had no idea that our host did this and that he was able to meet Mike Ruppert, a man I have come to greatly admire as well and whose untimely end I found to be so sad. It is cathartic to see such discussions on problem solving without the interruptions from deniers that cannot acknowledge the fact that such problems even exist. I suppose that is why those who deal in the solution of problems do not invite naysayers into their work lest nothing ever be accomplished. Again, thank you.

          • Walter B April 30, 2018 at 10:45 pm #

            Oh, I forgot, it was rather curious don’t you think, that the fellow that was developing AI wondered whether or not they would eventually kill we humans all off, yet he continues to develop them, doesn’t he? That tells you all you need to know about mankind and his technologies doesn’t it?

          • GreenAlba May 1, 2018 at 12:22 pm #

            Walter, I expect the excuse is the same as for arms sales to regimes it would be polite to call dubious: if we don’t do it someone else will.

            Although who is either of us to call other regimes dubious these days?

          • Walter B May 1, 2018 at 3:15 pm #

            No doubt GA, no doubt at all. Unfortunately for mankind there will always be those who lack morality or caring for a “greater good” and that are more than willing to do any and everything they can for profit. Profit which gives them more and more control and power. The ensuing corruption results in human beings being even more valuable after you kill them off, harvest their organs, steal their lands and their resources and profit further. This is the system that is run by those in control today. It lacks pretty much any morality and those of us that are not directly affected by it (NIMBY) either do not care or cannot stop it even if we wanted to. All that remains to be seen is how long it can go on before it can no longer go on. Perhaps the AI robots will be doing the world a favor should they decide that WE are the problem and they decide to solve it.

  49. wm5135 April 30, 2018 at 8:18 pm #

    In light of current events including Mr. Netanyahu’s most recent speech I would ask everyone here who is a person of faith to say a prayer for peace. Those of you who are men and women of good will I ask to hold a thought for peace in your hearts.

    William

    • JohnAZ April 30, 2018 at 8:38 pm #

      Men who put their faith in mankind will be sorely disappointed.

      Men who put their faith in God will be rewarded.

      Prayer to God will help, but God guided people better keep their powder dry.

  50. BackRowHeckler April 30, 2018 at 8:49 pm #

    Well Jim, this unwelcome news about ultimate collapse will certainly be a surprise to millions and millions of young people in colleges and universities across the USA and Canada, who evidently think as soon as they remove western canon from the cirricula, rescind the 2nd amendment, go green, tear down offensive statues, apologize and grovel at the feet of all and every ‘marginalized’ group … utopia is right around the corner, which they will ride into in self driving electric automobiles while scrolling their facebook page. For them, the future is bright and skys the limit.

    brh

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    • PeteAtomic April 30, 2018 at 9:36 pm #

      I can envision the dumb founded lot of them crying: “But we were diverse, damn it!” in the face of a downfall, as if clinging on to that word is some kind of magical talisman.

  51. Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 9:15 pm #

    Race, Foundation for Human Understanding, John R. Baker, (original publisher: Oxford University Press), 1974, 625 pp., $25.00.

    Race, by John Baker, is a remarkable book. There is probably no other treatment of the biology and physical anthropology of race that approaches it in breadth, detail, erudition or style. Even more remarkable is the book’s point of view. Far from evading the issue of racial differences in ability, it was written for the very purpose of investigating and clarifying those differences.

    Dr. Baker, now deceased, was the ideal author for this book. He was professor emeritus of cytology at Oxford University, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and president of the Royal Microscopical Society. To these professional qualifications he added an abiding interest in what he called the “ethnic question,” that is to say, the entire range of ways in which the races differ.

    I’m going to order this book so I can serve my readers even better on the subject of Race. There are more learned men than I and more intelligent, but like Confucius I can say I have never met any more eager to learn. JS.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 9:18 pm #

      Good review of this important book on this all important subject. The fate of our Civilization hangs in the balance as to whether we get this question right. And right means separating ourselves from all others who would make us other and therefore less than we are and what we are destined to be.

      https://www.amren.com/news/2018/04/the-scientific-reality-of-race/

      • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 11:27 pm #

        Yes, we are enemies. You and yours have to be defeated, both in the classroom and the battlefield. Such evil doctrines will never be allowed in our America since they have consigned our Race to death. What you do in your America is your business. You can take our dissidents and we’ll take some of yours.

      • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 11:50 am #

        “Janos, I disagree with what you say, but will defend to your death your right to say it.” (paraphrased)

        “you will be neutralized”

        John,
        Your pathology is the scariest thing on this site.

        • PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 1:03 pm #

          ha ha, yeah

          a little confusing, isn’t it?

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 5:12 pm #

          We have freedom of speech right now, but you may well end up homeless and friendless and under a bridge (or in prison in Europe) if you don’t tow the PC line. John seems to offer the same deal, but with a different version of PC and a more terminal endpoint.

  52. dolph9 April 30, 2018 at 9:24 pm #

    Jews? Blacks?

    Am I being racist? No. I’m merely pointing out the reality of the situation. America does not just consist of white Americans, you are the deluded and closeted ones if you think this is the case.

    America has something like 7 million Jews and 40 million blacks, and probably more if you count the mixed. They all need what the rest of us need: food, shelter, work, reproduction, culture, a belief in the future.

    Are you going to give it to them? How much and for how long are you people willing to help them…centuries?

    • Janos Skorenzy April 30, 2018 at 11:36 pm #

      Ideally America will split up into a number of new states. Blacks will get a generous swath of the Deep South from Georgia to New Orleans. Obviously they will blow it and we will recoup all this land at some point once wind and weather have done their work. Monroe Doctrine in play. Hands off China, Russia, Cuba, etc. We will help the Blacks get started and then let these Supermen do their own thing. It will be the greatest Reality Show in history. Hopefully then, the Liberals will learn at last.

  53. 100th Avatar April 30, 2018 at 9:39 pm #

    You already said that.
    Where is the doom?

    Tell me, when your friend turns on the lights and turns off the music at 2AM at the end of the fiesta, is he a “doomer”?

    When your alarm drives you from bed and ushers you on the path to work at 6:00AM, is it a “doomer”?

    The whiney ones want the party and relaxation to never end.
    When it comes time to work and get down to business they lay hate on the “pessimists”, those that advocate a return to responsibility.

    Buzz kills.
    Time to sober up.

  54. Sticks-of-TNT April 30, 2018 at 9:45 pm #

    Show our host a little common courtesy. You made your point. More than once. Just counting today.

    Or start your own site. Then we can analyze your traffic.

    • 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 5:36 am #

      An *sshole shrugged
      He lives and breathes derivative.
      From his lame handle
      to his cliched use of cliches

      • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 11:59 am #

        John,

        Sounds like a wonderful Utopia.

        ALL the horrors of the 20th century can be traced back to a Utopian premise. Communism…Fascism…Religion…Jim Jones…The tribal excesses in Africa…NAMBLA….

        Sheepdogs….

  55. BackRowHeckler April 30, 2018 at 10:42 pm #

    Then again, maybe this ‘Opioid Crisis’, so called, is the start of a human die off of some sort, 130 deaths per day, most of them young people.

    About 130 per day are killed off in car wrecks too.

    Sometimes I go thru the archives here, old newspapers that go back to the 1760s. In the 1920s automobiles were far more dangerous than they are today: Memorial Day Weekend 1927, 28 deaths in Massachussets, 18 in CT. In many ways life is much safer now than it was in the past.

    brh

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    • 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 8:17 am #

      0 = people who care about your Ayn Rand bullshit.
      61= years since people shrugged off the ridiculous book you’re rather sophmorically peddling.
      Sheepdog = a new macho meme dredged up through Hollywood gun culture.

      > = the naiveté index of Rand followers compared to Dale Carnegie nuts

      • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 12:06 pm #

        Avatar,
        I fear your name has been writ large in the book of those needed to be “neutralized” by the heroic Sheepdogs of the New Republic.

        “You are a has been”

        You will be erased from living memory…for the ultimate good of the group…but take heart in that it will be done with love, and will pass the new “Constitutional” muster.

        • 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 1:36 pm #

          I beg to differ! As my mother constantly reminds me, I’m a never was!

          Y’all wrong
          Again

    • Farmer Joe May 1, 2018 at 12:43 pm #

      I thought the opioid crisis was a way to cull the useless eaters and keep Wall Street afloat:

      https://www.globalresearch.ca/wall-street-and-the-global-laundering-of-drug-money/5380153

      https://www.narconews.com/narcodollars1.html

  56. BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 12:23 am #

    Is this Jack Alpert fellow any relation to Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass?

    Ram Dass

    Ram dropped acid with Tim Leary back in ’64 (those halcyon days when everything seemed possible) and he hasn’t been the same since.

    brh

    • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

      BRH,
      Read a book many years ago…one of it’s subjects was BaBa Ram Dass. Alpert’s brother was not impressed with BaBa’s antics, and referred to his brother as BaBa “rammed ass”

      The name of the book, as I recall was “Power of Mind”, by Adam Smith…great read.

      • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 7:25 pm #

        BaBa rammed ass!

        turns out the dude is bisexual.

        Believe it or not his father was the last president of the New Haven RR.

        brh

    • malthuss May 1, 2018 at 5:38 pm #

      I have read Ram das books.
      He had a brother who was very mentally ill [Schizophrenic, if I recall].

      Leary and Steinhem were CIA funded.

  57. Tate May 1, 2018 at 12:25 am #

    Happy May Day!

    You Commie Bass turds!

    • FincaInTheMountains May 1, 2018 at 9:14 am #

      Happy May Day! Peace, Labor, May!!

      https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/25921/44617652.155/0_a5a7e_eb4611ac_XL.jpg

      • GreenAlba May 1, 2018 at 9:44 am #

        And a happy folkloric May Day back, on behalf of my cousins south of the border.

        https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=english+may+day+images&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=Efze8DSRH7rlJM%253A%252Co6spKNf-4pa-6M%252C_&usg=__guSiTMUmoA26CV47C2lpOBYCD7o%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjTlPzV0OTaAhUQOsAKHWsBAe4Q9QEIPDAG#imgrc=rg_cI88jKk2WQM:

        Not that there’s anything wrong with a more ‘European’ May Day to celebrate things like work-free weekends or paid holidays. Even right-wingers seem to quite like those, which had to be fought for. In Scotland, workers didn’t get Christmas Day off until 1958.

        • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 2:37 pm #

          To Americans, that (no Christmas) just sounds astounding.
          Things are finally turning spring-ish here in the States. Hope you’re doing well “over there.” Some day when the time is right, I’ll write here of my love for all things Scottish! -Sticks

          • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 6:12 am #

            Sticks

            The Christmas thing was originally a gift of the Reformation rather than the nasty capitalists – similar to the puritanical ban imposed by Oliver Cromwell in England, since pagan – or indeed popish – jollities were frowned upon as unbiblical.

            Hogmanay was therefore traditionally the time to let your hair down in a cold Scottish midwinter, with first footers bearing coal (now generally a bottle of something warming) to signal a prosperous new year.

            Now, of course, we have the same demented consumer-fest as everywhere else. Bah humbug…

          • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 6:18 am #

            And we still get 2 January off to sleep off our New Year revellings. It’s quite nice to be still in bed on a cold 2nd January morning and know the English colleagues you work with are back at their desks, hehe. Not that it affects me now I’m freelancing – I don’t even notice weekends…

  58. Pucker May 1, 2018 at 4:16 am #

    Jack Alpert: “Do the Math!”

  59. Pucker May 1, 2018 at 4:18 am #

    Jack Alpert mentions Cannibalism as a post-Collapse survival strategy.

    I’ve got a Chinese book lying around somewhere that is a confidential Chinese government record of cannibalism in Southwest China during the Cultural Revolution.

    • RIB May 1, 2018 at 6:43 am #

      You doomer fucks need to get laid more often. Especially you, “Janet” I’m out RIB

      • K-Dog May 1, 2018 at 11:26 am #

        How do you know how often Janet gets laid?

      • capt spaulding May 1, 2018 at 11:28 am #

        I like doomers. They’re the ones who bring the life jackets.

    • PeteAtomic May 2, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

      “I’ve got a Chinese book lying around somewhere that is a confidential Chinese government record of cannibalism in Southwest China during the Cultural Revolution.”

      Is that how General Tso got into General Tso’s chicken?

      🙂

  60. Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 9:59 am #

    I think an ability almost anyone has who has served in the military in a leadership position, at any level, whether enlisted or officer, is the ability to spot a bullshitter. There’s something about relentless, highly stressful training and combat, that tends to separate the doers from the talkers. I’m certain this must also be the case in civilian occupations involving highly stressful training and real world application, such as fire fighting, emergency room medicine, airplane crash and major casualty rescue operations, etc. It’s what boot camp is designed to spot.

    Such occupations certainly do not have a monopoly on such intuition. I’m sure plenty of teachers working with teenagers, athletic coaches and those involved in other ‘performance’ oriented occupations, either innately or through experience, have developed such abilities.

    With that in mind, I’d like for you to take a look at a video. This video was recommended by ‘Eoin’ here early in the day yesterday. Heeding his advice, I watched it last night. It’s an interview of a fellow name Kevin Shipp by USAWatchdog.com’s Greg Hunter. Hunter, who used to be an anchor with CNN back in the days when it was the “must go to” source for television news, is highly skilled as an interviewer and news hound. I lived in Atlanta back in those years and as part of an alumni group, which had a member employed there as an executive, once got the behind-the-scenes “cook’s tour” of the CNN news operation downtown at CNN Center, which used to be called the Omni before Ted Turner bought it. It was really quite a force in those days, but things sure have changed, haven’t they?

    Anyway, I like Greg Hunter’s YouTube channel and plugged it in a sub-post, but hadn’t watched his most recent interview, which was his 4/28 interview of Kevin Shipp, so I watched it last night. To say I was blown away would be an understatement. This is how Hunter’s description accompanying the video begins:

    Published on Apr 28, 2018 “Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp says, ‘There is essentially a civil war involving parts of senior management and upper parts of our government that is occurring in the United States. It’s between the ‘Dark’ side and the ‘Constitutional’ side. There has never been anything like this in history. . .”

    If what I have posted above has peeked your curiosity, watch the interview. What do your own intuitive abilities tell you about what this man is saying? Does he seem credible, or is he just a born bullshitter, spinning a big conspiracy tale? If you don’t mind, and if you’ve given him a fair hearing and listened to the interview in its entirety, regardless of your conclusions, report back to your fellow shitizens and tell us what you think. A grateful CF Nation thanks you for your service:

    TITLE: Kevin Shipp – Civil War Between Dark Side & Constitution Side
    YOUTUBE CHANNEL: Greg Hunter
    WEBSITE: USAWatchdog.com
    YOUTUBE URL: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7woh9gPPf7k
    VIEWS: 85,126 (5/1 – 9:30am EDT)
    THUMBS UP: 2.6K (98%)
    THUMBS DOWN: 52 (2%)

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    • K-Dog May 1, 2018 at 11:33 am #

      The intelligence community doing their own thing? You have to be kidding because as Shipp says they have ‘a hundred ways’ to get back at you.

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 12:53 pm #

        It will be interesting to see if Shipp stays around. As the mob guys used to say, Don’t buy any long-playing records. Thanks for watching Dog. -Sticks

    • akmofo May 1, 2018 at 11:37 am #

      We’ve known for a long time these federal agencies are criminal agencies. The criminality goes from the very top to the very bottom. The FBI CIA NSA DOJ DOE DOS IRS CDC FDA and the hundreds other federal agencies should be dissolved. In fact, pretty much the whole federal bureaucracy is a criminal superstructure designed to spawn and sponsor corporate fascist predation and should be dissolved.

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

        No argument from me on this one friend. -Sticks

      • FincaInTheMountains May 1, 2018 at 12:50 pm #

        I don’t think you wanna burn the house to get rid of the cockroaches.

        However, good old Stalin-type purge is overdue.

        — Honey, it’s so easy to remember my phone number.

        — What is it?

        — 555-37-58

        1937, Article 58, Enemy of the People.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_58_(RSFSR_Penal_Code)

        • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 12:57 pm #

          Good point. You’ve seen more of that than we have, but we’re working hard to catch up! Thanks for watching & comments. -Sticks

    • Tate May 1, 2018 at 2:07 pm #

      He says it all ties back to the Clinton Foundation. Ever read “Clinton Cash,” by Peter Schweitzer? Check it out. The criminality is rampant. It staggers the mind really when you think about it.

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 5:41 pm #

        Yes Tate, I listened to the Audible version of “Clinton Cash” right after it came out. The criminality of that enterprise really does stagger the mind. Worse though, is that everything about our system; the Congress–in fact, all three branches of government–plus the investigative agencies, the news media, and the apathetic &/or ignorant people themselves as the cherry on top–everything about our system has become so culpable, co-dependent, corrupt, you name it, they seem to either be part of the scam, in some way, or perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to it.

        That is what just staggers the mind. In the video, recall Shipp’s reaction when Hunter mentioned Watergate? You and I were just beginning to play our roles as independent adults in the system in those years, but Nixon’s crimes were cast as so monumental, so corrupt, and every part of the system was so hell-bent on going after and destroying him, that his name itself was made synonymous with evil; the very definition of high crimes and misdemeanors, worthy of impeachment. For what now, in retrospect and in hindsight, looks like a damn parking ticket. Remember Shipp and Hunter’s reaction to THAT in the interview? They just shook their heads. What else can you do? That’s just how far we’ve fallen.

        And what an irony, that the self-righteous little Radcliff bitch–I know she didn’t go to school there, but that’s the expression they used back then in “Love Story” or” The Paper Chase” or one of those little movies they targeted us with at the time–that Hillary Clinton herself, helping lead the prosecution of Nixon, would be at the top of one of the greatest criminal enterprises/government scandals in the history of the Presidency–back to the very founding of our Republic –and NOTHING would be done about it. And I think that’s going to be the outcome. NOTHING will be done about it. The system is just too corrupt. Or one-sided.

        I tell ya’ Tate, that’s what’s frustrating. That and the fact they’re more than willing to crucify Trump–who nobody here is really crazy about in the first place, except he’s who we had to go with to avoid Hillary–but they’re more than willing to hang anything they can come up with–real or imagined, petty or grand, ANYTHING to get him out of the way–and no one lays a glove on Bill or Hillary Clinton or even Barack Obama. That’s what staggers the mind Tate and makes you just want to pack it up and move to the mountains. Sorry for the rant on your dime. Thanks for commenting on my video. As the guys say on YouTube, Peace, Out. -Sticks

        • Tate May 1, 2018 at 6:49 pm #

          Maybe Finca’s right about — what does he call her — Bastinda? That she’s at the nexus of it all… Who knows what to believe.

          Anyway, I can’t spend too much time here this week. I’m trying to rehabilitate a sprinkler system.

    • Walter B May 1, 2018 at 3:35 pm #

      I watched that on Sunday Sticks so I am familiar. Also, I have been fortunate enough to have received some serious training in the military and spent many decades across the desk from Syrians and Israelis, all of which makes you either more able to discern truth or be eliminated in the business world. Since I survived and thrived, I assume I have many of the abilities of which you speak.

      For my buck Mr. Shipp is being honest, though the civil war of which he speaks is more of a covert infiltration or a backlash. I have an excellent personal contact who is a department director in the FBI, and another that is a friend in the DOD. While neither of them would ever come close to talking out of school or divulging any “inside information” they both openly claim that the rank and file of all of the people that do the work are decent honest people and that the BS that exists at the top is something that they cannot control. Perhaps the degradation of their agencies from all of the bullshit that the paid-off political hacks have perpetrated on our nation is finally reached the point where the good people inside will try to find a way to expose it all if not outright fight the battle themselves. We can hope, can’t we?

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 7:54 pm #

        Hi Walter,

        I have no doubt your abilities were being honed long before you took your place in the Long Gray Line. Getting there in the first place required that, so you were already a step ahead of the pack.

        The rank and file and those doing the daily heavy lifting is not the center of the problem, although we know from lessons learned at places like Abu Ghraib, My Lai (the seeds of which were sown by the bean-counting McNamara at D.O.D.’s drive to tabulate ‘body counts’ for his spreadsheets as measures of progress and success) and hundreds of others throughout history, in the military, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, etc., that cultures of corruption are usually created from the top down. Over time, this grows like cancer, metastasizing and spreading throughout the body. Then, entire agencies, police departments, etc., gain deserved reputations for corruption. Mayor Daly’s Chicago Police Dept., L.A.P.D, etc.

        I personally believe that at some, where billions of dollars are involved, over long periods of time, especially where they are operating at the fringes to begin with, such as the multi-trillion dollar, multi-decade effort we call the War on Drugs, we can look for this corruption to be widespread, rank & file, top to bottom. I believe the DEA is a likely candidate, where corruption breeds from the local drugstore, to the executive suites of major pharma, from the jungles of South America & SE Asia and the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the lobbying firms on K Street, committee rooms in Congress and bureaucratic office buildings throughout D.C and surrounding suburbs. And there are others, not just a few. Reform too, will have to come from the top down. “Rooting it out” is literally defined as pulling it out of the ground and burning it, NOT clipping off the tops.

        -Sticks

        • Walter B May 1, 2018 at 11:26 pm #

          Oh my gosh sticks, thank you for your kind words. I really needed such words today, bless you. Yes the “money” that buys the “power” but which is only all illusion anyway seems to be the drug that addicts those who crave it into the never ending spiral that leads to no good and no control in the end.

          I played hockey and was a goalie in my day. Standing there when the action was at the far end, I had a lot of time to ponder all sorts of bizarre ideas. I was blessed to be able to come to the understanding one day that life was a lot like playing hockey. We fool ourselves into thinking that we are in “control” when we are actually only fortunate to be able to remain upright on the slippery ice. When the action finds its way into your end, you as a goalie, start flipping and flopping and doing whatever you can to remain upright, in control and able to stop that little black bastard from finding its way behind you. There is really NO control, there is only reaction and sometimes chaos.

          I often look back and recall the great saves, the cheap shots, and the failed attempts to stop the inevitable. It is to this day an interesting parody of life.

          I look forward to sharing concepts, ideas, and potential solutions with you in the future my friend. Be well.

          • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 10:03 pm #

            Your hockey example was a great word picture & metaphor. Thanks Walter!

  61. Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 10:30 am #

    I don’t know about collapse. Adam Smith wrote that there was much ruin in a nation, meaning that a well-run country does not collapse overnight. (I heard this from Swedish-Kurdish economist Tino Sanandaji when talking about the effects of mass immigration.)

    What is impossible to deny is the astonishing intellectual collapse which has been in train for at least the last fifty-five or sixty years. It has either got markedly worse in the last few years or I am just more sensitive to it. This is affecting what used to be called thinking people and includes, obviously, academia, the media and most of those on social media. I suppose earlier collapses had their intellectual counterpart.

    It is a psychological condition involving a huge ‘meta-fantasy’ which we can call political correctness within which an array of different but connected mass fantasies are playing out. There is a permanent level of public hysteria, which blows up into full-blown insanity at regular intervals, damaging all institutions including justice. These fantasies can be easily demonstrated but it is very difficult to persuade people to look at the evidence, of which there are mountains.

    Janos, in the last thread you say that if a penny is spun five times and turns up as heads it does not affect the next toss. However witch hunts are not random. People do not make accusations out of the blue, especially when they are thirty years after the event. The recent academic paper on the Savile scandal focuses on Duncroft Girls School, which is where it began. Former girls at this approved school (that is, for problem girls) had been discussing their school days on an internet forum and it appears that things got out of control. The story broke with a television documentary based largey on Duncroft and the police and authorities got carried away (yet again). (A year or two ago I read in the course of the same day a knowledgeable blogger state that there was not one sentence in that documentary that was not at least partly untrue and heard veteran investigative journalist Christopher Booker say the very same thing about Al Gore’s film. Booker wrote the precocious The Neophilicas (1969) which examines the unprecedented rise of the Swinging Sixties in Britain in terms of a ‘fantasy cycle’. He also investigated the likes of the asbestos and food scares, the millenium bug and, of course, global warming, highlighting what they have in common with each other.)

    If it were possible (which of course it is not) to conduct an experiment and stage ‘abuse’ allegations against a prominent well-known man and get actresses to play the accusers and ‘survivors’ then you could bet that there would be a large number of victims and survivors stepping forward with their own stories, with ‘their own truth’. At least a hundred if it got plenty of publicity. The police would once again trawl for victims and greedy lawyers once again do the same. And then when the time came to reveal the hoax nobody would believe it. People would talk darkly of the rumours that ‘everyone knew’, the government would be rocked by accusations of a cover-up, former friends would line up to denounce him, minor celebrities would appear on breakfast television telling of their close miss at his hands, psychologists would drone on about his ‘predatory’ personality, washed-up middle-aged alcoholic and drug-addled women would blame him for the mess they made of their lives, a Guardian leading article would compare him in all seriousness with Pol Pot and speculate as to whether it was down to his audaciousness in committing his evil In Plain Sight that nobody actually saw anything, the social media would launch petitions, the all-night manic depressive posters at the bottom of the YouTube swamp would declare burning at the stake too good for him, the papers would carry sensational stories about his necrophilia, involvement in snuff videos and links with Jimmy Savile, the Director General of the BBC would resign and the Queen would apologise in her Christmas speech to the Commonwealth. They might even pass a law to make it an offence to deny it happened.

    • FincaInTheMountains May 1, 2018 at 11:05 am #

      What is impossible to deny is the astonishing intellectual collapse which has been in train for at least the last fifty-five or sixty years.

      The Americans were the first to whom the notorious Dulles plan was applied

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles%27_Plan

      They began as usual with history, then physics and mathematics followed, and it was the turn of the political science. Honestly, when I arrived in the country, I was not up to politics, but when my girlfriend arranged a work for me in the election campaign of Hillary Clinton (oh sorry Bill Clinton), I began to watch Sunday’s political reviews and was amazed at their depth and skill with which they presented the drama of American politics.

      I even came to the conclusion that political commentators have a real impact on the political life of the country.

      It was after her arrival at the White House that her deadly breath on the media was felt for the first time, and as a result she now commits a coup d’etat having nothing but the Fourth Estate and the Assassins from the relevant services.

      However, the old eagle from the Mountain Nest Alamut proved that with the help of assassins, it is possible to defeat regular armies, even while in occupation.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alamut_Castle

    • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 12:25 pm #

      “If it were possible… ”

      Sean,
      And so it is….

    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 2:05 pm #

      Google the Spirit Cooking cult. Celebrities like Lady Gaga were pretending to eat human flesh on camera. If this is what they do on camera, what do they do off camera? You have to understand that where there’s smoke there’s fire. If people get incredibly excited about the idea and image of someone being killed (snuff films), is it rational to believe in never really happens? With people who have the money, means, and smarts to do it and get away with it?

      You are fixated one aspect of reality to the exclusion of another part – the part were terrible things really happen. I assume most snuff films are just acting. There’s no reason to believe all of them are. I assume most people at these cannibal camera fetes are just dilettantes looking to look hip. More serious people will be marked and invited back for off camera activities. This is the way it works.

      Facts are facts. Jimmy Saville had access to the highest levels of British Society. WHY? Howard Stern and other such vulgar shock jocks don’t here in America. And I assume most British equivalents don’t either, now or then. What did this pos offer that was so fucking valuable?

      • Tate May 1, 2018 at 2:49 pm #

        When the Comet Pizza thing was front & center — when was that again? a geological epoch ago, lol — I remember telling my son who was having conniptions over it, that of course there was substance to it, that it was just the tip of the iceberg, but that there was no point in becoming obsessed over it because if it were ever really taken seriously and investigated, it would lead to the highest levels, and therefore it had to be suppressed & put down as tin-foil hat material in the media and therefore nothing would ever come of it.

        Looking at the historical record, the same evidence resurfaces periodically but except for the occasional Dennis Hastert scandal, nothing will ever be done.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 1:44 am #

          Exactly. Almost like Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea”. The fish is too big. If you landed it, it would swamp the boat – or cut you too pieces if a sword fish.

          Or friend Coleman, who can’t live in universe where such thing actually happen. Normalcy Bias, both common and a killer.

      • Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 3:43 pm #

        Savile (one ‘l’) had access to the highest levels of British society? People say he spent every Christmas at Chequers with Mrs Thatcher. The problem here is that he did not. He visited once. The rest is legend, probably encouraged by Jimmy himself as he was a self-publicist. Think about it. How on earth can an ageing Radio 1 disc jockey be so POWERFUL? They would have been embarrassed by the man, which is why the ordinary British public loved him.

        The deceit at every step in story is astonishing. The story is how on earth people can believe it. That is the only thing of any interest.

        When I had read Webster I thought to myself: ‘Let’s see if I can spot the next witch hunt. It will be along in minute, just like the next bus.” It never occurred to me to look at Savile because it was cut and dried: everyone knew he was a monster, the police and the RSPCC said so. It was only a daft reposting by my sister on Facebook about some nonsense linking Savile to the Tory Party that I looked at it. I told her that 90% of the story had to be false, straight off. It was just a matter of establishing whether there was a small core of truth: unlikely but possible.

        When I started to actually look at the stories the penny dropped. They were terrible. One of the star witnesses was an sex-change inmate of Broadmoor high-security hospital for the criminally insane. He/she had previously accused his/her adoptive parents of abuse before committing arson (as far as I recall). He/she said that Jimmy carried a human eye around on a ring which he got from a morgue and had a special gold key that opened every door in the place. Was this the best they had? Seriously, this was the best they had to offer?

        Same with all the other stories. Once you actually look at them (nobody will though) you have to be off your trolley to give them the time of day. The whole thing is not only false it is absurdly wrong in an almost artistically surreal way. Kafka would have had trouble with this material.

        Or look at Weinstein. Is there ONE serious accusation that is not laughable? If you want to be entertained look up the NYT’s article For Harvey a Brush with the Law and if you are not doubled up laughing then you do not possess a sense of humour. Remember, America gave the world the Marx Brothers.

        And have you seen the cut of some of the women who accused Cosby? I don’t want to run any risk of legal action so all I will say is that those I saw were straight out of the Chamber of Horrors.

        In this deranged universe you cannot throw a stone in any direction without it bouncing off a prize Whopper.

        • Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 3:58 pm #

          But there is one last thing I have to say this time. You mention the highest levels of society. Well the joke is that they believe the nonsense too. Maybe not the off the wall insane stuff, but the general narrative. See what I mean by intellectual collapse?

      • Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 3:48 pm #

        And Janos, “Facts are facts.”

        Well bloody well check the facts.

        But you won’t.

        Why?

        This is the grip the fantasy has.

      • malthuss May 1, 2018 at 5:43 pm #

        SaviLe.

        Allison Mack, funded by Bronfmans.

        The Queen and indigenous children, you know that the Queen of England has a warrant on her for her involvement with missing native kids?
        Anyone who asks why she’s still walking free ends up in jail.
        (They usually end up free, but still.)

        Google William Combes. He was the whistleblower for that, and ended up dead before he could say much more.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:18 pm #

          Was she the one who tried to do that in Haiti? If not, where?

          Yeah the Nexium Cult may be bigger than people previously thought since the Bronfman’s are involved. And apparently Raniere is a convicted pedophile.

          • malthuss May 2, 2018 at 10:34 am #

            where? Canada.

            Haiti — 33 children kidnapped by Laura Silsby [works for amber alert? under another name].
            33 s a satanic number.

        • Sean Coleman May 2, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

          The Queen always ends up in it! From what I know she has a strong sense of duty, loves horses and corgis and enjoys using Tupperware.

        • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

          “The Queen and indigenous children, you know that the Queen of England has a warrant on her for her involvement with missing native kids?”

          How does she find the time? Finca tells me she is busy working on whatever coloured project she’s highly involved in, fighting Theresa May or Hillary Clinton or gawd knows who else (I haven’t got my head round the ‘projects’ and don’t think I ever will).

          On a lighter note, I popped round to café on the corner with my other half and a friend for lunch and we met JK Rowling coming the other way, looking quite, well, ordinary and very underdressed (it’s not posh round here, though, it has to be said)… I didn’t even notice it was her until our more quick-witted friend recognised her. Just thought I’d throw that in – my life is not exciting. Could we knit her entirely casual passing by into a conspiracy or a project, I wonder. So many people seem to be involved these days.

          Perhaps that famous tree-house she spent £35K on for her kids is actually used to entice small children, pied piper-like into the garden for nefarious ends.

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

      Sean,

      I read your post carefully, with great interest. You make a compelling case for your point of view and your thoughts on a hypothetical social experiment mimicking this phenomenon were quite intriguing. I know it was only a secondary comment to your main point, but can you elaborate on the ‘fantasy cycle’ thing in Britain? I had not heard anything about it in the past (that I can recall) and would like to know more. Thanks! -Sticks

      • Sean Coleman May 1, 2018 at 3:06 pm #

        Sticks-of-TNT

        Thanks. My hypothetical experiment was satire of course, but it would be perhaps the only way to actually prove it. It is said that when such an accusation is made against you it is impossible to clear your name.

        My interest was psychological to start with. Australian psychologist Dorothy Rowe has described the difference between extraverts (sic) and introverts very well in her books. Her insight: every couple has one of both. You are one or the other. Ten years ago and more I started to examine this and I can confirm the truth of her insight.

        I noticed that extraverts tended to be politically correct and assumed there was a connection. But as you get used to distinguishing between the two groups I also noticed that those who challenged it were extraverts too. What I did realize early on, however, was that people choose to believe what they want to believe based on their psychological disposition, or whatever, so I began looking at everything very critically through that prism.

        I got a lot of insights on the nature of political correctness from Peter Hitchens’s books and blog. Then I looked at certain causes or movements, again with the same critical purpose, to see if there was anything to them beyond sheer belief. I cannot remember the order that I took them up, but I think global warming may have been the first. Booker’s The Real Global Warming Disaster was an eye-opener, as was Donna Laframoise’s blog and excellent book about the deceit and ineptness of the IPCC.

        I have a big interest in languages and came across an interesting Spanish historian (self-taught), Pio Moa Rodriguez, and read some of his books about Franco and the Civil War. The Republicans’ narrative, the winning one (although they lost), is generally accepted and indeed has been copper-fastened by the fairly recent Law of Historical Memory. How could this be that this story was utterly false from beginning to end?

        Another topic I took in on the way was Andrew Wakefield and the vaccination scandal. I was astonished to learn that the leader of the disgraced medical team, Prof John Walker-Smith, appealed the GMC’s decision to strike him off as a doctor even though his circumstances were similar to Wakefield’s. WS had been the world’s leading expert in his field. Wakefield is routinely vilified as a liar.

        The list goes on and on. Food scares, asbestos, mad cow disease – all studied by Booker and Richard North. The EU too. In short every plank of the pc agenda is suspect.

        Another one I learnt of before Christmas: white racism in America. Cue Colin Flaherty and his YT videos (and his banned YT channel). All of the evidence points in the other direction. (I summarize his approach in a post on the last thread.)

        Oh, I forgot the modern abuse witch hunts. See Richard Webster’s Sceptical Essays for these: False Allegations, The Shieldfield Files, Bryn Estyn and Casa Pia. And his essay on Flat Earth News. His book on the North Wales children’s homes scandal is superb (The Secrety of Bryn Estyn).

        Then Savile. See Rabbitaway and Moor Larkin’s blogs.

        There are others including Cosby (see Alexander Baron’s videos about him), Rolf Harris, Cliff Richard.

        Back to Booker. He was involved in the extraordinary rise of the Swinging Sixties, at the end of which he wrote The Neophiliacs. He explained it (persuasively) in terms of a five-stage fantasy cycle, perhaps of his own devising, although he is a noted scholar or Jung: anticipation stage/ fantasy finding its focus, dream stage, frustration, nightmare, death wish. He identified two large cycles between 1956 and about 1967. It seems that other lesser fantasy cycles operated within it.

        It is clear to me that this fantasy did not end in the 60s but has, if anything, deepened. We are in a situation now where it is very hard to identify what is true, where the media lie in an organized fashion, etc, etc.

        Sorry, running out of time. Must dash, but if you have any questions fire away.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 5:18 pm #

          So no Christian children were ever killed in secret Jewish rituals? But you see Dr Toaf, a leading expert in Medieval Judaism and a Jew himself with access to private libraries, actually found the Liturgy – something the Catholic Prosecutors never found.

          And your expert goes in detail about the incredible dark fantasies of a large number of people. Does he imagine like you that no one ever acted these out? Who is fantasizing now?

          • malthuss May 1, 2018 at 5:44 pm #

            what was the sacrificial liturgy? copy paste?

          • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 2:14 am #

            Dr Toaf withdrew the book from publication almost immediately because of death threats, but a few were sold. And I think someone got it online if you look a bit. I don’t know if the liturgy is published in the book or not.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 9:53 pm #

          Read Wilhelm Reich on “psychic plague”. I warn you though: he believes the Terror of the French Revolution was real, and people actually were beheaded and drowned. In other words, despite his controversial theory, he remains sane.

          And James Alefantis (sp?), a guy who owned a couple of pizza places was named one of Washington’s most prominent men. WHY?

          Belgium is always named as one of the centers of the Child Sacrifice Cult. And sure enough, two huge public murals were produced in Brussels of people being drained of their blood. Post Christian to say the least! And the denials of the “civilized” help the Cult to flourish.

          I remember you call yourself a Catholic I believe. You are supposed to believe in things like this, that evil exists, that the martyrs died in torment fighting such people, etc. One can only shake one’s head at how far we have fallen.

          Some years ago a nice man walked into an Amish school and butchered the kids. He couldn’t explain it except some rubbish about an Amish relative and an implied atrocity. His relatives thought about it and concluded he was never alone with her as a kid. In other words, he didn’t know why he did what he did. But Christians do: he was taken over by an evil spirit. If you deny such things are possible, then you are not a Christian. Again, nothing in his character or past (no police record whatsoever) could explain what he did. It IS the logical explanation.

          • elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 11:00 am #

            Janos,
            Sooo…”The Devil Made Me Do It” is a valid defense? There can be no accountability with such. Flip Wilson notwithstanding.

            Flip was funny when he said it…not so funny now, however, if you substitute “White Privileged” or “Slavery” for the Devil.

          • Sean Coleman May 2, 2018 at 12:24 pm #

            Janos, I believe in the supernatural of course. And in evil, though it is not always hard to define what it is. Booker, as a young man when he wrote The Neophiliacs, equated evil with fantasy. It is an interesting idea and he may well have a point. I don’t know.

            You are looking in the wrong direction. The Terror existed in France along with the absurd and blasphemous Cult of Reason, with prostitutes defiling altars. The Red Terror also existed and in both cases there would have been plenty of hysteria. The degree of paranoia in Stalin’s regime was extraordinary. There are surely parallels with what is going on now.

            You don’t seem to take my point that the fantasy is tied up with politicial correctness, with the progressive ideology. I don’t know if that is necessarily so but it would seem to be. We have had four or five attempts to establish a rational Utopia since the 18th Century, beginning with America, then France, then Germany (arguably at any rate) and the USSR in the early 20thC and finally our present Ameropean project (to borrow Desmond Fennell’s term).

            As for Booker being my expert, he wrote an article a year or two ago including the words “knowing what we now know about Savile”. So even the experts have difficulty seeing it all.

            The injustice involved in the current witch hunts is inexcusable and if those who allow themselves to be swept along (nobody makes them) examined their conscience they would desist.

          • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:02 pm #

            The Supernatural is all something in the past for you. You can’t imagine the existence of Evil in the here and now – especially organized evil.

            I hope you can imagine sanctity in the here and now at least. For many, that’s something in the past as well.

          • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:04 pm #

            E – google spiritual combat. One doesn’t have to give in to every impulse that one feels or ever thought one thinks, whether from one’s own self, another, or a dark entity.

            How do you explain this incident?

          • Sean Coleman May 3, 2018 at 5:53 pm #

            Janos

            ‘organized evil’

            From what I can see the extravert mind has to identify tangible causes and reasons. Organized rings, conspiracies, cover-ups at the top, follow the money, Big Pharma, Soros, the fossil fuels companies (one of my favourites), hallucinogenic mould on cereals, and so on. It finds it hard to accept that, while such things do indeed come into it to a greater or lesser degree (Hitchens describes conspiracies as ‘lunch’, when senior political correspondents and senior politicians get together), there is no rational explanation. This is my point. These fantasies do a great deal of self-evident harm and are ultimately irrational.

            You mentioned the French Revolution and I remembered this incident from that Frenchman’s classic book about mass psychology; Something or other Des Foules, from around the 1890s. When the mob was marching around Paris it found itself heading towards the Bastille. The prison governor gave himself up and they wondered what to do next. An apprentice butcher was standing nearby and volunteered to cut off the man’s head, which they then paraded around the city. A year or two earlier the big scandal was the Queen’s necklace, some cheap con trick which ended up destroying Marie Antoinette’s standing for ever (she wasn’t even involved, if I recall).

            In the early summer of 1914 the British government felt it had some duty to France (which it did not). An ancient treaty dating back to around 1830 was invoked and the violation of Belgian neutrality became the casus belli, even though it was vague and obsolete and had been superseded by other policies at the time of the Schleswig Holstein crisis in the 1860s (this is all from memory). Indeed Asquith’s Cabinet had discussed the old treaty and understood its very limited, even non-existent, application. German peace overtures were scorned. Russia was demonized (a recurring theme, as we see). The idea then was that if a war could not be avoided it would be limited strictly to naval assistance to France. The rest is history. (See Douglas Newtown’s fairly recent book about this.) It is hard to detect rationality there.

            Merkel’s hasty and emotional decision to admit hundreds of thousands of immigrants in September 2015 lacked reason. People keep arguing that it was a master stroke to provide badly needed labour required by German industry. Why do they do this? They have to have a tangible reason, even if they have to make it up. But it makes no sense whatsoever.

          • elysianfield May 3, 2018 at 8:19 pm #

            Janos,

            Heuristics. Ignorant youth succumbs…wisdom provides self-control.

            To believe in evil spirits, one, by extension, must believe in God.

            If one were to truly believe in God…well, why wouldn’t one be in a monastery (I would be). Total supplication. Absolute abandon of worldly pursuits…a life of prayer and meditation.

        • Sean Coleman May 2, 2018 at 12:13 pm #

          When I said it was satire, actually nearly all of it happened in the Savile case. Add to my list the Irish anticlerical hysteria which has been going full tilt for the last two decades and more.

  62. wm5135 May 1, 2018 at 10:57 am #

    Sticks – Watched half the video. Opinion is that Mr. Shipp is describing the symptoms not the disease.

    Mr. Shipp and Mr. Hunter are playing on the naivete of the viewers. Mr. Truman became 33 in 1945, the constitutional crisis has at least 75 years under it’s belt.

    While Mr. Shipp is factual in many of his statements there remains a peculiar odor.

    Clinton Foundation = United States of Ammorality and Depravity. The pie is shrinking and the race for power is turning the final laps.

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 12:48 pm #

      Thanks for taking a look at it. I appreciate your comments. -Sticks

    • Tate May 1, 2018 at 2:23 pm #

      1947 is also a date to remember with passage of National Security Act of 1947. Look what happened to James Forrestal for being anti-Zionist.

      • elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 11:02 am #

        “Look what happened to James Forrestal…”

        Tate,
        He learned to fly?

        • Tate May 2, 2018 at 3:02 pm #

          Sadly, no. He was a poor learner.

  63. 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 1:54 pm #

    “Alpert’s project aims to engineer a path to that optimal outcome.”

    What a doom pornographer!
    Doom fetish hustler!

    Even the Christians with their storybook chock-full of doom porn, have had enough of the “pessimism”! This is rich.

    “Liberalism, socialism, and pragmatism may all be termed optimistic in the sense that they are all premised on the idea that the application of reason to human social and political conditions will ultimately result in the melioration of these conditions. Pessimism, while retaining a linear account of time and history, denies this premise, or finds no evidence for it and asks us to philosophize in its absence”

    Heaven forbid people dwell on the many troubles facing humanity.
    A real bummer

    • 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 2:01 pm #

      “Pessimism claims an impressive following–from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet “pessimist” remains a term of abuse–an accusation of a bad attitude–or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species–who would actually counsel pessimism?

      Clusterfucks do. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism’s claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Clusterfucks argue that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been–and can again be–an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal–of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism–is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 2:07 pm #

      The followers of Jacob Frank vowed to sow the seeds of chaos and destruction amidst the greater society. Only then would the Messiah come to renew a ruined world.

      • Tate May 1, 2018 at 3:00 pm #

        It’s classified as an Antinomian movement. Orthodox Jews today insist it’s identical to Reform Judaism. Where is Satan in this?

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 5:23 pm #

          He is incarnate in the Vatican as Mofo says. See Malachai Martin’s novel “The Windswept House” to see the ritual. And he is incarnate in the Jewish people insofar as they desire to throw down all other races and culture until theirs is the only one left standing. The Vatican Two Church surrendered to the Judeo-Masons at Vatican Two.

          • Tate May 1, 2018 at 6:43 pm #

            I may read the Amazon comments. There’s no possibility I can put it on my reading list. I have stacks of books around here that I want to read but have not found the time for. And my eyesight’s not what it used to be.

          • 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 7:54 pm #

            Didn’t see that coming, y’know, Vlad attributing the study of archaic pessimism, an orthodoxy that urges one to anticipate and accept all possible outcomes, to a Jewish plot to destroy the civilized world.
            ?

          • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 9:56 pm #

            Our Lady of La Salette warned that Rome would become the seat of the Anti-Christ. And the Apostles themselves called Jerusalem “Sodom” and predicted the same of it before the End.

  64. 100th Avatar May 1, 2018 at 2:09 pm #

    “Pessimists argue that there is a fundamental disorder to the world and that the world does not conform to human desires. You are free to make choices, but if you want to be happy, you have to hide from the disorder.”

    “Pessimism provides you with a way of directing your life that minimizes suffering. I don’t think that constitutes optimism, which would be expecting that happiness was readily within your grasp.”

    “When I do, I attempt to conceptualize the university in its original medieval form as a sort of fortress of knowledge protected against the chaos of the outside world. Fortunately we don’t need to surround UCLA with stone walls and parapets. Not yet anyway.”

    “What’s especially dangerous are idle promises that history is on our side and that therefore any suffering or sacrifice we make now will be compensated for in the future.”

    “I do. I suggest we try to live without expectations, which is different from living without hopes and dreams. Expectations are when you think the world is arranged for your benefit and therefore you’ve got something coming to you.”

  65. FincaInTheMountains May 1, 2018 at 2:25 pm #

    Funny.

    Is Putin the only guy in the Middle East who doesn’t want to bomb anybody, except the maniacal jihadis?

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    • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 6:01 pm #

      Probably, sigh. Pretty sad, eh? Orange is the new black, so I guess bombing is the new peace overture. -Sticks

  66. pequiste May 1, 2018 at 3:12 pm #

    is it just me or is today’s bankruptcy filing by legendary Gibson guitars just another blaring klaxon alarm that this show is just about over?

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2018/05/01/gibson-guitars-has-filed-for-bankruptcy/#396d04225dda

    • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 7:19 pm #

      Hey Tate, don’t laugh.

      Remember when Biggy got gunned down, then Tupac got shot up?

      But the best one was when Foxy Brown and her crew showed up at a recording studio in midtown manhattan one afternoon and peppered it with Thompson submachine gun fire, hundreds of rounds.

      Believe it or not i recently read a review that claimed these hiphop artists are on the level of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

      But did Bach have a Thompson?

      brh

      • Tate May 1, 2018 at 8:54 pm #

        Haha, never heard of Foxy Brown. I had to look it (her) up on Wikipedia, the go-to source, lol. She has a bigger entry than Isaac Newton.

        Bach must have used an arquebus. How else did he create that music?

        • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 9:02 pm #

          That’s not the only things that foxy Brown got big.

          brh

      • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 9:20 pm #

        “But did Bach have a Thompson?”

        BRH,
        No, but he had…white privilege. “I Wanna Smell Yo’ Dick” was about as good as the Hip-hop “artists” have to offer….

        But understand that “I Wanna Smell” is a tapestry of the Black experience…the angst brought on of Racism and Poverty… carefully crafted and set to music.

        Mozart, Beethoven, Bach? Most of their music was culturally appropriated…derivative. Difficult to dance to…impossible to Twerk to…who needs it? How do you like it now?

        • elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 9:23 pm #

          And…the link;

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruef7aYCEbc

          • Tate May 1, 2018 at 11:55 pm #

            Why would comments be disabled?!

            We all know the answer: white privilege.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:00 pm #

          Where did Cain find his wife? Among the Beast men in east of Eden.

          Thus did the Bible say not to lay down with beasts….

  67. malthuss May 1, 2018 at 5:51 pm #

    An additional Billion more humans, every 12 years.

  68. janet May 1, 2018 at 7:34 pm #

    Chill out, dude. We have a president who appears to have no knowledge of civics or respect for the law.

    Trump said: “It would seem very hard to obstruct justice for a crime that never happened! Witch Hunt!”

    That’s flatly wrong. Obstruction of justice involves interfering with an investigation, regardless of whether the investigation uncovers a crime.

    Prosecutors can prove intent to obstruct justice without a direct confession using things like documents or interviews with witnesses who can help demonstrate what a suspect was thinking at a given moment.

    The stakes couldn’t be higher: If Trump admits under oath that he fired Comey to end the Russia investigation, as the president suggested during a May 2017 interview with NBC, it could help Mueller prove Trump obstructed justice. And even if Trump is never charged by Mueller, proof of obstruction could serve as the backbone of articles of impeachment. Stay tuned.

    • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 7:48 pm #

      what are you gonna do when Trump gets a Nobel Peace Prize, which is a real possibility?

      brh

      • janet May 1, 2018 at 8:39 pm #

        Same thing I did when Obama got it, which is to say neither Obama nor Trump deserve a peace prize, especially not when they are supervising invasions and bombings (remember MOAB?) as commander in chief.

        • Walter B May 1, 2018 at 11:27 pm #

          Wow, janet well said. Your fairness is showing and I admire it. Thank you.

  69. BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 7:46 pm #

    Hey Green Alba down in Londonistan mobs are in the streets carrying posters of Comrade Stalin, Chairman Mao, and many red flags with the hammer and sickle logo. (to celebrate May Day)

    Is the Muzzy Mayor and the Muslim hordes down with that? Wouldn’t they rather see the crescent moon in shades of green?

    Are these sort of images permissible in Londonistan? Would flags bearing swastikas and images of Adolf Hitler be acceptable? Or is it only monsters from the left that can be flaunted?

    brh

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    • Ishabaka May 1, 2018 at 8:23 pm #

      Hitler murdered about 20,000,000
      Stalin murdered about 30,000,000
      Mao murdered about 80,000,000
      It’s acceptable to march in the streets of the West bearing symbols of Stalin and Mao
      Its not acceptable to march in the streets of the West bearing symbols of Hitler
      No one seems to be able to explain why

    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:06 pm #

      And one remembers Being There proclaiming Marxism was dead. Like hell. It’s become the culture. It’s like women who say they aren’t feminists. They are because Feminism triumphed and isn’t a special or separate thing anymore, at least for the most part.

  70. beantownbill. May 1, 2018 at 7:56 pm #

    The world is a very complicated place, so I’ve had to develop my own rules to cope with all the twists and turns of life.

    One major rule of mine is: don’t just state it, prove it. Or in other words, “show me the money” – my only way forward in this crazy world. The Hunter-Shipp interview is full of yakking, not anything more. I’ll be glad to believe in all the criminal enterprises, but prove them. Provide me with the specific evidence. Pretend I’m from Missouri.

    As far as doom-mongering is concerned, state concerns, but don’t throw around numbers or opinions, show me evidence. No one can accurately say we are doomed because no one can predict the future – it hasn’t happened yet. For example, no one knows exactly how much oil is left. Ten years worth? One hundred? Two hundred? Who’s to say. People who freak out about oil depletion are utilizing a logical fallacy of statistics. Just because something’s happened in the past at a certain rate doesn’t mean it will happen at the same rate in the future.

    Same thing with overpopulation. It’s just an assumption not a proven fact that more and more people will populate the Earth over fairly long time periods. We don’t know everything about the human psyche; maybe as the population reaches a certain density, people stop procreating. We just don’t know. Nature has her own ways of reducing population, too, such as famine and disease.

    Take fusion energy. We’ve tried and tried for 50-75 years to develop a practical fusion reactor, all to no avail. We all know fusion power would resolve our energy issues. Just because we haven’t been able to do it for 50 years doesn’t mean there’s not an 18 year old who’ll figure it out in 10-15 years. Or that tomorrow some science lab demonstrates a working reactor.

    See, you can’t confuse facts with opinions or substitute the past for the future. It just doesn’t pay to be a pessimist. Yeah, concern over many issues is prudent, otherwise nothing would ever get done. But to say we are doomed or we will flourish is foolish and logically false. The only accurate viewpoint is to be realistic, neither an optimist or a pessimist for the future is unreadable. Why worry? Just hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

    No more, “we are so fucked”.

    • BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 8:11 pm #

      I was wondering how you did down at Foxwoods the other nite, Bill?

      You sound pretty optimistic so I’m thinking you might have hit a jackpot.

      brh

      • beantownbill. May 1, 2018 at 10:49 pm #

        Marlin, I lost but my wife saved me. I was having terrible luck at the blackjack tables and the crap tables. This happens from time to time. My wife went to a slot machine and hit for $1,000. Then when I was at a craps table, she went to a blackjack table and won $1,600. She left and went straight to another slot machine where she won another $1,000. Despite my own losses I had a good time because of her, and of course she was very happy. Did I tell you about the last time we went, on February 20th? She won again for a total of $3,900.

        Needless to say, we’re going back on June 13th. I was told by her I have to match her winnings. Work, work, work, always have to strive to do better.

        That’s one reason I’m in a good mood. Another is my business is doing very well. Regardless, worrying is not for me. Every day I wake up is a successful day. I will be 73 this Sunday and I’ve never felt better (except for my sore hip. What can you expect – After 7+ decades, it’s earned the right to be a little stiff.).

        • BackRowHeckler May 2, 2018 at 12:02 am #

          God Bless You, Bill.

          Here’s to many more years.

          You’re one of the good guys here.

          brh

    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:13 pm #

      Can you prove that air exists to a layman? Or water to a fish? Or that the Holocaust really happened? To prove water existed, you’d have to separate the water from the fish and the fish would die. Likewise, few Jews can live without feeling better than non-Jews with the Holocaust as the epitome of this.

      You believe in Fusion and I hope you are right. We need more planets for all this diversity. And if we are evil as you say, then you will want to separate from us. Blacks say that about Whites, but follow us everywhere we go. Strange!

      • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 11:23 pm #

        Thanks Billy. Norman Lear really scored a coup against White America with that’s show. And you think Norman considered himself White, right?

        • malthuss May 2, 2018 at 10:41 am #

          I read how Archie practically converted to Judaism, in the course of the years of the show.
          Goes to a synagogue, best friend is jewish or whatever.
          Total propaganda.

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 1, 2018 at 11:43 pm #

        No, Janos is our Morpheus, captain of this Nebuchadnezzar called CFN. But the Matrix portrays him as a dangerous terrorist, and send their agents here to eliminate the threat.

        He has offered each of us here the choice of a blue pill to continue to live in the world of illusion, or a red pill to enter the painful world of reality. You have chosen blue and must now live with the world as it as been presented to you. You have only yourself to blame. Either way, life’s a bitch…but we have hope.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 2:09 am #

          Yes, what is a Sith Lord but an Occult SS Master seen thru a glass darkly? Mystics say the Light is experienced as darkness because it is too bright for our mortal eyes.

    • 100th Avatar May 2, 2018 at 9:13 am #

      This is celebration of the very temporal blindness that Alpert references.

      Do you pinch yourself when you awake in the morning?
      Have doubts that the sun will rise again?
      That a post, and a comment section full of racist and Russian drivel, will be waiting for you at 10:30AM on Monday?

      The Earth is already overpopulated, but people like you, riding the last wave out in relative comfort and enjoyment, are blind to the information available.

      Climate, resources, arable land, fishing stocks, light pollution, fresh water stocks, air pollution, endless wars, large scale migrations…
      But hey, my house isn’t on fire yet, I’m one foot in the grave, still got some casino chips from Atlantic City, so why complain?

      I’m good, so so what?

      Optimism

      When your home is being ransacked, and you and your bum hip cannot outrun your machete waving pursuer, I’ll be sure to tap you on the shoulder and show you the money, as I sprint by.

      • beantownbill. May 2, 2018 at 11:50 am #

        Tsk, tsk! You obviously closed your eyes as soon as you saw I didn’t fully agree with your doomer philosophy. What you didn’t see or pay attention to is that I wrote we have no way to KNOW the future, so stating either we are heading for disaster or will flourish is not a proper attitude or accurate viewpoint. I also said hoping for the best but preparing for the worst is prudent.

        So why are you attacking me? It seems to me you’re displaying some of the traits of a fanatic, one who can’t be reasoned with.

        I can run well if I have to. I said my hip is sore, not dysfunctional. If TSHTF I probably won’t survive long-term, but I can tell you, I won’t go down without a fight.

  71. PeteAtomic May 1, 2018 at 8:30 pm #

    Government radio today had a friendly historian who pronounced both that Trump is an aberration, and that everything will be OK in the future.

    Who needs Prozac, eh?

    🙂

    • janet May 1, 2018 at 8:46 pm #

      “Trump is an aberration, and that everything will be OK in the future.” –PeteAtomic

      That’s pretty much the way I see it, too. Best four words to remember: “This too shall pass.” For some of you the eight-year nightmare of Obama is over. Nothing lasts forever. I would encourage Trump to enjoy himself. He enjoys BigMacs. He should double or triple his intake… and get lots of “executive time” in bed watching FoxNews.

  72. BackRowHeckler May 1, 2018 at 8:58 pm #

    Paris was set upon today, too, cars lit ablaze (why in France is it always cars burning?) windows smashed, police assaulted.

    these mob actions are purportedly ‘for the workers’, but have any of these rioters ever done a full days work in their lives. And would riots like the ones in Paris and Londonistan be permitted where actual communism still exists (NKorea, China, Vietnam)

    The only place today I could see where commy heads were cracked was in Ankara, Turkey, where apparently they don’t put up with much in the way of lefty street theater.

    brh

  73. elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 9:03 pm #

    John,
    Well, I for one, will try not being too much of a pussy.

    But then, it has been posited that you are what you eat…so my poor attempts might be in vain.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:01 pm #

      The Game of Thrones is right: the Lamb Men must be crushed.

  74. elysianfield May 1, 2018 at 9:07 pm #

    Billy Jack?

    Jesus, John, I’ve tried several times, without success, to sit through that piece of cheese.

    Please reference something a bit less counter-cultural…Dirty Harry, or Bronson…you know, real men….

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    • Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 10:04 pm #

      He didn’t, did he?! Billy was a half breed who studied Hapkido and liked to beat up Whites. John goes from bad to worse….

    • elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 11:12 am #

      John,
      Well, my running days are over…however, if you ask me how fast I can cycle an 870, then we can have this conversation….

  75. Pucker May 1, 2018 at 9:18 pm #

    During the interview, Jack Alpert remarks that the Millennials know that the US Federal Government won’t present a solution.

    Is this a True statement? Evidence?

    Do the Math!

    • Pucker May 1, 2018 at 9:36 pm #

      I thought that the Millennials are Big Bernie Supporters who think that the US Federal Government will take care of them?

  76. FincaInTheMountains May 1, 2018 at 10:19 pm #

    The last week it turned out that a seemingly insignificant event has a world-historical significance.

    Very often an avalanche sweeping away everything in its path is provoked by one grain of sand or one drop of water, and looking at the consequences of the avalanche, it seems that the individual characteristics of this grain or drop that caused it do not matter, simply because no one has seen it with his eyes, and if you saw, then the memories of the avalanche completely erase the memories of its trigger.

    But sometimes a person gets sick with a flu and comes around when all the hype from the avalanche has already disappeared, and then it comes to his mind that the avalanche itself and its consequences carry the features of the initial grain that gave birth to it, like an adult tree carries in it features of a seed from which it grew.

    And strangely enough, it seems to me that the forthcoming Korean Reunification, the state visit to the US of Macron’s dandruff, the fleetingness of negotiations with Merkel, and even the publication of intelligence data about Iran’s development of an atomic bomb by Bibi Netanyahu all fit into an oil painting depicting an avalanche-like frontal offensive by Trump.

    After all, the fact that the Fourth Reich of Frau Merkel financed not only Hillary’s election campaign but also attempts to cancel the election results in the US is well known, as well as the fact that a year ago Trump offered Macron a strategic alliance, but he rejected it, hoping for future triumph of the Frau.

    As you can see, an avalanche this week has formed quite formidable, and at the top of this avalanche rides the chairman of the congressional intelligence committee Davin Nunes holding the articles of impeachment in his hands.

    But not Trump’s impeachment, but the impeachment of the Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation of the special prosecutor Mueller. And Davin Nunes acts with such consistency and force that he involuntarily appears to be not just a congressman sympathizing with Trump but a representative of those power circles which, two weeks before the elections of 2016, forced the then head of the FBI, Comey, to reopen Hillary Clinton’s case about her private mail server that she used to leak sensitive US information to the inquisitive and well-paying parties who do not have any sympathy for the United States.

    And all this avalanche was caused by a not very successful attempt by a porn actress Stormy Daniel to make a photo robot of a man who allegedly threatened her and her daughter if she did not give up attempts to cancel the agreement between her and Donald Trump, forbidding her to publish memories of their not quite platonic relationships, at the time in his life, when he could not imagine himself as President of the United States even in his worst nightmare.

    Trump’s interests were represented by Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen at the conclusion of this agreement, and this served as the legal basis for the police to attack his office and seize all documents from it, with a clear intent of finding something in these documents that would force Cohen to betray the interests of his main client and begin cooperating with Mueller’s investigation.

    In any case, it was Mueller who gave the police a tip-off for crime in the role that Cohen played in the relationship between Trump and Stormy Daniel, which in fact became the basis for this raid.

    And Cohen had settled all sorts of matters for Trump for many years and there could have been a lot of things in the seized documents that had nothing to do with the subject of Mueller’s investigation, but allowing Trump to be impeached and Cohen to go to jail for a couple of hundred years.

    And if you consider that shortly before that it was proved that the grounds for Mueller’s investigation were fabricated by Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and they were used to get permission from the special court to eavesdrop on Trump’s election campaign, then Mueller’s investigation is finally turning into an attempted coup d’état.

    And there is nothing surprising in the fact that a few days after this police raid on the office of Cohen smart and beautiful missiles flew into Assad Syria.

    But after the publication of the photo-robot, compiled by Stormy Daniel, Trump immediately tweeted that the investigation of Mueller is illegal and the search of the lawyer is a complete lowliness, based on the same fabrication as the very investigation of Mueller.

    And Davin Nunes began to threaten officials of the Justice Department with arrest for contempt of Congress, which is expressed in refusing to provide documents on the basis of which the FBI director Comey refused to initiate criminal proceedings against Hillary Clinton, then again started a preliminary investigation against her two weeks before the election, and then again closed it simultaneously with the beginning of the wire-tapping of the elected president of the United States.

    The media reacted to this tweet of Trump with a joyous giggle that with this tweet Trump had exposed himself as the organizer of threats against Stormy Daniel, since how could he knew what the man who threatened Stormy Daniel looked like if he himself had not hired him. And Trump gave them an awful lot to catch up on this topic, and then retwitted the post of his admirer, in which she compared the photo-robot compiled by Stormy Daniel with a photograph of her first husband, who actually directed her to the path that led her to Donald Trump.

    Well, it’s hard to invent a person’s face from the head after 19 years of filming in porn movies, where other parts of your partners’ body represent his personality. Here she involuntarily described the features of the last person, whom she actually remembered in the face, and the Media and the DOJ said oops!

    And it was this oops! that was the beginning of that avalanche, which we are witnessing now.

  77. Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 11:16 pm #

    Let’s start a Church of the Atom. Priest and Priestesses could represent the various parts, proton, neutron, etc. Fusion would be the greatest and most secret rite of the Church, performed by a Priest and Priestess with only the most devout invited to attend.

    Beantown will be Pope….

  78. Janos Skorenzy May 1, 2018 at 11:20 pm #

    The Indians on the border seeking asylum are a particularly low breed, little smarter than Blacks. There is no way that such as these built the Maya Cities. Maybe they did the stoop and brute labor of carrying rocks and such, but obviously a higher breed or breeds did the directing. Probably Whites and a higher caste of Indians. Only people like the Shepherd would think that these people have any place in America.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 2:03 am #

      Another thought: it might have been the same tribe or tribes, but these are the “white trash” of a once great people. I mean our detritus couldn’t build anything either.

      How might it have happened? Apparently this culture was already in steep decline and the Spanish just finished it off. Since they didn’t bring their own women, the Spanish started vast harems with the native women. Any remnants of the Indian Elite were finished off by this. The offspring were mestizos cut off from their culture, becoming 2nd class Spainards. The Male Indian Elite mated with their inferiors if at all, their descendants being the greatly reduced people we see in this area today.

  79. wm5135 May 2, 2018 at 7:44 am #

    Janos, can anyone be white enough?

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    • stelmosfire May 2, 2018 at 8:17 am #

      wm, How about these guys? They’ll lighten up your day.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 7:45 pm #

      Just be natural and be for your people – like most of the other races just naturally are. It’s not complicated. Whites have lost their instincts, yet seem unwilling to really think. In this grey in between place, they are vulnerable to propaganda aimed at getting them to commit racial suicide. Either think less or think more. Either be natural or be above nature, but don’t be a sick subhuman thing, an un-man or untermensch.

  80. Pucker May 2, 2018 at 8:47 am #

    “Perhaps Man is something that should never have been. Perhaps the world should even be cleansed of all human presence, so that Being and consciousness could return to the innocent brutality of the animal. I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies. What then is to be done?”

    12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
    by Jordan B. Peterson

    • beantownbill. May 2, 2018 at 9:14 am #

      So people are flawed. Big deal. Most every animal is flawed, too. Cats torture captured mice before killing them. Should they be eradicated from the Earth? One has to look deeper inside to learn the purpose of humans in the universe.

      • janet May 2, 2018 at 9:26 am #

        Yes, by looking deeper, beyond dualism, the concept “flawed” disappears.

    • elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 11:35 am #

      ” I believe that the person who claims never to have wished for such a thing has neither consulted his memory nor confronted his darkest fantasies.”

      Puck,
      I for one, have never contemplated nor wished for your scenario. My “darkest fantasies” exist however…they involve Thwack, KesaAnna and a cattle prod….

      • ozone May 2, 2018 at 7:10 pm #

        ef,
        Revealing.
        So I ask (stupidly enough): Lots of friends that entertain the same torture fantasies — or have conducted such fun in reality?

  81. janet May 2, 2018 at 9:22 am #

    “What then is to be done?”” —jordan peterson

    Typical Leninist inquiry.

  82. Warren May 2, 2018 at 10:22 am #

    Because of their hydro power facilities I would like to add Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador to the places that will survive post collapse, Newfoundland in particular because in addition to abundant hydro power from the Churchill River it has a remote location a low population and substantial natural resources

    • janet May 2, 2018 at 11:36 am #

      Quebec province? Or Quebec City?

  83. capt spaulding May 2, 2018 at 11:09 am #

    Try to use the right foot foot on the wrong guy, and you might pull back a stump.

  84. K-Dog May 2, 2018 at 12:00 pm #

    Death is a certainty but deciding you had the misfortune of being born is nothing but a drug commercial for a pill to help you out with that. Ask your doctor.

    Death is certain, birth was certain, deciding how you feel about either is your opinion. Between birth and death someone may deliberately exacerbate you and tell you everything is uncertain and pretty confusing. It is a matter of control, they want it and they want you confused. If it is not that then they just want you as confused as they are.

    Depletion is real. Cheese doodles on store shelves look the same but the oil that made the packages those Trump haired delights are sealed in and the oil that put the crunchy wonders on the store shelves came from other places than it did ten years ago. The first time I saw an oil train was in a documentary on Azerbaijan years ago. Caspian sea oil was moving by train while a pipeline was being built through multiple countries. Now I see these black snake trains every day. Ours are bigger, the cars are new shiny and black and they are miles long with four engines on an end.

    The trains suggest alternate living arrangements. The cheese doodles do not.

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  85. Elrond Hubbard May 2, 2018 at 12:10 pm #

    Georgia governor candidate aims gun at teen in campaign ad. ‘Get over it,’ he tells critics.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/02/georgia-governor-candidate-aims-gun-at-teenager-in-campaign-ad-get-over-it-he-tells-critics/?utm_term=.1deef4509da3

    “[A] new ad in the race for Georgia governor — in which a candidate points a gun at a teenager — did not sit well with some Georgians. After all, it aired just one state away from the Florida high school where 17 people were killed in a mass shooting.”

    Click the link to view it. A father threatening to shoot a young man who wants to date his daughter — don’t get all bent out of shape, liberals, it’s good clean fun! Now let’s try that in a different context:

    Interior. Dorm room. Day. Open on ELLIOT, seated, with a shotgun in his lap; and STACY, also seated. Stacy is trembling visibly.

    ELLIOT: Hi. I’m Elliot, Supreme Gentleman and candidate to be the boyfriend of this little filly right here. Say hello, Stacy.

    STACY (nervously looking at the gun): Yes, sir.

    ELLIOT: I said, say hello, Stacy.

    STACY (to the camera): Hello.

    ELLIOT: Good girl. Now, Stacy asked why I should be her boyfriend. Tell ’em why, Stacy.

    STACY (sobbing): Please, I just —

    Elliot RACKS THE SHOTGUN. It is pointing at her abdomen. Elliot’s finger is on the trigger.

    ELLIOT: Now Stacy, we discussed this. I don’t like having to repeat myself.

    Stacy takes a moment to gather herself. She stares into space, appearing to retreat from reality.

    STACY: I should be your girlfriend because you deserve to have sex with me. When a man expresses desire for me, I should always feel complimented and never threatened. Thank you for teaching me a healthy respect for men’s rights.

    ELLIOT: Good girl, Stacy.

    ALEK enters, carrying car keys. He JINGLES THEM.

    ALEK: Ready to go? The van’s gassed up and running.

    ELLIOT stands up. STACY rushes to follow, as though frightened to do otherwise.

    ELLIOT: Let’s go for a ride, everyone. I can’t wait.

    CUT TO BLACK. TITLE: Remember, this is what you deserve, ladies.

    INSET — JELLO SPOKESMAN: I’m Bill Cosby, and I approve this message.

    FIN.

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 3:55 pm #

      It’s called humor, with a Southern twist. Your little exercise in fantasy writing says more about your demented view of the American South and gun control than it does about sexual abuse or anything else. Try reading something other than the Washington Post.

      • Elrond Hubbard May 2, 2018 at 4:18 pm #

        My post wasn’t about the American South at all, except insofar as ‘the American South’ is associated with a culture of honour, patriarchy and violence. Those two aren’t one and the same, but to deny there’s an association is just dumb.

        What’s more, I understood the humour of the original ad perfectly, thanks. I even got a chuckle out of it. But I also recognize that it’s cultural products that perpetuate cultural norms through time. I decided to highlight this cultural product in particular, for its tacit acceptance of violence as a cultural norm. That’s because I oppose violence and patriarchy on principle. Don’t like that? Don’t have to, but I’ll do it all the same. I’m not here to make friends.

        • Tate May 2, 2018 at 9:06 pm #

          You oppose the ad for the wrong reasons, Elrond Hubbard. Not because it is a tacit acceptance of violence or the Patriarchy, as you claim, although it certainly is a tacit acceptance of violence.

          The fact is, the ad is, for lack of a better word, deplorable. The simple reason for this — which any gun-rights advocate understands — is that it trivializes & makes light of proper gun usage. No one should ever be held at gunpoint unless they are threatening grave bodily injury. Pointing a gun at someone is a serious matter.

          • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 9:47 pm #

            Excellent point Tate. Those of us who own and use firearms look upon that as sacred. It was one of the first things I remember my father teaching me. My late father, as I’ve mentioned here previously, was an infantry officer and a vet of WWII, Korea & Vietnam (he called it the trifecta!) He would not even allow me to point a toy gun at another child. Thanks for reminding me of that sacred principle. -Sticks

          • Elrond Hubbard May 2, 2018 at 10:42 pm #

            You make a very valid point, Tate — and thanks for checking me after I (you know, possibly) overstated things a bit.

  86. elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 12:54 pm #

    Comments regarding Climate Change and Global Warming…a voice in the wilderness.

    https://canadafreepress.com/article/weather-climate-carbon-dioxide-and-global-warming

    Yeah…what he said….

    • GreenAlba May 2, 2018 at 1:56 pm #

      elysianfield

      I genuinely thought better of you. I clicked on your link, expecting to read something by a self-styled ‘maverick’ (yawn…) scientist. And what I got was a story that could have been written by someone off the top of their head for their weekly church magazine. And I mean someone who didn’t study science beyond the age of 10.

      Svante Arrhenius demonstrated the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere towards the end of the 19th century. Not the 20th century, elysianfield, the 19th. And here we still are. This bloke thinks it’s rational to say the weatherman doesn’t mention the ‘CO2’ count and he doesn’t even know that there’s a 40-year lag between the introduction of the CO2 into the atmosphere and the consequent warming effect.

      https://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html

      With this level of embarrassing ignorance, the guy really should just stick to gardening or knitting his own yogurt,

      • Walter B May 2, 2018 at 5:59 pm #

        I have a number of issues with the Climate Change movement people and none of them will ever even address any of them. None of these clowns stress the need for conservation, you know, using less energy, nope nobody – zip, zero, none. Nobody will even consider going with a conservation element in their plan.

        How about the energy consumed by the US military, arguably the biggest user of energy in the World…

        http://www.resilience.org/stories/2007-05-21/us-military-energy-consumption-facts-and-figures/

        When is somebody going to suggest that THEY cut back even a tiny bit? Al of us who served understand that the waste these bad boys live with is HUGE!

        Why will nobody ever address exactly how the rank and file citizen paying double the price for electricity is going to stop the C-Change? Why is there even one single civilian out there that trusts that giving the government more money will somehow magically solve the problem? What exactly was the last problem that they solved with increased taxes?

        And how about the Sun? Am I the only idiot that believes that the rotten damn white hot ball of fire in the sky has gotten really, really intense lately? Why can this not be affecting the weather on our little green and blue ball?

        I know, shut up and pay, I get it all the time on New Jersey. Don’t think, feel. Unfortunately where I come from the only thing that you will feel will NOT be good for your sphincter.

        • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 8:29 pm #

          Old people don’t take the sun as well. That might be what you are feeling. But I agree that the Sun is the driver of climate for the most part. He is the man in the dance and Earth, the woman.

          • Walter B May 2, 2018 at 10:05 pm #

            Gee thanks for pointing that out good buddy, but yup I am old so perhaps that is a part of it. But just as the Japanese are rumored to revere the aged, so too do I think of my 6+ decades in the shit as a badge of honor. I would not go back. It was fun once, but moving on is better than moving back. Seriously though I did find an article claiming that our Sun increased from a Yellow Giant to a White Giant, but I have also found articles that claim it is a Yellow Dwarf. Frankly it is all very confusing, and in the end it leads to one of my favorite assertions that “there is NO truth, there is only spin”. I’ll tell you another thing and that unless it is just my old eyes playing tricks on me, the light spectrum has visibly changed as well. Colors are very different and yellow objects fade color extremely quickly.

          • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 10:28 pm #

            Well I’ve heard of the different colors of the Sun, but that can’t be real. As I understand it, such a thing would take a long time and entail vast changes. A White Giant would probably expand to engulf the Earth. I’ve never heard of a Yellow Giant. A Red Giant is a big but cool, dying sun. Yellow is an average sun – and probably the only one that can sustain life as we know it here on Earth.

            But I haven’t read much pop science in years, but that’s what they used to say at least. Can’t remember if a White Giant can develop from a Yellow or if it is either one or the other.

            The Chinese talk of “old man Kung Fu” and say a trained old man can do certain things better than the young. But obviously that’s only among the very fit.

          • Elrond Hubbard May 3, 2018 at 11:48 am #

            Walter B: I’ve never heard of a white giant or yellow giant star either. Our sun is classified as a type G0 yellow dwarf.

            If you want to see how it compares to other stars out there, here’s some science nerdery for you:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_diagram

            Cheers!

        • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 8:48 am #

          “None of these clowns stress the need for conservation, you know, using less energy, nope nobody – zip, zero, none. Nobody will even consider going with a conservation element in their plan.”

          I don’t understand this, Walter, because I have no knowledge of the detail of how ‘the climate movement’ works in your country. The ‘climate movement’ is, in any case, a number of disparate groups and interests, including the government. Well, it’s not the federal government now in the US, since the advent of the climate-science deniers/fossil fuel lobbyists in power, but thankfully a lot of the States and great cities are still taking their responsibilities to present and future generations seriously to varying extents. Other groups include pressure groups of people who care about the issue and want solutions.

          Of course conservation has to be a big part of the answer. That has to start with fossil fuel conservation, obviously. There are some things that can be done publicly (divesting from fossil fuels, changing sources of electricity production, cutting waste) and others that can only be done by individuals.

          As an American commenter whose posts impressed me at the time used to say ‘the unit of anthropogenic climate change causation is the individual’, either directly (switching on the heating, driving, taking a trip across the world, having children…) or indirectly (benefiting from street lighting, agricultural production or office heating, or even, as you mention, the maintaining of an army).

          In the context of individual causation that obviously means that the unit of climate-change mitigation is the individual as well.

          My response to that is to limit my contribution. Not as much as that commenter did, though. He’d made great efforts (technologically) to make his home carbon neutral, invested in specific types of clothing to make heating his home unnecessary, didn’t drive or fly etc. etc. Let’s call him dark green. I’m mid-green (I’d call someone who just recycles their packaging and bottles very light green!).

          I still heat my home, when ‘necessary’ but not as much I could if I didn’t care at all. I still buy ‘stuff’ but not as much as most people. I don’t have a car and I avoid flying (Tate calls this ‘signalling’, in the way that school children call their more serious classmates ‘swots’ but whatever…it’s a fact, so can be expressed).

          We compost our waste veggie peelings etc. along with toilet rolls, egg boxes, random waste paper that’s not recyclable etc., for the shared garden (my husband put in a double composting unit for our use but also for any of our neighbours who use the garden, including the guy upstairs who has for decades taken it upon himself to keep the grass cut and puts the clippings in there). And we waste practically no food, because wasted food has always upset me.

          I totally agree with you about the army. Well, I believe we have to have armed forces but I agree that their deployment when they shouldn’t be deployed is a huge unnecessary addition to the problem we’re talking about, in addition to all its other horrific consequences.

          But the thing is, too, that I’m not going to make personal excuses that involve what other people do or not do, because I don’t do that in the rest of my life. I don’t say ‘well I might as well shoplift as well, because look at all the other people who do’ or ‘I might as well tell lies or cheat because loads of humans do so I’m half expected to’ or whatever. So I could just buy a car tomorrow and say ‘well it’s not going to make that much difference because it’s a drop in the ocean’.

          But I can’t, for the same reasons that you hold yourself to higher standards than other people in other things – because you have a conscience. And so do I.

          There are other things I could say, but this is a long post, so I might include them in my reply to Tate instead 🙂 . But I agree that it’s difficult to make yourself make an effort when there’s so much hypocrisy and half-heartedness around. I’m still going to make an effort though, because I’m only responsible for me. And the minor efforts I make haven’t earned me any kind of halo anyway, because they’re so very minor. On the scale of human misery, not treating myself to a private motorised vehicle or declining to visit the Galapagos Islands and letting David Attenborough do it on my behalf and on behalf of millions of other people don’t even figure.

          The people who are most at risk from the effects of climate change first (e.g. Bangladeshi farmers who have salt water leaching under their subsistence farms) will never see a car or a holiday no matter how hard they work.

          • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 8:50 am #

            The ‘American commenter’ I mentioned commented somewhere else, not here…

        • stelmosfire May 3, 2018 at 10:30 am #

          Hi Walt, luckily for us the sun is a dwarf star. This is an interesting video from APOD that really puts things in perspective. Well worth a look.
          https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110222.html

    • Tate May 2, 2018 at 2:07 pm #

      Are you kidding me, EF!

      Next, we’ll be seeing stories that that floating debris island in the N. Pacific Ocean is the product of an over-active thyroid gland.

    • Elrond Hubbard May 2, 2018 at 2:17 pm #

      Ever encounter one of those mathematical brain-teasers that claim to ‘prove’ something impossible, like 1=2?

      Example: http://brainden.com/forum/topic/27-why-1-2/

      Even to someone who did okay in high-school math, these can look superficially convincing. But there’s always an error somewhere that demonstrates that the conclusion is flawed — as it should, since there are completely valid reasons why the incorrect conclusion is already known to be untrue.

      So it is with that article. In the brain teaser I linked to above, you can’t simplify the equation by dividing both sides by x-2, since if x=2 then you’re dividing by zero, which is an invalid operation, making the entire argument specious. In the article elysianfield linked to, there’s more than one specious point made:

      “Trying to calculate something called ‘global average temperature’ from this massive variety of ever-changing data covering diverse locations, elevations, times and weather is an exercise in statistical sophistry – either meaningless or misleading.” This is what’s known as an opinion, and an ill-informed one at that. What’s more, anyone who actually works with numbers understands the difference between a global average, which is nothing more than a high-level indicator of general trends, and actual detail-level observations and predictions. If Bill Gates walks into a room, the average wealth of the people in that room is likely to increase dramatically, but that doesn’t really indicate anything except how very rich Bill Gates is. The author of the article pretends that unlike himself, climate scientists somehow don’t understand this, while he does. Bzzt, wrong — they understand it perfectly well, and he’s not actually addressing their actual work.

      “‘Climate’ is just the notional 30 year average of weather, so climate is controlled by the same big three factors that drive weather.” This is a cartoonishly oversimplifying statement about climate science. It’s like saying the English language is just the average way that letters are strung together. It’s so ignorant of details and meaning, it can’t tell the difference between Shakespeare and alphabet soup. This is a deficiency the author has, not one that climate science has.

      “Never does a daily weather forecast mention CO2, and never do weather-watching farmers or sailors note daily measurements of CO2.” Never does a motorist look up the history of how legislatures set speed limits, or which contractors put up the highway signs. And yet, if you break the speed limit, you’ll still get a ticket.

      “There are over one hundred massive computerised climate forecasting models run by bureaucracies that use CO2 as a key driver, with variable inputs and rules, and differing results. No one knows which model may have stumbled onto an accurate climate forecast.” Except these models yield predictions, and some predictions are measurably better than others. The models that yield better predictions survive, while the others get let go. Then climate scientists work on improving the models, and fitting them better to reality. That’s science in action.

      I could go on, but you get the idea. This kind of drivel mixed in with seemingly-reasonable opinionation reveals very little about actual climate science, but quite a bit about the lamentable ignorance and/or denialism of people who write stuff like that. Pay it no further mind.

      • elysianfield May 2, 2018 at 9:17 pm #

        Elrond, Tate, Alba and others…

        I am not, and was not, prepared to argue point by point the entire text of his position…I am sure there is much grist for debate, derision, and possibly denouncement. My acceptance of his general argument that climate may not be macro-influenced by our actions IS something I can accept and argue. The fact that the issue has been politicized and weaponized is an issue that I can argue. The issue that the Globalists accept the premise of human caused change, and seem to have ready made “solutions” that weigh heavily on 1st World lifestyles, as well as our country’s Sovereignty, is something I will argue. The CO2-driven climate change models may have merit…or perhaps not in this politically balkanized climate. I am not a troglodyte, but I am wary.

        However, considering my somewhat flippant acquiescence, and that my temerity in offering the subject up were both errors in judgment, I will be more selective in the future…I accept the chastisement.

        • Tate May 2, 2018 at 9:33 pm #

          Sorry about the misunderstanding, EF, I wasn’t chastising you. I was being sarcastic. I actually agree with you. (And it doesn’t bother me if Alba doesn’t think better of me.)

          • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 11:10 am #

            Tate

            As if I’d imagined you’d care what I think of you. You’ve already pointed out that women with opinions they think they have a right to express are a thing that just shouldn’t be. An offence to the manosphere, which should be allowed to define all conversations and make all decisions, even those that negatively affect said women and future generations. An essential ‘thing out of place’.

            Tough titties. I don’t care what you think of me either. Although I’m an easy-going and friendly person and would happily buy you a drink if I met you and Mrs T, and try to have a pleasant chat about less fraught questions. We don’t achieve anything in life by staying in our echo chambers and imagining each other to be the devil incarnate.

            Since you’ve said you agree with Elysianfield I’ll permit myself a point or two relating to what he has said. For what it’s worth, I have a gut feeling that Elysianfield would actually be more amenable to incontrovertible proof of AGW than yourself. I may be wrong. The way you identify a ‘denier’, as opposed to a sceptic, is that the sceptic is amenable to persuasion if presented with irrefutable evidence, while the denier is defined by the fact that no evidence whatever would ever persuade him (it’s more usually a him) of the truth because his position is not based on evidence but on personal preference.

            Now, on politicisation…I’m not the first to point out that right-wingers have a tendency to use the word ‘political’ or ‘politicise’ as if it only applied to other people and as if the position of defender of the status quo were somehow a less ‘political’ position than opposer of the status quo. It’s just another of those cognitive biases to which we are all vulnerable.

            In the climate context, it tends to go thus: person who likes the status quo, thank you very much, with its high-energy lifestyle and comfortable stories about personal entitlement, considers any criticism of this status quo – and more especially any regulatory coercion to mitigate the status quo – as ‘political’.

            Now, it is indeed ‘political’, in that politics, stripped of the historical and inevitable corruptions in practice of its purpose, is about the public actions of free people to determine how society should be regulated – or not – for the common weal.

            The thing is, though, that it is equally ‘political’ to insist on the maintenance of the status quo as it pertains to climate. Members of ‘Plane Stupid’, the anti-aviation activist group, were severely dealt with by the judiciary system for demonstrating at airports and trying to interfere with perfectly entitled citizens going about their entirely legal business of adding CO2 to the atmosphere in large quantities by discretionary flying, in the interests of a (to them) well-earned rest after a hard few months’ work.

            But their implicit decision to say ‘f**k you, I deserve a holiday on the other side of the world and I don’t care what the consequences are to anyone else’ is also a political decision – especially if they deliberately vote for a party that insists on their right to pollute unhindered and untaxed – because it affects both the polity they inhabit and, because the atmosphere has no borders, polities where they don’t even live and to which they don’t pay any kind of compensation for the effects of their self-indulgence.

            I’m picking on aviation because it’s a clear example, not because it’s the only one or even the worst one overall. Industrial agriculture contributes enormously to our climate woes, but, aside from having a child, the SINGLE most damaging individual thing we can do to contribute to climate change is to fly. And it’s the most discretionary and easiest to avoid. Eating a burger contributes too, but not as much per individual act of burger eating.

            Now I’m not suggesting for a minute that people shouldn’t be allowed to fly where they want on holiday. Coercion doesn’t really work, except where you have widespread and immediate agreement, e.g. that adult men shouldn’t be allowed to sexually exploit 13-year-olds or that everyone should keep their blackout curtains closed because the Germans are about to drop bombs on your cities and it’s not OK to help them.

            But we can’t let the ‘f**k you’ brigade just plough on forever regardless of the damage they’re doing. Where my brother and his wife live, flash flooding has recently become so bad that the people who have the small businesses in the lower part of the town/village can’t get buildings or contents insurance any more to cover those businesses.

            Here are those businesses and those floods:

            https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=flooding+in+hebden+bridge+images&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjh6bzk4enaAhWSXMAKHTmeBuwQsAQILQ&biw=1920&bih=908#imgrc=rnBzPDRThGZseM:

            I don’t think my right to see the Galapagos Islands or Angkor Wat is more important than their right to a living and the right of their small town/big village to have a viable future. You may disagree. Both of our decisions are political in their effects, so it’s completely impossible not to ‘politicise’ the debate.

            The science itself is not essentially political, no matter how much people witter about research grants and how to get them. And the laws of physics don’t care in the slightest how much either of us needs a holiday compared to how much the Bangladeshi subsistence farmer just needs a farm.

          • Tate May 3, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

            Far be it from me, Alba, to deny a woman’s signaling privileges. And didn’t I say once that women should have the right to vote, and isn’t voting an expression of opinion? I just hope your husband is counseling you on your vote is all. For those unfortunate widows & single women, they should take counsel from their fathers or an older gentleman relative, naturally.

            The first thing I would counsel you on, Alba, is your language. As a woman, you should never use the coarse expressions you are using here. Instead of ‘tough you-know-whatties’, you should say ‘tough chesties’. Don’t say you have a ‘gut feeling.’ Express it thusly: “I have an abdominal sensation.” Anyway, I think you take my point. Delicacy, Alba, delicacy.

            Frankly, I don’t know what you’re talking about with all the climate change rigamarole. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good for plants, & by extension, people. Warming the arctic isn’t a bad thing. Wouldn’t an all-weather Northwest passage be better than digging another canal? It would certainly cut down on the carbon emissions of digging the canal, wouldn’t it? You can’t deny that, can you?

            The point I’m trying to make is that you have to look at both sides of the picture. And in the ridiculously short time scale of a human life compared to geological time, it’s conceited in the extreme to believe that our actions can have much effect on global climate, which is constantly changing in any case. This is all part of a propaganda project to indoctrinate our kids. “Here comes Wilma! and she’s packing a real punch this year because of increased AGW. Here’s some tips for how you can help, kids…” Give me a break. What you like to call ‘science’, I call ‘scientism.’

            And, even if our actions do have an effect in aggregate, there’s nothing we are likely to be able to do about it. If you want to know my sincere opinion, I believe very much that John Michael Greer has the closest grasp of reality of what ‘tomorrow’ will bring, even though he suggests but never says that environmental collapse will proceed apace next week. I’m much less certain of that. But only time will tell what the future holds in store.

          • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 2:41 pm #

            “Far be it from me, Alba, to deny a woman’s signaling privileges. And didn’t I say once that women should have the right to vote, and isn’t voting an expression of opinion?”

            What you said, Tate, was that Ann Coulter didn’t know her place, spouting opinions as she was and thinking men should listen to her. And someone else – can’t remember if it was Katie Hopkins or someone else.

            ” I just hope your husband is counseling you on your vote is all. For those unfortunate widows & single women, they should take counsel from their fathers or an older gentleman relative, naturally.”

            Ah, I get it now. An attempt at irony. Well done, Tate, with you being a total American an ‘all, I’m impressed 🙂 .

            I mean it was so good you almost had me, given your previous pronouncements, but then I realised even Americans aren’t that stupid. Unless you’re about 140, which is a possibility, of course, in which case well done.

          • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 2:44 pm #

            “Adding CO2 to the atmosphere is good for plants, & by extension, people. Warming the arctic isn’t a bad thing. Wouldn’t an all-weather Northwest passage be better than digging another canal? ”

            That level of disingenuousness is almost endearingly sweet, Tate. Although it could obviously be another attempt at irony, which I would take as a compliment to us Brits, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery 🙂

          • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 2:46 pm #

            And no offence meant to Americans in general, obviously, but you have to admit, there’s a ‘type’ that you just don’t come across that much in other advanced nations.

          • Tate May 3, 2018 at 3:31 pm #

            ‘Advanced’ nations, haw haw.

        • GreenAlba May 3, 2018 at 9:09 am #

          “My acceptance of his general argument that climate may not be macro-influenced by our actions IS something I can accept and argue. ”

          Elysianfield

          That’s perfectly fine and laudable. But it’s only valuable if you do it scientifically, the way climate scientists do, by isolating all other factors (including the effects of the sun), over time, and figuring out which one(s) is/are causing the unprecedented rate of increase in global temperature now. If you can prove scientifically that it’s not human activity, that will be great and we can all relax, at least in an ‘inshallah’ kind of way. I’ll buy a car tomorrow and book half a dozen holidays on the other side of the world to make up for the ones I’ve gone without on your behalf.

          In the meantime, you’d have to have a very odd idea of how scientists work to think that they haven’t included variations in the sun’s activity in their models. They have, because it’s blindingly obvious that it has an effect. But after all of that, the science still demonstrates that the critical difference NOW is human activity.

          For your own reasons you don’t like that and you will continue not to want to believe it. That’s just the way people are in the context of vested interests, so it’s not unusual. At least you’re sort of honest. Some people accept the conclusions of the science and STILL won’t make any changes to their lifestyles, because they think someone else should do it first. And so it goes…

          • elysianfield May 3, 2018 at 8:49 pm #

            Alba,
            I understand, I accept, I embrace he empirical method. HOWEVER, when contrarian voices are shouted down, threatened, and demeaned in the Media, this raises red flags. I have not studied the issue in depth, save to say I believe proffered causal effects, like CO2, methane, cow flatulence, etc. are one-dimensional…simplistic , easily quantified and provide for simple solutions that are not being sought, save as political weapons used on the many by the few.

            I would welcome open debate on the subject…something now impossible. Why does the “scientific community” fear open debate? Why do they insist upon Stalinist “show-trial” adherence to the party line?

            Alba…please consider…peer review is suspended on this topic.

          • GreenAlba May 4, 2018 at 7:52 am #

            elysianfield

            Peer review is suspended on the theory of gravity as well. Perhaps you’d like to debate that too.

            I accept that your position is not based on bad faith. People have their reasons. For the vast majority it’s vested interests, whether financial (fossil fuel lobby, industrial livestock lobby…) or personal (lifestyle). For some it’s psychological (I’m a maverick, not one of the sheeple…).

            Years ago we met a woman on holiday who smoked like a chimney and had the complexion that comes with that. She held on desperately to the hope that the link between smoking and cancer would one day be proved wrong. People are like that. But you wouldn’t expect many people to give credence, at this stage, to research that expected serious peer review on the link.

            The BBC has in the past been ridiculous in its attempts at ‘balance’, thereby having a serious scientist on one side of a ‘debate’ and a total fruitcake like James Delingpole or Jeremy Corbyn’s loopy brother on the other, talking unscientific nonsense. And this kind of thing is far from harmless because it has wasted time that we don’t have to waste. It’s deliberate, and disinformation has been heavily financed by the usual interests (e.g. Exxon Mobil, famously) and Nigel Lawson with his comical (if only) ‘Global Warming Foundation’.

            About a minute into this clip Dara o’Briain is quite funny on the ‘equality’ of opinions on such matters (he’s a comedian but a qualified physicist).

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMvMb90hem8

            The scientific community doesn’t fear debate. It’s debating within itself about the detail wherein the devil is to be found. But it’s not going to go back to debating gravity, metaphorically speaking, and nor should it. We don’t have time.

            And everyone knows about methane and cow flatulence, including (very obviously) scientists, who are trying to find solutions. Methane from e.g. Siberia and clathrate hydrates are going to be a problem as part of positive feedback loops resulting from CO2-driven AGW, given that methane is almost 30 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, although it doesn’t remain in the atmosphere for as long as CO2.

            There is work to be done and no time to waste on nonsense.

          • GreenAlba May 4, 2018 at 7:54 am #

            Incidentally, the BBC recently had to apologise for letting Nigel Lawson broadcast totally unsupported ‘facts’ on its platform without them being challenged. These people have got away with disinformation for too long. It’s not harmless.

  87. Tate May 2, 2018 at 1:38 pm #

    CoverUp at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

    from a reason.com article by Brian Doherty, 4/10/18

    CDC, in Surveys it Never Bothered Making Public, Provides More Evidence that Plenty of Americans Innocently Defend Themselves with Guns

    “Many people who support gun control are angry that the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are not legally allowed to use money from Congress to do research whose purpose is ‘to advocate or promote gun control.’ (This is not the same as doing no research into gun violence, though it seems to discourage many potential recipients of CDC money.)

    “But in the 1990s, the CDC itself did look into one of the more controversial questions in gun social science: How often do innocent Americans use guns in self-defense, and how does that compare to the harms guns can cause in the hands of violent criminals?

    “Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck conducted the most thorough previously known survey data on the question in the 1990s. His study, which has been harshly disputed in pro-gun-control quarters, indicated that there were more than 2.2 million such defensive uses of guns (DGUs) in America a year.

    “Now Kleck has unearthed some lost CDC survey data on the question. The CDC essentially confirmed Kleck’s results. But Kleck didn’t know about that until now, because the CDC never reported what it found.

    “Kleck’s new paper—‘What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?’—finds that the agency had asked about DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System in 1996, 1997, and 1998.

    “Those polls, Kleck writes,

    are high-quality telephone surveys of enormous probability samples of U.S. adults, asking about a wide range of health-related topics. Those that addressed DGU asked more people about this topic than any other surveys conducted before or since. For example, the 1996 survey asked the DGU question of 5,484 people. The next-largest number questioned about DGU was 4,977 by Kleck and Gertz (1995), and sample sizes were much smaller in all the rest of surveys on the topic (Kleck 2001).

    “Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident.

    “From Kleck’s own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU ‘had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview,’ so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck’s own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)

    “At any rate, Kleck downloaded the datasets for those three years and found that the ‘weighted percent who reported a DGU…was 1.3% in 1996, 0.9% in 1997, 1.0% in 1998, and 1.07% in all three surveys combined.’

    “Kleck figures if you do the adjustment upward he thinks necessary for those who had DGU incidents without personally owning a gun in the home at the time of the survey, and then the adjustment downward he thinks necessary because CDC didn’t do detailed follow-ups to confirm the nature of the incident, you get 1.24 percent, a close match to his own 1.326 percent figure.

    “He concludes that the small difference between his estimate and the CDC’s ‘can be attributed to declining rates of violent crime, which accounts for most DGUs… Kleck further details how much these CDC surveys confirmed his own controversial work:

    “The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.

    “… Kleck notes that ‘CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.’

    “NPR revisited the DGU controversy last week, with a thin piece that backs the National Crime Victimization Survey’s lowball estimate of around 100,000 such uses a year. NPR seemed unaware of those CDC surveys.

    “For a more thorough take, see my 2015 article ‘How to Count the Defensive Use of Guns.’ That piece more thoroughly explains the likely reasons why the available DGU estimates differ so hugely.

    “However interesting attempts to estimate the inherently uncountable social phenomenon of innocent DGUs (while remembering that defensive gun use generally does not mean defensive gun firing, indeed it likely only means that less than a quarter of the time), when it comes to public policy, no individual’s right to armed self-defense should be up for grabs merely because a social scientist isn’t convinced a satisfyingly large enough number of other Americans have defended themselves with a gun…

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 3:40 pm #

      Interesting article, Tate. And of course, not shocking. -Sticks

  88. Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 5:55 pm #

    The Cancer at the heart of British Society is also eating away at the NHS. JS

    For example, where would the National Health Service (NHS) be without doctors and nurses from the Third World? Well, the NHS would be like the rest of Britain: far better off. Non-White doctors and nurses are far more likely to be corrupt and incompetent, particularly if they have acquired their qualifications in such hotbeds of cheating and fraud as India, Pakistan and Nigeria. Britain was the birthplace of modern medicine in the nineteenth century, when highly intelligent and competent Whites like Joseph Lister and Florence Nightingale began to reform a profession that had formerly done more harm than good to its patients. British medicine did not need non-Whites then and does not need them now. The NHS would be better off without them.

    “Guilty until proved guilty”

    But that is a truth that cannot be spoken. Minority worship is as rampant in the NHS as it is in parliament and at the BBC. White doctors may see that their non-White colleagues are incompetent or corrupt, but they must not act on the evidence of their lying eyes. If they do, they will share the fate of a White surgeon called Peter Duffy, who discovered that Whites who face allegations of racism in the NHS are “guilty until proved guilty”:

    Consultant NHS surgeon voted Doctor of the Year ‘was forced to quit his job after three Asian colleagues branded him a racist when he raised concerns about their work’

    A consultant NHS surgeon who was voted ‘Doctor of the Year’ was forced to quit his job after being branded a racist by three Asian colleagues, a tribunal heard. Peter Duffy, 56, alleges he was the subject of racism allegations from two Indian consultants Dr Kavinda Madhra and Dr Ashutosh Jain and Pakistani Dr Saleem Nassem.

    Dr Duffy told a tribunal he reported one doctor for being unable to use an ultrasound machine, missing ‘several’ cancers and playing golf despite being asked to treat a patient with deadly sepsis. He also said he raised concerns over another he believed had bungled operations and been involved in overtime fraud. But the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust consultant urologist claimed at a tribunal yesterday he was subjected to ‘malicious, toxic and utterly false’ allegations from the three men over his ‘whistleblowing’. …

    In a statement given to the Manchester employment tribunal Mr Duffy who is being advised by the whistleblowing charity Public Concern at Work, said he had suffered from heart problems as a result of his treatment and now had ‘chronic’ post traumatic stress disorder. He claimed another senior colleague had stood down after claims of racism were also levelled against him and added: ‘I believe a clear and sustained campaign of victimisation, vilification and disinformation was aimed at me by the clinicians who were responsible for the clinical errors, avoidable deaths and excessive, probably fraudulent work that were the subject of the my repeated protected disclosures. …’

    In his statement Mr Duffy added: ‘It is difficult to overstate the sheer toxicity of these utterly false allegations. I was warned in my first few months in the Trust that I must at all costs avoid an allegation of racism against me. I was told that such allegations, even if entirely unwarranted can destroy careers and that the NHS tended to regard racism allegations as “guilty until proven guilty”. Unfortunately, I was unable to defend myself during this particular meeting, being entirely unaware that I was under attack or that the meeting ever took place until I was unemployed.’ … (Consultant NHS surgeon voted Doctor of the Year ‘was forced to quit his job after three Asian colleagues branded him a racist when he raised concerns about their work’, The Daily Mail, 19th April 2018)

    PC is a Cult of Human Sacrifice where Whites are offered up to the Dark Gods of Diversity – often by other Whites.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 7:46 pm #

      Unz Review, In the Land of Lies by Tobias Langdon

  89. 100th Avatar May 2, 2018 at 5:57 pm #

    It’s so nice that the host hosts the blog sites of so many others.

    What a swell chap.

    ii =: !! := ii (eyes rolling)

    Support this blog on PatreonSupport this blog on Substack
    Support this blog via Patreon or Substack
    • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:39 am #

      Gosh yes, it should be hermetically sealed from all contamination.

  90. FincaInTheMountains May 2, 2018 at 6:07 pm #

    Svante Arrhenius demonstrated the warming effect of CO2 on the atmosphere towards the end of the 19th century == GA

    Unfortunately, this is the main direction of the Western science: scientific research is actively being taken to the Sphere of the Useless.

    Probably, real research is conducted, but in limited quantities, in isolated places and purely for elite use. Such studies are not advertised. The bulk of Western scientific thought is increasingly shifted towards the illusory. Scientific grants are generously allocated only in strictly defined areas. Artificially created and maintained the rapid flow of some gender studies, global anthropogenic warming and other such nonsense.

    These streams, according to the plan of the Western projectors of the Future, should lead the direction of thought of the whole world science. With the help of such mechanisms, entire regions are struck from the sphere of scientific search.

    They simply become invisible, and from the sphere of application of the scientific efforts, they mostly want to remove studies aimed at solving real problems of the mankind.

    Well, for example, huge resources are being spent on research on global warming, but they do not go for serious land reclamation projects or crops selection that are resistant to new conditions, but are scattered onto big and small “scarecrows”.

    And at the same time, the idea is implanted in the minds of citizens and politicians that if the West does not deal with a problem, then it is not worth it!

    To force competitors to spend money on alternative energy and demolition of nuclear power plants is, of course, understandable, but the development of science has nothing to do with it.

  91. Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 6:16 pm #

    WE INTERRUPT THIS BLOG TO MAKE THE FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT:

    CFN SHITIZENS:

    Good News!

    I have it on good authority we won’t have to worry about ‘John Galt’ posting here at CFN anymore. As you may recall, I chastised him earlier this week and asked him to show our host, JHK, a little respect. ‘John Galt’ was relentlessly trying to pick a fight with him, as well as any one of us who happened to be online at the same time he was, wholly independent of which side of an issue we happened to represent.

    Things can get heated here from time to time. That’s to be expected when we feel passionately about something. On occasion, I myself have pushed, and perhaps briefly stepped across, the lines of civil discourse. At the end of the day, I hope we can at least show a modicum of respect toward one another, and in most cases, can remain ‘friends’ in the limited sense of that word when the vast majority of us have never actually met anyone else here in person.

    Often we consider another person’s views “extreme” when they differ greatly from our own. This is not about extremity of views or censorship. JHK has more than proven himself tolerant of allowing the free expression of views he may find personally distasteful, even abhorrent, on his blog. This is not a public utility or a democracy. JHK hosts it and maintains it at substantial cost to himself financially and with his time. Although a few of us contribute money &/or purchase his work, we do it voluntarily. He has absolute authority to operate it any way he sees fit.

    But when someone verbally stalks and harangues another here, and then when rebuked, screams, “He is the meanest MF (expletive censored) in the land!” and even threatens physical violence toward one of us, he hasn’t crossed a line, he has obliterated it.

    So there you have it. It happens rarely, but ‘John Galt’ has been collared and tossed outside. Snakes like him bent on online mayhem have proven themselves adept at morphing and shape-shifting and returning here again. But leopards cannot change their spots, and their behavior–words and style in this case–always betray them. So if he does, he should know he will again be expelled, so stay vigilant.

    In the meantime, take this opportunity to support our host financially via patreon.com, mailing checks to him directly at PO Box 193, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, clicking on the Amazon icons to make your Amazon purchases (at no added cost to you) and by purchasing (new at retail) his outstanding books, art, and other products. Also, let him know from time to time you appreciate him. His exterior is crusty, his demeanor sometimes gruff, but his heart is golden.

    •Sticks-of-TNT

    THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

    WE NOW RESUME THIS REGULARLY SCHEDULED BLOG IN PROGRESS.

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 8:54 pm #

      Sorry to hear that.

      Any last requests?

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 4, 2018 at 12:09 am #

        😉 LOL—My reply was to ‘John Galt’. JHK deleted Galt’s comment and now it appears I’m talking to myself. (Not at all unusual!)

        Lesson Learned—Don’t waste your time responding to ‘John Galt!’

        Eventually, JHK will see his and remove it. Why, you may ask if you’ve arrived late to the party? My broadcast message directly above pretty much provides the story:

        Ruthless verbal abuse of our host for starters. Would you go to someone else’s nice house, with a pleasant social affair underway, trash it, verbally harass other guests, even threaten a few with physical violence, and NOT expect to be asked to leave?

        Then, continually return to the scene, climb in open (actually closed) windows, slide down the chimney, break down back doors, and repeatedly attempt to re-enter despite the OWNER’S efforts to remove and keep you out?

        JHK states this has been going on quite some time. It did NOT begin with my rebuke of him earlier this week.

        So, if you care about this site and appreciate our host’s gracious hospitality, please assist him in his ongoing effort to restore order and provide a forum for respectful discourse, by abiding by his very simple request TO SHUN AND IGNORE the shapeshifting, IP changing, web crawling creature currently going by the screen name ‘John Galt.’ Please do not engage with him in any way. The adolescent craves attention, so just pay him no mind.

        He says his name stands for freedom and liberty, but his behavior is all about mayhem and anarchy. Do it for your country. A grateful CF Nation thanks you for your service!!

        •Sticks-of-TNT

  92. janet May 2, 2018 at 6:18 pm #

    Of course, I expect the collapse to express itself first in banking, finance, and markets — being so deeply faith-based and so subject to simple failures of faith. –JHK

    That collapse you ordered is just around the corner. Enjoy your fiat gold while you can. We are heading toward $800 Gold, probably by July 4, 2018.

    Investors are fleeing to gold, in a desperate attempt to weather the recent market volatility… but gold, long considered a “safe-haven,” is actually poised to collapse.

    Trillions of dollars of wealth will be wiped out in the process. We are in a gold bubble. Happy July 4th in Trump’s America! (if he is still president by July 4th).

    • Tate May 2, 2018 at 7:40 pm #

      Why do you say that? (Not that I have any skin in that game.) It would be helpful if you could back up your assertion with oh, maybe a cogent argument.

      • Tate May 2, 2018 at 7:41 pm #

        Just to clarify, I was referring to the gold claim, not whether Trump will be president on July 4.

        • Walter B May 2, 2018 at 10:10 pm #

          Anyone can argue just about any future on the PM’s as the “value” is only set by some old drunk in a back room somewhere at least as far as the LIBOR and the American markets are concerned. None of it makes sense and the “future” is anybody’s guess. Massing paper shorts can bring the value to zero if dumped in sufficient quantities. The true test will always be what the Chinese and the Indians are paying for the PM’s. Never forget that.

          • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:19 am #

            Good point, Walter.

  93. Ol' Scratch May 2, 2018 at 6:52 pm #

    Thanks for the Kevin Shipp link above. In one of his other videos he takes a walk down memory lane listing one by one the false flag operations the CIA and their deep state cronies have conducted over the years, thus adding yet another data point refuting the many on this board who scoff at conspiracy theorists/theories, which aren’t so much “conspiracies” [Twilight Zone theme plays here], as just plain old garden variety classified ops.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQouKi7xDpM

    • Ol' Scratch May 2, 2018 at 6:52 pm #

      This was to Sticks.

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 12:35 am #

        WOW! I’m watching it now and taking notes.

        There are a lot of people on this forum talking about the Deep State.

        How many of them will take an hour of their time and actually learn something about it?

        Excellent. Thanks for posting this!

        -Sticks

      • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 8:01 am #

        Ol’ Scratch,

        Check out this one. 26 Mar interview of Shipp by The Haggmann Report:

        https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=2652s&v=h3HNRKSx2HM

        As my best buddy in Georgia says, It’s stronger than gator breath!

        He also mentions his Subversion in America video, so I guess that’s next.

        I might be watching Shipp videos on YouTube for the next week.

        If a quarter of this stuff is true, I’ll be very surprised if this guy doesn’t get whacked. If he does, I suspect his YouTubes will disappear down the memory hole.

        •Sticks-of-TNT

  94. Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 8:26 pm #

    Careful, cuz we’re gonna bring back the cruel and unusual. We’ll dress you up like a sheep and make you eat grass. In episode 1, I’m going to demand a lamb gyro. My underlings look around and see a herd of sheep across the way. Are you going to be part of that herd?

    Episode 2 involves wolves, assuming you make it past episode 1.

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    • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 9:01 pm #

      Janos,

      He’s shapeshifting and changing IP addresses.

      Please shun him. He craves attention.

      -Sticks

      • Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 10:22 pm #

        I’m not sure I can. His mythical republic is at war with my mythical republic. His group is real, he’s not the only member. A few others used to post – unless it was all him.

        • Sticks-of-TNT May 2, 2018 at 10:59 pm #

          Try hard. The problem is, his posts will be deleted leaving yours hanging in the air, making you appear to be talking to no one. You don’t want to give your enemies that satisfaction. -Your friend, Sticks

          • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:08 pm #

            That’s fine. Happens all the time. Many have called me a troll as well. What’s so bad about this guy again – apart from his monstrous agenda of race mixing?

            Charles Dexter Ward (Lovecraft) Can not a man be dual now and then for his own purposes?

            Answer: Yes, as long as he has any right to exist at all. (Apparently Charlie didn’t).

  95. Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 8:30 pm #

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/durham-city-ban-police-training-israeli-military-180419135856501.html

    Is this why the police have become so brutal – because they’re trained to treat us like Palestinians?

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 12:57 am #

      Of course they do.

      Now go watch the follow-up video to my Kevin Shipp video posted by Ol’ Scratch just a few posts north of this one and see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

      By the time you get back John Galt’s fentanyl patch will have kicked in and you’ll have some peace.

      -Sticks

      • Tate May 3, 2018 at 2:55 pm #

        Sheepdogs protect the sheep.

  96. ItsOnTheWall May 2, 2018 at 8:41 pm #

    Not the only folks forecasting a huge downshift in US population. Check out the 2025 forecast from Deagel at http://www.deagel.com/country/forecast.aspx

    • Tate May 2, 2018 at 9:22 pm #

      I’ve seen this one somewhere before. Anyway…
      Good for a laugh, right?

      Forecasting a decline from present 326m to 99m???

      Quote:

      “The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th century, the key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was immigration with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit expansion and the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States. This unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern with unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring will surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus becoming foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe – suffering a similar illness – won’t be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union’s population was poorer than the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the following struggle in the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride. Might we say “Twice the pride, double the fall”? Nope. The American standard of living is one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial system. When pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and there are no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least younger people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or 40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union’s one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.

  97. Janos Skorenzy May 2, 2018 at 8:53 pm #

    Black called “21Savage” starts program called Guns Down Paintballs Up – fighting with paintball guns instead of real guns – out in the streets so random people are being shot. And some Blacks respond with real guns. The net effect will probably be more real violence and deaths despite his good intentions. Just as Blacks often start gang battles at Peace Marches in their communities.

  98. beantownbill. May 2, 2018 at 11:12 pm #

    Just FYI, I’m not aware of the existence of white giant type stars. There is, however, a white dwarf type star, which is the endpoint of stellar evolution for some stars. They eventually become cinders after billions of years of cooling down, like logs in a fireplace.

    To confuse matters, a non-giant star can be called a dwarf star even though it isn’t tiny. Our sun, for example, is a yellow dwarf (based on its color, but color is mostly based on temperature), around 864,000 miles in diameter, over 100 Earth diameters. Since both the Earth and sun are spheres, which mathematically speaking are 3 dimensional circles, the volume of the sun is 100x100x100 times the Earth’s volume. In other words, one million Earths could fit inside the sun.

    Did I confuse everyone enough?

    • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:24 am #

      Astronomy was the one Science course I loved. Until the little sorority girls complained that there was too much maff and the instructor had to dumb it down to isolated facts plucked out of the textbook, lol.

  99. Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:28 am #

    Try hard. The problem is, his posts will be deleted leaving yours hanging in the air, making you appear to be talking to no one. You don’t want to give your enemies that satisfaction. -Your friend, Sticks

    *************************************************************
    LOL. You don’t know the half of it. I spent an hour this afternoon searching for the mysterious missing “John.”

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    • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 12:43 am #

      Thanks for confirming for others that the posts of ‘John Galt’ have been and will be deleted.

      Do not waste your time with him CFN. Shun John Galt.

      Sticks-of-TNT

      • capt spaulding May 3, 2018 at 11:43 am #

        The thing you should feel pity about is that these posts are as close as a troll can get to making friends. That’s why they are never seen seated at a table having a beer and enjoying conversations with interesting people, and are instead pictured squatting in their parent’s basement, pecking at the keyboard, and lacking vitamin D.

        • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 8:20 pm #

          You nailed him, Captain!

  100. janet May 3, 2018 at 4:39 am #

    “Just to clarify, I was referring to the gold claim…” –Tate

    Gold Prices per Ounce

    2011 … $1,889.70

    2012 … $1,550.00

    2013 … $1,200.00

    2016 … $1,100.00

    That’s a $700 dollar drop in value if you own an ounce of gold, from 2011 to 2016. It is not hard to foresee the downward trend continuing. Gold was overvalued, a bubble that will burst and bring gold to a more realistic value, like $300.

    • akmofo May 3, 2018 at 6:51 am #

      Thank you, Janet, for publicizing this dire sentiment. I don’t own gold, but my brother does. I think he’ll be glad I informed him gold is soon heading to an all time high.

    • beantownbill. May 3, 2018 at 10:11 am #

      The price of gold, a commodity, is just a number when stated in dollars. Since the dollar is the numerative standard in America, every physical thing that has value is stated in dollars. Therefore, it is more instructive to compare a commodity to another commodity. For example, as I’m sure you know, you can buy an average suit for an ounce of gold. It has been thus for centuries. Fifty Years ago I bought my first custom-made suit from a Hong Kong company for $50. Using your criterion, we could say the value of a suit has decreased by 95%+ over the years, so buying a suit has been a very poor idea.

      Where we have gone wrong is replacing gold for the dollar as a measure of value. Using dollars is very convenient for conducting financial transactions, but is bad for determining value. Those who buy gold, if smart, buy it as a hedge against our currency, which is based on faith in the US banking system and the federal government.

      Buying gold as a hedge against the dollar is smarter than buying gold as an investment. Because of this, a purchaser of gold should want its price to keep going down, so one can buy more gold with one’s dollars. To buy gold at a specific dollar price for the purpose of trading it for a dollar profit is really a gamble, not an investment.

      • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:08 pm #

        They say a Roman senator could buy his toga with one ounce of gold. $300/oz, yeah! Toga party!

    • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:03 pm #

      Under your logic, janet, gold should have reached its true value… wait for it… of $0/oz! decades ago. (Or alternatively $trillions & $trillions of dollars (in my best Carl Sagan imitation) per ounce. LOL. And that goes for any commodity. But we know that can’t be, and we know janet is trolling. Haha, ya got me.

      • Tate May 3, 2018 at 12:05 pm #

        oopsie, didn’t close that second parens.

    • Walter B May 3, 2018 at 1:46 pm #

      Your numbers conveniently neglect the fact that gold was at $300.00 an ounce in 1997. Quoted prices are cyclical to be sure, but they are NOT straight downward forever as you insinuate.

  101. FincaInTheMountains May 3, 2018 at 6:50 am #

    Gold Prices per Ounce == janet

    The English Humor or the Gold Prices per Nation

    On March 30, 1867 in Washington, the signing of an agreement between the Russian Empire and the United States on the sale of Alaska for 7.2 million dollars in gold took place.

    The tsarist government embarked on this unprecedented deal in order to partially pay off the 15 million pounds sterling debt or 72.75 million dollars, which the tsarist government borrowed from the Rothschilds in 1862 at 5% per annum to finance the “emancipation” of the peasants.

    True, the peasant reform developed by the ministers Lansky, Panin and Muravyov liberated the peasants, who were already pledged by the Treasury for non-payment of taxes to the landlords, and did not release them, but renamed them from serfs to debtors to pay for the land they forcibly received along with the “freedom”.

    And for this land, which cost 544 million rubles, the peasants paid 1 billion 570 million rubles by 1906, when these payments were terminated by the First Russian Revolution.

    Sale of Alaska took place almost simultaneously with the first international currency conference in Paris, which established the gold standard and thus created the world monetary system. “Quite by chance” it was this year that the Hudson’s Bay Company transferred its possessions to its own dominion, Canada.

    Five years later, in 1872 (and according to some sources in 1865), gold was found in Alaska in two veins, out of which, by 1905, nearly 1,000 tons of gold had been extracted, which amounted to more than $600 million golden dollars.

    It’s funny that the £15 million that the Tsarist government borrowed from the British Rothschilds was the money Rothschilds loaned against the mortgage on the Herzen estate and which they invested in the mercury deposits necessary to purify the gold found in California in 1848.

    Soviet Stamp Russian America:
    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Soviet_Union_stamp_1991_CPA_6304.jpg

    But you can completely laugh your ass off at the knowledge that the gold of California was found in the territory of the Russian colony of Fort Ross by a Mexican citizen of Swiss origin, John Satter, who bought it on credit from a Russian-American company in 1841 for $30,000 dollars, which he also did not pay.

    Recent “salesman” of Russia by the pound of flesh:
    https://dezinfo.net/images3/image/04.2011/borgbirth/1006.jpg

  102. Pucker May 3, 2018 at 8:42 am #

    We seem to be living in very delusional times?

    “We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition. What but willful blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism? It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health. 69 Their credo? Let a lie be your umbrella. A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined: things are so terrible that only delusion can save you.”

    12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
    by Jordan B. Peterson

  103. wm5135 May 3, 2018 at 9:34 am #

    Sticks are you a reader of William Blum? Considering the information that seems to be accurate and readily available one wonders why anyone still considers my nation, The United States of America, noble. There are citizens within the nation who still adhere to standards of behavior that are noble but the overall failure of duty and responsiblity to govern ourselves has cost us our honor.

    Has Galt truly been banished to the Gulch? I had the misfortune to raise our host’s ire when Galt first appeared, A clarification from a member of CFN and an apology saved me.

    • beantownbill. May 3, 2018 at 10:59 am #

      I agree with what you are saying, but that begs the question of why we have a failure of responsibility and duty. I’ve come to believe the reason is because we have lost our frontier lifestyle. Back in the days when there was an American frontier, those that lived there had to be tough-minded to survive. Communities being built required cooperation, effort and responsibility. Also, the frontier was an outlet for those dissatisfied with their lives in the developed part of the country, and who were able to move.

      Today there’s no frontier. One doesn’t have to put out much of an effort to survive. Everything is provided for us, or at least available. Apparently, people don’t have to have a sense of responsibility to get by. Societal cooperation is no longer a necessity, which leads to a me-first-and-only-me way of living.

      • akmofo May 3, 2018 at 12:35 pm #

        I think there’s more this. Out of control corporate predation has made individual responsibility and duty a waste of time. People know that whatever they struggle for will be appropriated from them by the corporate fascist gov mafia.

        • beantownbill. May 3, 2018 at 3:55 pm #

          Life is complicated, so there’s always several factors that contribute to most situations.

      • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:19 pm #

        So would you agree with changing our society to prevent this in the future? Which would mean not letting technology make us so centralized and overly comfortable? And of course, not making everyone drive for miles to get to “work”. Work would be close to home or at home.

        It would mean a controlled economy – and not letting society by hijacked by the money mad and the engineers and scientists who serve them.

    • Sticks-of-TNT May 3, 2018 at 4:42 pm #

      Hey William,

      I am not familiar with Blum. A quick look at his Wiki reminded me of the late Chalmers Johnson. They even would have been about the same age. A lot of CJ’s articles are here, the titles of which will give you an idea of his philosophy. I liked his book ‘Blowback’ Doesn’t that sound like Blum?

      https://www.lewrockwell.com/?s=Chalmers+Johnson

      By the way, LRC (link) gave Kunstler’s commentary this week (this one we are supposedly commenting on) top billing on Tuesday (there’s a daily scroll back button on lower left of home page below daily articles if you go there)

      It was my conversation with JHK over that occasion, that indirectly led to the current uproar over ‘john galt’ who, depending whether his sub-post presently just below your post remains, should answer your last question. He’s a shapeshifter rapidly changing IP addresses, but will have to get accustomed to a life on the run. Shun him, he craves attention. Thanks! -Sticks (I’ll check out WB some more. Sounds like a good guy.)

  104. wm5135 May 3, 2018 at 9:42 am #

    A postcard to everyone here from way out in left field.

    How in the cosmos can taking personal responsibility and making a rational attempt to understand existence and one’s place in society be deemed subversive?

    I reference of course the Canadian, Peterson.

    The person who invents a viable and affordable panty dewadder will have a fortune beyond measure!

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    • volodya May 3, 2018 at 11:04 am #

      wm old bean you hit the nail on the head. People on the Left portray themselves as society’s – cough – intellectuals.

      To the Lefty, only the Lefty knows what’s what. So Lefties assign themselves the right to dictate. This entitlement accrues only to them because, on top of everything else, they’re “progressive”. That means they stand on an elevated moral plane. They stand for, um, “progress”.

      The Left tells us they won the culture wars. It’s over, they tell us, it’s done, their ideas are the correct ideas.

      Now comes along this Jordan Peterson chap with the temerity to think for himself. Can’t have that. What effrontery.

  105. sprawlcapital May 3, 2018 at 11:06 am #

    In the podcsast Alpert states that the Russians are so backward that they are not able even to build an escalator that works.

    If Russian technology is so deficient, how are they able to build space rockets that are reliable; so much so in fact that the US relies on them to get our people to the International Space Station, and brought back safely home?

  106. Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:13 pm #

    Yes, your Fathers permanently weakened Western Civilization by killing their brothers – on behalf of an Alien people and the alien ideology of Capitalism/Communism. Your Grandfathers began the process with the conflagration known as World War One. America is damned and its soldiers are dogs who kill for they know not who, what or why.

    George Washington and John Adams said to stay out of foreign wars. Did you?

  107. Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 2:15 pm #

    Even the ACLU protected the Nazis against the Jewish and Liberal bigots who would have deprived them of their civil right to march.

    • janet May 3, 2018 at 3:58 pm #

      Send money to the ACLU. They protect everyone’s civil rights.

      • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 5:32 pm #

        Not so much anymore. After the Skokie debacle, a large number of supporters left. They’ve been wary of supporting the Far Right (the Real Centre) ever since.

  108. volodya May 3, 2018 at 2:45 pm #

    There’s entire mountain ranges for the financial vessel of pretense to slam into.

    The tallest peak of course is the Everest of energy unsustainability with charlatan CEO’s and their retinue of cheerleaders pretending their firms’ cockamamie technologies are a workable replacement.

    What qualifies as the K2 is the farcical scheme to move production facilities – along with the attendant consumer buying-power – from western countries to slave-wage third world shit-holes, one of these being China, who being CHINESE, see themselves not as a vassal to American interests but rather as global shot-caller.

    And when this rising Asian hegemon, who by-the-way has its own vision of how to run stuff, sez enough with having to use the greenback and enough with American devised international financial arrangements, watch Wall Street go splat against the Kanchenjunga of Chinese aspirations to global leadership.

    There’s other mountains of course, the veritable Lhotse being the pure idiocy of the world’s leading financial managers who think that recognition of risk is in inverse proportion to their penis size. Do you have a big swinging dick? Well then you don’t know the concept of uncertainty. It’s just not in your vocabulary.

    • ozone May 3, 2018 at 8:29 pm #

      V.,
      Excellent projection with a heapin’ helpin’ of realism to make it more of a brick than a vapor.
      In this same spirit, we also should not forget that the reforms our military is so gallantly bringing about in the lands of blowing sands are all in service of US dollar hegemony. The grift and skim will never come to an end as long as this predominates. Let’s see now, what were those former countries (presently in shambles) that tried bucking the buck?

      One of our most recent co-ink-adinks was a naming of shaming of Pakistan for “religious freeeedom” violations on Jan.4th. Strangely enough, it was reported that Pakistan was sidelining the US dollar in its trade contracts with China on that very same day. The. Same. Day. Let’s get this in the proper box, shall we? Duh Troops are fighting for the bankers freedom to get their un-fair share of money-for-nothing. What’s that about Iran? This week, they switched from the dollar to the euro and BOOM, they’re suddenly *lying* about the nuclear weapons development program they’ve secretly secreted from Israel’s probing truth-tellers of unimpeachable moral standing! Well now, I’m convinced (by some fine reportage and think-tank deep thought) it’s all about aggression and expansionist totalitarian theological insanity, how ’bout youse?

  109. janet May 3, 2018 at 3:57 pm #

    That collapse you ordered..? The collapse of the Trump presidency? Oh, yeah, Giuliani delivered the final blow today… on Fox News! Karma.

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  110. Tate May 3, 2018 at 4:09 pm #

    Eloquent testimony excerpted from jameslafond.com:

    ‘There You Are’
    Bitch Song of the Babe-Twisting Brood

    “I was heading into a branch of my bank…

    “… I noticed a tall, handsome woman, some five years my senior walking up behind me, and jumping at the chance to show some courtesy despite my squalorous state, I opened the door for her and she thanked me with a bitter catch in her throat.

    “As I followed her, expecting to take the door in hand after her, she stepped aside by way of insistence that she hold the door for me and said snidely, “There you go,” as if returning an insult.

    “Then as I stepped through, she, acting like a maternal usher in some soulless version of Hel, said as sternly as her failing flesh could project, “Now you go first…”

    “When I made my way to the counter, greeted by a smiling chocolate drop named Kieshya, I was at least permitted by this smiling, helpful women [sic] to engage in ancient customs of courtesy that I had long ago observed my father conduct at the movie ticket counter, the deli counter and the beer tap at the Orioles games at old Memorial Stadium.

    “Meanwhile, I hear the bitch conducting business as if she owns one of her own and I recalled what a shame it was that Memorial Stadium has been paved over to make room for whores like this to ride stationary bikes at their exclusive community gym and that Orioles baseball is no longer televised. I live in a world calibrated to run according to the tortured will of such whores, where a working class man can no longer take his son to a ball game, a game that is now only visible via a paid TV network.

    “However, as I sit at a Manhattan pub composing this, … I reflect that even the most courteous of sports is now debased and that this is the natural course of Civilization. For Civilization is the home of the unarmed and therefore rude man, free to refine discourtesy to a rare art until finally he worships it from afar, forever shrinking inconsequentially within his dwindling self, hurried by the banshee bitch-song of such as she who made a nicety into an insult as a matter of considered malice.

    “And people wonder why I’m attracted to colored girls who smile and treat me like a man when the women of my own kind sneer and scold as if I’m a dog for the unforgivable crime of being a man?

    “The enemy of humanity is closer than you think.

    • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 5:35 pm #

      A beautiful meditation. Such vile old broads are now dying their hair purple and pink to advertise their hatred of the natural order.

      • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 5:40 pm #

        Women in and of herself does not deserve any such courtesy. Only when she is serving in the natural order can it be offered in good faith. By nature she is a 2nd class citizen (with no right to vote). But if she is doing her best and serving the Order, then a man can show his appreciation and rebalance things a bit – which nature per se does NOT do.

  111. Tate May 3, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

    After 108 years, Boy Scouts will drop “Boy” in name and become gender neutral:

    http://theduran.com/after-108-years-boy-scouts-will-drop-boy-in-name-and-become-gender-neutral/

    This leaves many of our parents with no choice but to sign up their boys for Hitler Youth. Trade in those faggy goy scouts scarves for a knife.

    “Blut und Ehre!”

    • janet May 3, 2018 at 5:11 pm #

      In the 1920s and 1930s German homosexuals were seeking a political party to carry their lifestyle to power. They threw their weight behind the Nazis and were rewarded with leadership of the stormtroopers (SA).

      Over time, Nazi youth organizations and camps became notorious for homosexual molestations. Open homosexuality, pornography, drugs and prostitution turned Berlin into the San Francisco of Europe. [from a 1985 pamphlet called “Criminality, Social Disruption and Homosexuality: Homosexuality is a Crime against Humanity.”] Paul Cameron’s organization, the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality (yes, they were called ISIS), mailed thousands of these pamphlets across the nation.

      Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement
      https://cup.columbia.edu/book/stormtrooper-families/9781939594051

    • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 5:47 pm #

      Yet the Girl Scouts are going to remain unchanged. They even asked to the Boy Scouts not to do this. Thus the Elite show their hand. No one can deny the War against Men now – yet they will continue nonetheless.

      Unchanged? The Girl Scouts fell to the Darkness years ago. Any parent who sends their kid to ether of these is of the Enemy or under their Spell. It’s almost as bad as sending them to public school.

  112. Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 6:04 pm #

    Real half American Indian (mestizo) demands that Liz prove her mestizo bona fides.

    http://freebeacon.com/politics/pocahontas-descendant-elizabeth-warren-wish-shed-take-dna-test/

  113. Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 6:47 pm #

    How cool would it be if Melania divorced Trump and married Stormy?

    • janet May 3, 2018 at 7:33 pm #

      Wait, you oppose male homosexuality, but you think female lesbianism is cool?

      • Janos Skorenzy May 3, 2018 at 9:08 pm #

        Just as you support Nazi Germany because of its supposed homosexuality.

      • elysianfield May 3, 2018 at 9:10 pm #

        Janet…what part of “fantasy” do you not understand?

        • GreenAlba May 4, 2018 at 6:45 am #

          Elysianfield

          I somehow doubt you’d be saying the same about someone admitting to fantasising about children, but no-one ever lost money betting on male hypocrisy. #notallmen 🙂

  114. janet May 3, 2018 at 7:32 pm #

    “Not the only folks forecasting a huge downshift in US population.”

    If the population was reduced to five hundred, to a misanthrope that would be 499 too many.

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    • dolph9 May 3, 2018 at 10:50 pm #

      I would say the U.S. could probably survive intact for a long time with something like 100-200 million people, but immigration controls strictly enforced, and sterilization for select offenders.

      But as it is that’s never the case, everything in America is about growth growth growth, so you’ve already won janet, congrats. We are headed for 350 then 400 million people, recruited from all over the world, crowded into megacities with traffic 24/7, low wages, high housing costs, crime ridden, with poor schools and nonexistent services.

      But oh, I’ve got my cheetos and porn and netflix movies, and jeff bezos and bill gates are quadrillionaires, so everything is awesome.

  115. janet May 3, 2018 at 7:39 pm #

    Stormy won a big victory over Trump today with the help of Giuliani. Just four words from Rudy Giuliani unwound months of White House misdirection about Stormy Daniels. Trump is going to be subpoenaed to testify. His fate will be just like John Edwards/Bill Clinton. Too bad he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Too bad he couldn’t be faithful to Melania.

  116. janet May 3, 2018 at 11:30 pm #

    “I would say the U.S. could probably survive intact for a long time with something like 100-200 million people…” –dolph9

    dolph9, you are a romantic, not a realist. The USA had one hundred million residents in 1915. It also had a monotonous consumer economy with NO “cheetos and porn and netflix movies”. Having 100 million residents was the shits.

    In 1915, Americans walked everywhere (There were just 2 million cars on the sparse roads of 1915, or about one for every 50 people). They lived in three-generation homes that they rarely owned, ate almost as much lard as chicken, and spent Friday nights dancing to player pianos. In short: Everything was worse.

    America in 1915, with only 100 million inhabitants, suffered worse working conditions, in just about every way. Work for men was more widespread, more dangerous, worse paid, and, well, just more annoying. According to the 1920 census, 85 percent of men over 14 were in the labor force, compared with just 69 percent for men over 16 today. It was the dawn of scientific management, with factory workers introduced to a brand new office colleague, the time clock. Manufacturing workers averaged 55 hours at work per week, 10 percent more than self-reported averages today. And the jobs were more dangerous: With a fatality rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers, the workplace was about 30 times more dangerous than it is today.

    Women were much less likely to work, and in 1915, many were finding employment at elementary and high schools. The reason for women’s early entry into education in the U.S., however, is a little depressing. School boards preferred female teachers not only because they were seen as more loving, but also because they would do what male principals told them while accepting less than a man’s wage.

    For those who did make it to old age (something of a feat back then), Social Security didn’t exist, and in bad times, poverty among the old was so bad that contemporaries wrote of growing old as if it were a dystopia—the “haunting fear in the winter of life.” In 1938 a writer with the American Association for Old-Age Security said “our modern system of industrial production has rendered our lives insecure to the point of despair.” The industrializing economy was no country for old men or women. As families moved off farms into cities and suburbs, it became harder for some old people to find work in factories, which ran on limber sinews and sweat. In the 40 years before 1920, the share of men over 65 working on farms dropped 39 percent.

    Owning was a rarity. In 1920, there were about four times as many renters as homeowners, whereas today, the homeownership rate is above 60 percent. Houses were cheaper, but buying was a relative hassle: Although the average value of a home was no more than $75,000 in today’s dollars, mortgages typically required a downpayment of about 50 percent.

    Children were likely to die: Ten percent of infants died in their first year, compared with one in every 168 births in the U.S. today.

    In 1915, thirty percent of the country had a telephone. Less than 20 percent had a stove. Very few people owned a refrigerator, and almost nobody owned a radio.

    doph9, I want more immigrants and amenities. You can go back to a time when we had 100 million residents, but I’m not going to. By 2060 it is projected we will have 416.8 million people, a completely manageable number… and a I hope many more of those are immigrants. Your anti-immigrant lament is just more gloom and doom talk. And you are right that I have already won. I am a realist who sees we are multicultural, multiracial, soon to be majority non-white and I celebrate that fact.

  117. Bro Jobe May 4, 2018 at 1:27 pm #

    Thanks, Jim, for a post not about Trump or Russia. I skip over CFN those days. I cannot wait to hear the podcast.

    You write, “The Roman empire seems to be an exception” but I’m not sure it was. One astounding thing I learned at Hadrian’s Wall a few years ago was that within a few weeks of the last paycheck to the Legions (the ships carrying gold coins from Rome just stopped coming, one fine day) those native soldiers packed their bags, took their arms and armor, and walked home.

    By that time, few Latins remained in the ranks in Brittania. The folk in the Legions had families to think about, however.

    Soon enough that already permeable border was simple a fiction, and the trained soldiers who had nominally been Roman citizens were fortifying their little towns. Few records from the early 5th Century survive, but it was a tragic time for the largely bucolic and peaceful settlements south of The Wall.

    Things go SO bad that the skills for blowing glass vanished for a time, or at least the ability to keep a workshop going without looting.

    The American civilian populace is much better armed, but not very well trained or as sturdy as Roman provincial peasants. Most of us lack any useful manual skills.

    Yes, we’d look more like The Road and less like King Arthur v. Saxons.

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