The Cosmic Dance of Shiva, supreme Hindu god of destruction and creationLike many in the blogosphere, I have expended considerable mental energy in recent years studying and fretting over the various “doomer” scenarios that threaten humanity in the 21st century. There was a time when I found the apparent facts utterly depressing and was convinced that there was no light at the end of the tunnel for mankind – that the future offered nothing but total collapse and devolution. But some time during the past six months or so, and particularly with my recent turn to the “dark side”, I have…
Category: News Collapse of Society
A Vision of The End
Gaze with me into the mirrors of your Multiversal mind, and see one possible future coming into view…This is not the world your mythmakers promised you — no Disneyland of techno-prosperity and consumer capitalism for all. No, this world is racked by holy wars and ethnic conflicts, Malthusian catastrophes, refugee invasions, eco-anarchy and Millennial insanity. Do you see it? There, in the frontview mirror? Do you see the chaos approaching in the twilight of this, the darkest of all ages?The chaos is descending fastest across the lands of God-drunk Islam. Thirsty Yemen is falling to the soldiers of martyred bin Laden; modernity is in on the run in flood-ravaged Pakistan; hungry Egypt…
60 Facts That Prove The American Middle Class is Being Wiped Out
Michael Snyder, Contributor Activist Post The middle class in the United States is being systematically destroyed, and nobody is doing much of anything to stop it. Our incomes are shrinking, our share of the income pie is at an all-time low, our jobs are being sent overseas, debt burdens have soared to unprecedented heights and millions of formerly middle class Americans have fallen into poverty. America once had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen, but now it is rapidly being shredded. Unfortunately, this is particularly true for younger Americans. Today, families that have a head of household that is under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent. That is astounding. The…
After Victory, Raw Milk Farmer Faces Same Charges in Different County
Heather Callaghan Activist Post Last September, Alvin Schlangen and his many supporters witnessed a victory when three charges were dropped against him in Hennepin county, Minnesota thanks to jury nullification. But now he is facing six charges in Stearns county – his home county – three of which are identical to the ones he was acquitted of just a few months ago in Hennepin. Those included selling raw milk, operating without a food license, and handling adulterated food. If Alvin’s motion is successful, those will be thrown out, but he will face three more misdemeanors including failing to maintain proper temperature for organic eggs, selling meat that should not have been possessed (?), and removing or disposing food embargoed by state…
Health science journalism–don’t just blame the journalists for getting it so wrong
Coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you. Red wine will save your life, red wine will kill you. Low carb diet is the best, low carb diet is dangerous. Most major news outlets feature health science news with information designed to help us choose healthier lives. The problem is, much of it seems contradictory, headlines seem designed to scare us into attention rather than inform us. It’s ironic: the fear expressed by particularly the younger generation about food, pharmaceuticals, lifestyle choices and the like is matched only by their extreme distrust in the media. In other words, it seems the attention-desperate …
Is Instagram TooLateagram?
It seems a bit ironic that an iconic brand with “instant” in its name may be severely impacted in crisis response by offering “too little, too late.” ”Too late” is now the classic story of much crisis response and may well describe the latest attempt of Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom to quell the storm and restore trust. The good news is that he has come forward with the appropriate response regarding the attempt to change Terms of Service language to allow the photo-sharing service to sell users photos. His first attempt was weak at best: in it he said basically, legalese is hard for…
Stephen Resnick, professor of economics at UMass-Amherst, dies at age 74
On January 2nd, we lost a brilliant economist, Stephen Resnick, one of the founding members and a cornerstone of the heterodox Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Steve, a devoted and fabulous teacher, touched the lives of hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students over his career. Steve, along with his colleague Richard Wolff, worked tirelessly for decades to transform Marxian Economics and influenced the researching and teaching of scores of students. He will be sorely missed. Here we reprint an early obituary, written by one of his former students from Umass. -Gerald Epstein Greg Saulmon, writing in The Republican: Jan 3rd, 2013, Stephen A. Resnick, a professor…
The Return of Austerity-The View From Africa
Leonce Ndikumana Following the intense debate on the fiscal deficit during the U.S. presidential campaign, fiscal consolidation continues to dominate discussions in policy circles and academia. The large fiscal deficit in the U.S. and sovereign debt woes in the Eurozone are used by proponents of the “small government” mantra as a means to advance the belief that fiscal consolidation is the only way to bring the economy back to sustained growth and full employment. While the arguments are not new, the current circumstances of a global recession and a slow recovery in the U.S. make it somehow easier for proponents of this school of thought to fool the public into believing …
65 Percent Of Americans Believe That 2013 Will Be A Year Of Economic Difficulty
Do you believe that economic trouble is coming in 2013? If so, you have a lot of company. According to a brand new Gallup poll that was just released, 65 percent of Americans believe that 2013 will be a year of “economic difficulty” while only 33 percent of Americans believe that 2013 will be a year of “economic prosperity”. Gallup has been asking this question for a lot of years, and the percentage of Americans that are anticipating economic difficulty in the year ahead has not been this high since the early 1980s. And without a doubt, there are a whole lot of reasons to be deeply concerned…
The Good, The Bad And The Ugly From The Fiscal Cliff Deal
The fiscal cliff deal contains more bad news than it does good news. Yes, the tax increases on the middle class could have been much worse, and we should be thankful that Congress at least did something for the middle class. Unfortunately, they didn’t do enough. Every American worker is going to pay higher taxes next year as a result of this deal. The fiscal cliff deal represents the biggest tax increase in 20 years, and it is also projected to increase the U.S. national debt by an additional 4 trillion dollars over the next decade. In the final analysis, U.S. government finances are still wildly out of…
Girls need more protection from ‘greedy corporate world’
Rising numbers of girls are suffering mental health problems after coming under “sustained assault” from diet advertisements, alcohol marketing, fashion pressures and access to pornography, a leading psychologist has warned. A “greedy corporate world” increasingly sees girls – particularly those in the pre-teen group – as soft targets to be exploited, it is claimed.Steve Biddulph said girls were being forced to grow up too quickly and warned that parents had failed to protect them from external pressures.In a new book, Raising Girls, he says that a “marked plunge in girls’ mental health” was first seen around five years …
Rachelle Guyton: Calls 911 for Detroit Police to report her Van (and the gun under the seat inside of it) as stolen, told to "Call back…
While Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and Interim Police Chief Chester Logan explore a restructuring of the city’s police department, some residents are expressing frustration with how their calls are being handled.Detroiter Rachelle Guyton said she called 911 around 6:30 a.m. Saturday to report that her 2003 Chrysler Town & Country minivan had been stolen from an apartment building in Palmer Park — but it wasn’t the van she was worried about.“I have a gun under my car seat, and when I called the police department to explain this to them and try to have them help… they didn’t give me any attention. They told me I had to wait until 8 o’clock to call back. What …
Earth is fucked.
After extensive mathematical modeling, scientist declares “Earth is fucked” IO9Brad Werner has a simple question: Is the Earth fucked? He also has a remarkably complicated methodology yielding a very simple answer: yes, unless people start a serious global rebellion….So, to sum up: even our best efforts at environmental management are doomed to fail, unless massive scale resistance movements start springing up and send our cultural personality back toward a pre-technological era. Science has given you your mandate, people: Go blow some shit up.Put more scientifically…Despite weak economy, CO2 emissions to grow 2.6 percent in 2012: study ReutersCarbon dioxide emissions from industry rose an estimated 2.6 percent in a weak global economy this year, a study released on Monday showed, powered by rapid emissions growth in…
Annoying IEA Report
I’m going to try to give y’all some tools to refute that annoying IEA report that just came out — the one that says the US will be the “new Saudi Arabia” and a net exporter of energy. I doubt this community has any new people reading it, and if you’ve been here for a while, you know this report is bullshit, but you need to know why because all these smug, optimistic cornucopians are going to be bringing the article to your attention in hopes of defeating everything you’ve ever told them about energy production.I’m going to skip the IEA report…
Dmitry Orlov: Peak Oil Lessons From The Soviet Union
Dmitri Orlov on peak oil and climate change.
Noam Chomsky — Peak Oil and a Changing Climate
Mostly, he talks about the stuff Chomsky likes to talk about, but still good.
Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil and the Globe’s Limitations
This is about a year old, but it’s still a good summary.Here’s a link to Chomsky from the same series on peak oil and climate change. (About 9 months old.)
Cassandra.
The First Global Revolution: A report by the Council of the Club of Rome (1991) by Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider.No generation has ever liked its prophets, least of all those who point out the consequences of bad judgement and lack of foresight.The Club of Rome can take pride in the fact that it has been unpopular for the last twenty years. I hope it will continue for many years to come to spell out the unpalatable facts and to settle the conscience of the smug and apathetic.Price Philip, Duke of EdinburghMessage to the delegates at the Twentieth Anniversary Conference of the Club of Rome, Paris, 1988.
Meh.
Will Humanity Face a Carbohydrate Shortage? Scientific American, with link to primary source Photosynthesis is the single most important transformation on Earth. Using the energy in sunlight, all plants—from single-celled algae to towering redwoods—knit carbon dioxide and water into food and release oxygen as a byproduct. Every year, humanity uses up roughly 40 percent of the planet’s photosynthesis for our own purposes—from feeding a growing population to biofuels….Running suggests that only roughly 5 billion more metric tons of carbohydrates can be diverted to human uses, meaning a “net primary productivity” boundary of roughly 25.6 billion metric tons. We’re closing in on that fast. “The question is thus not whether humans will reach the…
I’m standing warm against the cold now that the flames have taken hold.
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say Vice.com This all goes to say that as long as climate change continues to advance—it seems that nothing can stop that now—and we maintain a global food system perennially subject to volatile price spikes and exploitation from speculators, without reform, our world will be an increasingly restive one. Hunger is coming, and so are the riots.Catherine Austin Fitts-They’re Going to Depopulate or Bankrupt the Rest of Us USAWatchDog.comCatherine Austin Fitts calls what happened to the U.S since the market meltdown of 2008 a “fiscal coup d’état.” Fitts should know because she is a former Wall…
Communing with the Dead
by Kathy McMahon, Psy.D. (I extend my sympathies to all of those who have lost loved ones, or are suffering as a result of Hurricane Sandy. It is my hope that this post (updated from last year) will be of use.*) Over this next week, too many people who survived Hurricane Sandy will die from preventable causes. The living can learn a lot from the tragic death of disaster victims. What killed them? What were they doing when they died? Their death can become a “teaching tale” that benefits the living. Tales from the Grave Behavioral researcher Wendy Joung studied firefighter errors in judgment, and…
Saying Goodbye to Tomorrow.
Today is the last day on Earth, according to some New Age interpretation of the Mayan calendar. This belief has caused endless suffering and useless expensive purchases by people trying to “beat the clock” and find somewhere safe to spend their last few hours. Cheap places have suddenly become outrageously expensive, because someone said “Hang out there!” during your final hours. This story caused one young woman to take her life. However, saying “Goodbye to Tomorrow” has a long history that goes beyond this moment in time. Humans are famous for planning the end of not only their own anticipated deaths, but because that is just too commonplace, they have to anticipate the death of…
Grappling with the Inexplicable – A Psychologist Looks at Newtown CT
A Reason to Kill It was a quiet afternoon, when the man walked in, holding a gun. He was looking for his wife’s therapist. He was angry, and was convinced that it was this therapist, not his wife’s own decision-making, that had led her to decide to divorce him. By the time he was finished shooting, one therapist was dead, another shot and permanently blinded. The man was a good shot. He was a police officer. I began working with couples in that same clinic several years later. There is a certain edge to a place that has experienced gross, unpredictable violence, even years earlier. That…
Alternate Energy – It may be closer than you think
It is obvious reading all the MSM articles on energy that they still are counting on technology to ride to the rescue of the declining oil age in the form of alternate energy on a white horse. I wish I shared their optimism, but the facts don’t seem to support that rosy outlook. I do believe we are closer to the alternate energy that no one wishes to think about. It is time proven, inexpensive to implement, useful for growing crops, building or repairing houses, transporting you 10-20 miles, but nowhere as efficient as what we use today. Where is this miraculous alternate energy? Why it is in your very house. Get up and go to the bathroom. Take a look in the mirror. You are looking…
In Memory of Chuck Willis
Chuck Willis Teaching about Peak Oil Major contributor to this blog, and my dear friend Chuck Willis, died suddenly on Tuesday, Oct 30, 2012 in Wichita, Kansas. Chuck has contributed 54 blog entries during his years of writing for Peak Oil Blues. He was working on another one right before he died. His son will finish it and forward it to me. Here is my tribute to him. Early Years College In 1960 – 1965, Chuck received his B.S. in both Math and Physics at The University of Texas at Austin. Chuck spent his professional career doing many things. Early Work in Computers He worked on the earliest prototypes of computers. In 2008, he wrote …
Mike Ruppert on the Third Date
Hey Peak Shrink! I read your help-letter from the lesbian couple looking to relocate. My partner and I moved from Sacramento to Nevada County almost two years ago. It was very scary but it was a wonderful choice. We are super happy here. I would love to be put in touch with the writer. You can give her my email address. The letter inspired me to write a blog about our story. Feel free to post it to your website of refer it to other readers if you want. 🙂 Hillary Hodge ********************** My partner had “taken the red pill” …
With Visions of Sugar-Plums Dancing in My Head
I’m feeling pretty darn good about 2013. Economic crash be damned. Just had a barely awake chat with KMO over at the C-Realm Podcast’s special programming called “The Vault.” I was sleepy, as it was the day after Christmas, and DH and I did a crazy stint of driving, after we put our dino-dog-puppies to bed, then shot over to see my sister and extended family. It was a great holiday. The Shopping Gene? My sister, who has an incredible talent for picking out clothes for me, chose a fantastic hat as my gift. For those of you who know hats, it is impossible to pick out a hat for someone. Not for my sister, though. It looks smashing, if I…
Post Peak Career? Forget Law, Consider Geology
In 2007, Byron King was chatting with Mr. Wang, a marine geologist from China, and what he learned knocked his socks off: “There are about 40,000 or 50,000 students studying geology in China today at the university level. Maybe more, but I do not want to give you a number that is too high.” That’s about 25 times the students studying in the US (and about half the US graduates are foreign nationals). For every geologist in the US, we have about 50-100 lawyers, King estimates. What about the population difference? China has 4 times our population, but 50 times the number of geologists. First year salaries: Lawyers: $38,118 – $91,256 Petroleum…
Doomer Book Reviews: Wolf and Iron and Catastrophe
Doomers, especially those of the survivalist, zombie-fearing variety, are sometimes accused of being adolescent gun nuts who have read too many post-apocalyptic science fiction novels and watched too many “Mad Max” movies. All I can say to these accusations is: guilty as charged. For me, such “doomer porn” is one of the few redeeming aspects of our otherwise disposable popular culture. This genre gives us a variety of entertaining and informative previews of what life might be like in the post-progressive world that is bearing down upon us now like a bat out of hell. In an effort to explore some…
Are You a Neo-Barbarian?
Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.Mongol General: That is good! That is good. Lately I’ve become obsessed with visions of a coming Dark Age, and of the kinds of men who will thrive amidst the collapse of the old order. Clearly it won’t be the power-possessors of today, the technocrats, financiers and lawyers who have created this Byzantine system of soul-destroying bureaucracy from the safety of their office cubicles…