Kollapsnik Kitten comes to Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Off the keyboard of RE
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Published on The Doomstead Diner on August 28, 2016
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Newz from Inside the Diner
One of my neighbors recently got a kitten which they are keeping as an "outside cat". He (or she, I haven't checked the gonads) wanders around and shows up on my porch regularly when I go out for a smoke to further destroy my lungs.
This has been going on for the last week, and I chat with the Kollapse Kitten when it jumps my fence and arrives, scoping out the 100 or so square feet of the porch area. KK does not have much to say to me so far but is a good listener while I have a smoke. Hopefully if I keep talking it will learn English and perhaps be able to communicate with me telepathically.
The trick though has been to keep KK from actually getting INSIDE my digs, which are PRIVATE PROPERTY! If I leave the back door open, KK can sneak in, and I don't want to be cleaning up kitten poop or kitten piss in the digs! I have been successful in […] Continue Reading…
Here Comes the SUN
Off the keyboard of RE
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Published on The Doomstead Diner on September 11, 2016
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In about a week from now, I will be flying down to Inman, South Carolina for their Harvest Festival. It's not a huge event, it's a small festival in a small town here in the United States of America. A place and time where local townies get together to celebrate their lives and another year successfully harvesting the bounty of the earth.
Why am I traveling from Palmer, Alaska to Inman, South Carolina? Because in addition to writing my blog, I ended up as CEO of a 501c3 Non-Profit organization, the Sustaining Universal Needs Foundation. Better known as SUN☼, found on the Internet at Sun4Living.com. I had no intention when I began writing about the issues facing our culture back in 2008 that I would end up heading such an organization, it just evolved over time. Much as everyone's life evolves, you don't really PLAN it, it just happens as a result of circumstances and where you happen to be and who you are that determines the directions of your life.
I am […] Continue Reading…
Collapse Cafe 9/4/2016
Off the cameras and microphones of Rivera Sun & RE
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Aired LIVE on Collapse Cafe YouTube on September 4, 2016
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Collapse Cafe TV
Featuring the Collapse Cafe Vidcasts, Live Feeds, Collapse Tutorials, Documentaries & Music Videos
RIP Bruce Charles “Bill” Mollison: 1928-2016
From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Published on The Daily Impact on September 27, 2016
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I never knew Bill Mollison. I have known of him for only a few years. But his vision has touched — in fact, transformed — the core of my being. As long as I live I will honor him for a vision that has vastly improved the way I understand and react to the world, a vision that could have vastly improved the world itself, had we listened to him in time.
Mollison, along with Boll Holmgren and others, was a principal founder of the Permaculture movement, a way of looking at agriculture with emphasis on symbiosis among plants, including trees and other perennials; the soil, with its myriad components and organisms; and the climate with its gifts of rain, wind and sunshine. This contemplative way of farming — permanent agriculture — has since its advent in Australia in 1968 morphed into a way of looking at life itself — permanent culture.
Bill Mollison, father of Permaculture
The most important thing about the way Bill Mollison thought about the world, in my view, was this: […] Continue Reading…
Zombie Apocalypse
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on September 18, 2016
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"The scary thing about multiple expansions is that they are reliably mean-reverting — if they run too far, the market always takes it back, sometimes with a vengeance."
Every time we catch a malodorous whiff of this year’s US Presidential elections, we involuntarily shudder, because regardless of winners or losers, it recalls September 14, 1930, when German voters, abused by post-war sanctions and put upon by financial depression, went to the polls and handed 107 Reichstag seats to the National Socialist Party. It’s useful to notice that the Nazis did not win that — they came in second. It hardly mattered.
Does this history sound familiar?
Hitler began each speech in low, hesitating tones, gradually raising the pitch and volume of his voice then exploding in a climax of frenzied indignation. He combined this with carefully rehearsed hand gestures for maximum effect. He skillfully played on the emotions of the audience bringing the level of excitement higher and higher until the people wound up a wide-eyed, screaming, frenzied mass that surrendered to his […] Continue Reading…
Oil Company Carnage Continues
From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Published on The Daily Impact on September 12, 2016
When an oil well like Deepwater Horizon explodes, the images are unforgettable. When the entire industry starts to collapse, it’s hard to see and to remember.
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When an oil well like Deepwater Horizon explodes, the images are unforgettable. When the entire industry starts to collapse, it’s hard to see and to remember.
In a recent essay I proposed the existence of a new human subspecies – homo sapiens ephemera — that is smart (thus sapiens) but severely afflicted by attention deficit disorder and long-term memory loss. Thus ephemera may understand, for example, the connection between a burning fuse at his feet and an imminent explosion, but almost immediately forgets it, goes on to something else, and is surprised by the blast. Nowhere is this behavior more evident than in the U.S. oil patch, whose collapse, predicted here and elsewhere for years, is now described by none other than Moody’s Investors Service, quoted in Bloomberg News as “catastrophic” and perhaps “the worst bust of […] Continue Reading…
Naomi Klein & the Letdown of the Leap Manifesto: Energy Depletion Dismissal is Just as Bad as Climate Change Denial (part 1/3)
Off the keyboard of Allan Stromfeldt Christensen
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Published on From Filmers to Farmers on September 15th, 2016
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(photo by Adolfo Lujan)
Over the years I've had the pleasure of chatting with Naomi Klein on a few different occasions; there was that first Prairie Festival at the Land Institute in Kansas that we both happened to attend in 2010, that second Prairie Festival which she spoke at in 2011, and the opening night talk she gave at the Toronto Reference Library the day before her latest book (This Changes Everything) was released – not to mention all those other times I've seen her speaking in Toronto (where we both used to live for several years). And although I've only very briefly spoken once to Klein's filmmaker-husband Avi Lewis (at that second Prairie Festival), there was that time in Toronto that Lewis and I stood next to each other for about half an hour and managed to say not a single word to each other. But I'll get to that in part 2.
While Lewis is known for his work hosting various television programs on MuchMusic, CityTV, CBC, and Al Jazeera English, […] Continue Reading…
An asteroid called “Peak Oil”
Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Cassandra's Legacy on September 13, 2016
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– the real cause of the growing social inequality in the US
In a recent article on the Huffington Post, Stan Sorscher reports the graph above and asks the question of what could have happened in the early 1970s that changed everything. Impressive, but what caused this "something" that happened in the early 1970s? According to Sorscher,
X marks the spot. In this case, “X” is our choice of national values. We abandoned traditional American values that built a great and prosperous nation.
Unfortunately, this is a classic case of an explanation that doesn't explain anything. Why did the American people decide to abandon traditional American values just at that specific moment in time?
In reality, the turning point of that time has been known for a long time. The first to notice it were Harry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison with their 1988 book "The Great U-turn: Corporate Restructuring And The Polarizing Of America." They noted that a lot of economic parameters had completely reversed their historical trends in the early 1970s, including the overall inequality measured […] Continue Reading…
World Trade Lost at Sea
From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Published on The Daily Impact on September 12, 2016
Containers crammed with electronics, clothing and other potential Christmas presents are stranded at sea by the bankruptcy of one of the world’s largest shipping lines. There's more to come. (Photo by NASA)
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homo sapiens, well, that’s another question, for another time.)
But the fact is that homo sapiens ephemera simply cannot grasp the fact that a long, slow-burning fuse, however boring it is to watch, almost always leads to a terrible explosion. By that time, ephemera has forgotten the fuse and is always surprised. (“Wow, no one could have seen that coming,” he says.)
So it is with globalized trade, the system set up to allow increasingly impoverished people to borrow money on their credit cards to buy cheap crap — made in China by totally impoverished and sometimes enslaved people — at their local MartMart store. The brilliance of the system is that while the people who make the crap and the people who consume it remain impoverished, the corporations that manufacture, finance, transport, market and insure the crap get filthy rich. (Stay […] Continue Reading…
Retrofuturists and Technocornucopians
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on September 11, 2016
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"Just outside the back door of the brewery, retrofuturists are fashioning leather and cowhorn beer mugs to use after the collapse."
At Burning Man #30 the nuevoriche had to watch their wallets. Also their food, water, camping gear and Teslas. Many lamented that once upon a time the Man had always been a safe place to freak freely, to make an annual connection with others of their kind — and ideas come fast when you have the latest designer drugs for that sort of thing. Burning Man also provided a chance for the nobly born and the peons to bounce ideas around, on equal par, while naked and having an orgy inside a neon art installation.
Burning Man attracts Silicon. Occasionally one can spot Paris Hilton in Steampunk chic, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, AirB&B’s Chip Conley, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman; QVC’s Matt Goldberg, or Facebook’s Stan Chudnovsky.
Bloomburg reported in 2015:
The community ethos is loosely governed by “The 10 Principles of Burning Man,” set down in 2004 by co-founder […] Continue Reading…
Tent Cities Mushroom
Off the keyboard of Michael Snyder
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Published on The Economic Collapse on September 11, 2016
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Tent Cities Full Of Homeless People Are Booming In Cities All Over America As Poverty Spikes
Just like during the last economic crisis, homeless encampments are popping up all over the nation as poverty grows at a very alarming rate. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than half a million people are homeless in America right now, but that figure is increasing by the day. And it isn’t just adults that we are talking about. It has been reported that that the number of homeless children in this country has risen by 60 percent since the last recession, and Poverty USA says that a total of 1.6 million children slept either in a homeless shelter or in some other form of emergency housing at some point last year. Yes, the stock market may have been experiencing a temporary boom for the last couple of years, but for those on the low end of the economic scale things have just continued to deteriorate.
Tonight, countless numbers of homeless people will try […] Continue Reading…
Who are the parasites?
Off the keyboard of Brian Davey
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Published on Credo Economics on August 14, 2016
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The radical implications of classical economics
Henry George and Karl Marx developed alternative radical theories out of the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
The classical economists did not mince their words. As Mason Gaffney puts it:
… classical political economy was a remarkable phenomenon. Its major writers in England were able to portray the dominant class of rent-takers as idlers and superfluous drones. One surmises they got by with this because the idlers were proud of it. In their value-system, labour was not respected; conspicuous leisure was. Saving was regarded contemptuously as stinginess: conspicuous consumption was the mark of a gentleman and aristocrat. (Mason Gaffney, “the Corruption of Economics”. (Gaffney, 1994)
Ricardo and land rent
The Physiocrats, Adam Smith and especially David Ricardo theorised land rents as the ideal source for taxation. Ricardo’s key insight was that economic rent is not a cost of production. No one produced the land, it was a free gift of nature so there was no cost involved in using it for production. Landowners could charge rent for its use because […] Continue Reading…
Peak oil by any other name is still peak oil
Off the keyboard of Diego Mantilla
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Published on Cassandra's Legacy on September 8, 2016
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One of the most compelling charts I have ever seen is the “Growing Gap” chart that used to appear in every ASPO Newsletter. This is the one from the last ASPO Newsletter, written by Colin Campbell and published in April 2009.
Since then, more than seven years have passed, and peak oil has disappeared from the mainstream press headlines–almost. On August 29, Bloomberg published a story alerting to the fact that conventional oil discovery has reached a 70-year low. It published a very interesting chart, using data provided by Wood Mackenzie, the oil consulting firm, to show that fact. Unlike the ASPO chart, Bloomberg's chart only goes back to 1947, the year before Ghawar was discovered.
I thought I would reproduce the “Growing Gap” chart using Wood Mackenzie's data.
Neither Wood Mackenzie nor Bloomberg make public the data behind the chart, but I used a digitization program, WebPlotDigitizer, to extract data from the chart. The results are not perfect, of course, but give a good enough estimate. One must keep in mind that discovery data are […] Continue Reading…
The power (and the limits) of propaganda
Off the keyboard of Ugo Bardi
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Published on Cassandra's Legacy on September 4, 2016
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There is a new and very interesting report on the attitudes of the public on Global Warming. It was published on "Environment" on Aug 26, with the title. "The Political Divide on Climate Change: Partisan Polarization Widens in the U.S. It is written by Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright and Jerrod H. Yarosh.
The report provides updated data from Gallup polls that basically confirms some interpretations that I had proposed in earlier posts. We seem to be completely stuck with this debate. The percentage of Americans who agree with the scientific interpretation of global warming today is basically the same as it was 10 years ago. You can see it from the figure above; all the data of the report are consistent on this point. The two camps advance a little and retreat a little, but the front line moves very little.
The figure at the top is also interesting because it provides a long-term assessment of what propaganda can do. You see the remarkable dip in the public belief on the importance of global […] Continue Reading…
Pyramids of the Power Rangers
Off the keyboard of Albert Bates
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Published on Peak Surfer on September 4, 2016
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"The critical path for waste-to-energy manure-to-biochar systems runs through aquaculture."
@mr_pineapple_eyes
Last month we were invited to a psychedelic soiree and a chance encounter with Daniel Pinchbeck who wrote, among other treatises that delve into occult pyramid power, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and 2012: Biography of a Time Traveler: The Journey of Jose Arguelles. His next book, which he gifted us through some kind of strange warp in the fabric of space and time, is How Soon is Now, out February 21, 2017 (apparently now is too soon).
If you find this post drifting towards the occult, blame it on the mind-warping microbes that we may have picked up from Daniel.
Two weeks beyond, at the USBI Biochar Symposium in Corvallis, Oregon, we listened to many wonderful stories of cascading profits from the many yields of biochar. People were using it to remediate tofu whey greywater, restore mangrove forests, and take some of the smell out of hog farming. While there were papers delivered and panel discussions on waste-to-energy manure-to-biochar systems, (already being practiced in […] Continue Reading…
Let them Eat Twinkies
From the keyboard of Thomas Lewis
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Published on The Daily Impact on August 29, 2016
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A change in food stamp benefits for up to a million people such as this one is affecting WalMart’s profits. Something must be done. (Photo by FaceMePLS/Flickr)
In this, the eighth successful year of our Glorious Recovery from the Great Recession, things are really looking up for the American Lower Class, formerly known as Middle. The unemployment rate as calculated by the U.S. Government (adjusted for inflation, seasonally adjusted, smoothed, combed and curried) is down to a piddling five per cent, which is regarded by the country-club set as better-than-full employment, because, they suspect, thousands of people are working against their will. Moreover, the number of able-bodied adults capable of working, but not working, classified as “not in the labor pool” and therefore not unemployed (and thus not included in the calculation of the unemployment rate) is only up to 95 million people.
Things are looking so good for poor people that between 500,000 and 1,000,000 of them are being dropped from SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp program, this year. Some 20 […] Continue Reading…
Scooter Solutions!
Off the keyboard of RE
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Published on The Doomstead Diner on September 4, 2016
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While I am well aware that there are many Kollapsniks out there who think the situation we are in is irretrievably HOPELESS, I am not one of those depressing nihilists. I continue to look for solutions, which even if not implemented on the grand scale might be implemented on small scale to maintain some semblance of modern living a while longer. At least as long as I expect to live anyhow, maybe another 10 years? After that, the question of how to transition and adapt is no longer my problem, it is the problem of the people still left after I buy my ticket to the Great Beyond. Meanwhile though, while I am still above ground level walking the earth, I can try to Save As Many As I Can.
So in this episode today, I am going to talk about the transportation problem and the reliance on automobiles for everyone to drive around, doing the daily shopping, getting the kids to school and activities, commuting to work, etc.
Automobiles are really […] Continue Reading…
The Whole Game is About Containing Russia-China
From the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
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Originally published in Sputnik on August 29, 2016
The next BRICS summit, in Goa, is less than two months away. Compared to only two years ago, the geopolitical tectonic plates have moved with astonishing speed. Most BRICS nations are mired in deep crisis; Brazil’s endles political/economic/institutional debacle may yield the Kafkaesque impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.
BRICS is in a coma. What's surviving is RC: the Russia/China strategic partnership. Yet even the partnership seems to be in trouble — with Russia still attacked by myriad metastases of Hybrid War. The — Exceptionalist — Hegemon remains powerful, and the opposition is dazed and confused.
Or is it? Slowly but surely — see for instance the possibility of an ATM (Ankara-Tehran-Moscow) coalition in the making — global power continues to insist on shifting East. That goes beyond Russia's pivoting to Asia; Germany's industrialists are just waiting for the right political conjunction, before the end of the decade, to also pivot to Asia, conforming a BMB (Berlin-Moscow-Beijing) coalition.
Germany already rules over Europe. The only way for a global trade power to solidify its reach is to go East. NATO member Germany, with a GDP that outstrips the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is not even allowed to share information with the "Five Eyes" secret cabal.
President Putin, years ago, was keen on a Lisbon-to-Vladivostok emporium. He may […] Continue Reading…
The Ongoing Collapse of Turkey’s Secular Democracy and… the West’s Abetment of an Islamic State in Turkey? (part 3/3)
Off the keyboard of Allan Stromfeldt Christensen
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Published on From Filmers to Farmers on August 29th, 2016
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The enemy of my enemy is my friend? (montage by DonkeyHotey)
Things continue to be heating up in Turkey as you may have heard (Turkey has now entered the Syrian war for the first time), and much of it, I think, is explainable by way of the recent one-day meeting that Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had with Russia's president Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg on August 9th, the first foreign visit Erdoğan had made since the failed Turkish coup on July 15th. The stated purpose of the talks was to return to pre-crisis relations, that being before Turkey had one of Russia's fighter jets shot down in November of 2015. This rapprochement included all the niceties of Russia allowing charter flights and tourists to resume their trips to Turkey, Russia allowing Turkish construction companies access to Russia, and Turkey lifting its firewall against Russia's online news portal Sputnik. But those were by no means cover for the meat of the meeting, of which […] Continue Reading…
In Defense of Nature: Pressing the Societal Reset Button
Off the keyboard of Gypsy Mama
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Published on The Butterchurn on September 2, 2016
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Tonight I have had an overwhelming need to protect Nature. To shorten a lengthy tale, let me get right to it: the state that I live in, South Carolina, recently sprayed a poison from the sky via planes, and killed millions of bees. MILLIONS.
Sometimes I feel as if the human species has become a plague upon the planet. If you stop to think about that for statement for awhile, you won’t need me to list all the reasons why I believe this.
As a species, I believe we need to grow…back into basic mammals of the Earth. I believe that we need to start learning from our past– and PRESS THE BIG RED RESET BUTTON.
Think of how terrifying that would be– a complete and total reset of the way you have learned to live. A way of life that was passed down to you from your parents and their parents. A life where everything comes packaged and easily accessible. A life where you don’t even have to grow your own food anymore– you […] Continue Reading…
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