Adam, Charles, John –
Great discussion! Especially the parts about “what’s next?”. Thank you.
Please return and push further on this. This can help us create a vision of what peak prosperity might actually look like. And this vision can be invaluable in guiding our efforts in our local situations.
I just heard on the radio (Glenn Beck) that for every percent rise of unemployment the national death rate(not counting the death toll from the virus) goes up by 10,000. Is this a standard rule of thumb? If so when do we try to start back to work? Also if this is true it is easier to understand the urgency of the people in the government to start putting everyone back to work.
Lots and lots of words and explanations. At first glance it sounds like they care and are helping but I don’t believe it for a second. Insurance companies are “for profit” and when the dust settles they will still be. Am believing Kuntsler.If a patient won’t have to pay for their care why not a National announcement that says “we as a nation will rise to the occasion and take care if each and every Covid-19 victim”. Instead as Kuntsler believes, just wait, insurance companies will stick it to you and your families yet. Wanting to believe the propaganda. Thoughts?
You don’t get it. By sending the young you minimize hospital overload. I repeat, this virus will not leave the country before 80% are infected.
Broad quarantine and face masks simply do not work. It is a stupid strategy. Take China. The locked a county again. No quarantine works until group immunity is reached.
Furthermore by simply taking vitamine C and in overdrive when infected will be enough to protect the vast majority from damage.
Clawing back the money from the $##!!## overpaid attorneys would be a good start.
Settle my thoughts enough to say, great guests and informative, relevant topics.
Nicely done Adam, thank you!!!
Faith in what is tangible, knowable, definable, predictable, and comprehensible, is completely different from any proclaimed faith in invisible, magical, spirits.
Faith in a good dog, is different from faith in a good god.
One may be rational, but the other never can be.
Try not to flee into insanity seeking to escape the wraith of spooks.
Assuming that society becomes simpler and more local:
Anything around elements needed for physical survival: that will allow you to produce water, food, protection against the elements, safety/ security, energy, improve health (you’re well placed for that no :)).
Anything linked to production, processing, improvement, storage, trade of these elements is probably good. Skills, equipment and materials to be able to repair equipment, infrastructure used for production of these elements. Specific skills that make you valuable in these issues in a larger collaboration.
Not sure how much in demand communication (e.g. through HF radio) would be.
A wood gasifier vehicle could be very interesting if you’re able to keep it running. Any type of renewable energy production will be very useful: photovoltaic, solar heating, biogas, micro hydro if you can keep it running.
Anything that allows you to leverage or make optimal use of force (e.g. hand cart, bike) is probably interesting if you can keep it operational.
A house that ‘works’ without needing (extra and/ or external) energy (e.g. naturally cool or warm, insulation, wood burners).
Think in chains of dependency: are you/ your close social group able to cover all needs concerning land and infrastructure, skills and (wo)manpower, materials (equipment, tools, spare parts), organisation, obtaining external inputs (e.g. energy, funds, consumables), accessing ‘clients’ (e.g. means of transport). General principles of resilience should be integrated as much as possible.
What are the simplest and most reliable ways of achieving these; handtools are more work, but are often cheaper, easier to repair, not dependent on external sources of energy, mobile etc. Things break, are there ways to repair using local materials and skills?
Books would probably also be good; music instrument.
Simpler society probably means less people. This probably means that there will be a glut in some things (clothing, cooking utensils, scrap metal?), so maybe good to not put too much energy in these things except in recycling these into something that could provide value (melting aluminum from motor blocks, though not sure what you could make out of these…)
A simpler society also means that more people will have health issues that cannot be taken care of through modern means. If you have knowledge/ skills that can help here (e.g. medicinal plants) or are able to make materials (e.g. crutches) that might be a useful resource.
“…the glory of the American experiment…”
Pompeo: ‘I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole’
https://youtu.be/qfrhATD4nM0
Fed’s Yellen expects no new financial crisis in ‘our lifetimes’
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-yellen-idUSKBN19I2I5
This pre-pandemic smugness is even more obscene and criminal when viewed through the lens of current events.
The coronavirus pandemic is real and potentially deadly. TPTB continue to exploit this crisis to further their agendas to basically own and control everything, i.e., “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
Today, crude oil hit $10 per barrel and the projections of US Covid deaths is at 200,000+. All is clearly not well in the financial ““markets”” where pandemic spread supersedes petrodollar geopolitical advantage. So its time to pull out all the stops on the Federal Reserve and the Plunge (Plague) Protection Team! Imbue them with special powers and resources to “rescue” the ““markets””–all for the public good and enslavement.
Approximately 1/3 of the US population is on “furlough”/out of work. ’
WH/Federal Reserve rescue helicopter fiat currency is on the way: crumbs to the masses, windfall$ to the 1%. Covid-2019 funding I-IV is a done deal with the vast majority of benefit to corporations and special interests at the expense of/on the backs of the masses.
We are cultivating a sedated, coerced citizenry dependent upon and ceding control to TBTB; debt servitude for current and future generations. :-/ Sheep to slaughter.
Assuming widespread awareness (there’s a leap!), at what point does enough mean ENOUGH! and the citizenry rebel and assert sovereignty over their lives vs. their overlords/“owners”?
What would that look like and how might it play out?
The revolution may not be televised, but it may be blogged and otherwise shared on PP and other social media.
Right now I’m listening to the presentation. I just heard a comment about how increases in Social Security will not keep up with inflation. Well I just discovered that my monthly SS payment has just been cut by almost 25%. The new growth industry will be selling pitch forks.
But it’s pretty easy to grow (despite commercial pot growers claiming the opposite) and, according to Desogames it isn’t addictive (although he could have fooled me, lol). Nicotine is. And it makes its users a little bit more aggressive and much more insistent about getting it than pot users are about their fix. Also, tobacco is neither grown nor processed as easily as pot. My money would be on cigarettes over pot.
Hemp’s pretty handy stuff though. It can be used for everything from making rope and paper (the Declaration of Independence was supposedly written on hemp paper) to making lightweight, strong, dent-proof and rustproof body panels for cars and fuel for diesel engines. In fact, it’s often said to be one of the most useful plants on the planet. But large scale hemp farming is unlikely to occur in a collapse scenario.
They went up, not by alot of course, this year. If your personal check is lower, it must be due to the money that is taken out of it for medical premiums, could you compare your new lower statement to your previous one since you are getting people on this site worried ?
Ision,
I would suggest that you don’t know what you don’t know. For you to suggest that faith is provable or disprovable based on man’s knowledge and observations might be short sighted. From what I have seen as the handiwork of “man” I am not impressed. There is observably a greater consciousness (force…ability) in the universe than man. When I stare at a tree, a bird, a child…I am in awe. When I look at myself and other men (women) (and the other 57 genders) I am disappointed in what I see.
THIS is exactly the discussion we need to be having! I second all the calls for “MORE”!
The one caveat I have is in regards to the “pitchforks,” because to me that implies the potential of skewering individuals, and that makes me a little squeamish because it’s actually the system itself that must change. Certainly the .1% benefit from the current arrangement, but the system itself is not actually those people. There is a shift in mentality/paradigm that is necessary push beyond the conventional understanding of what the possible arrangements of economy are and that comes from us. Someone once said to me that it may not be necessary to deconstruct the old in order for the new to arise. Think of how technology simply springs up and the old way of doing it becomes obsolete. Maybe what is needed, as the old is most obviously falling apart, is for us to shift our focus to birthing the new.
I agree that we need to be willing to think beyond the systems we already know, like capitalism or socialism or communism, and that what is coming is hard to imagine because it does not exist yet. I remember reading a long time ago that all of our known economic structures are funded by the debt-based monetary system and therefore are all vulnerable to the same extreme excesses we are seeing now. So it does seem to come back to a shift in understanding about what measuring stick we want to use going forward (see my previous posts on this thread) .
I get that gold and silver have been the default thing to turn to in a crisis throughout history. AND ALSO understand we are at a turning point in history unlike anything any other generation has faced, which means there is an opening now that there hasn’t ever been before to push for an entirely new kind of economic arrangement. Those that are currently in control (or think they are in control) will resist any effort to change the way it is set up and are well-schooled in distracting and dividing us, so that we cannot unite for real change.
So next question: how do we avoid the trap that so many movements of the people have encountered where a small segment of the population is blamed for the difficulties we are having and everyone aims their upset at that group and the system itself continues unchallenged? How do we remain clearheaded enough not to be divided and distracted so that we can keep our focus on actual systemic change?
Can a 1 dimensional point perceive the expanse of a plane?
Can a 2 dimensional plane perceive the expanse of a sphere?
Can a 3 dimensional sphere yesterday perceive a 3 dimensional sphere tomorrow?
So each dimension is incapable of perceiving the dimension above it.
Theoretical physicists have established the existence of dimensions beyond our 4 dimensions.
Can you entertain the possibility of an entity or entities that inhabit dimensions above our own? A fifth dimension? Or a tenth dimension?
Again, as a theoretical exercise, do you think you would be able to perceive such an entity with your 5 senses?
Do you think you would be able to comprehend these transdimensional realms and entities with your 4 dimensional intellect and senses?
Do you think an entity inhabiting a realm one dimension removed from yours would have greater power than you (if nothing more than your inability to perceive it versus its ability to perceive you)?
Do you believe the universe is completely random or is there an order to it?
If you believe in complete randomness, how does our civilization’s technology work?
If you believe in order, what establishes order since the law of entropy would suggest that we should be moving more steadily towards disorder?
If you believe a mix in the two, where does randomness end and order begin?
If you had absolute knowledge (i.e. omniscience), would you need faith?
Since you don’t have absolute knowledge, what can bridge the gap between your incomplete knowledge and having absolute complete knowledge?
I’ll pause here to await you sharing your thoughts on the above.
Most of these suggestions look great and are doable. My husband and I did a stint as back-to-the-landers in the 70s, and that, along with my roots in my grandmother’s era - frontier nurse in the 1910s in the BC interior, living through the wars, booms and busts until the 60s - meant I never felt really comfortable without an outsized pantry, wartime recipes and a garden.
But looking at the requirements now seems so daunting. As a polio survivor, I’m just so tired all the time, it’s hard to whomp up enthusiasm for acquiring new skills. But we may be ok - already in an isolated area, some savings in various forms, deep pantry as always, a garden, a close knit rural community with a lot of retirees from all walks of life and with a terrific range of skill sets. Also some small farms and lots of gardens, so food trading is already the norm.
At the moment, I justify my part in the community with volunteering web, desktop publishing and communications tasks, but if that infrastructure disappears, things will get interesting.
But mainly, my heart goes out to the city dwellers. We (before February, used to) get a steady flow of them to chill out for awhile at our little B&B cabin, and I don’t know how to think about their lives in the rabbit hutches downtown. I can only hope that necessity will be the mother of invention and they’ll get creative and find new ways to cope. Maybe, like in Detroit, community gardens will spring up on land left derelict. “Block neighbourhoods” will band together to look after each other.
While we lived in Quebec, during the great French/English divide, we noticed that there was lots of fighting and nastiness between the sides most of the time, but during the worst snowstorms, it was all forgotten and everyone helped everyone else. Emergencies do that to people. But “long emergencies”? Like war, they bring out both the best and the worst. But it will be how we all respond to each others’ needs, not just our own, that will make the difference.
Our biggest task, that made our current life possible, was that we made the huge effort to get out of debt, including mortgage. So even though we have a very low income, it is plenty (for now anyway). But does that hold if we are entering a hyper-inflationary environment? Should people bother killing themselves to pay off their mortgages with valuable dollars when those dollars are about to plummet in value? I can’t wrap my mind around that - sounds too much like a game, and just keeping it simple and paying off your debts was… real, somehow.
And will the change be immediate, or will the existing system continue the can-kicking? It’s looked like it would blow up for a very long time now. But initial inertia is HUGE. My husband’s parents moved out of South Africa a year after apartheid was inplemented, because they were sure “everything would blow up.” It took 50 years and a Nelson Mandela for change to actually happen. When people are tired and it takes everything they have to survive, it plays a big part in the equation. The sad part is, that’s 50 years of vicious oppression, and anger building up.
Tremendous opportunities to do something well, but we need to recognize the dispositional roadblocks along the way.
My 2 cents (from a Canadian, where we don’t have cents anymore…)
thought experiment.”for the finite to exist,the infinite must exist as a reference.” Sartre
Just read the Charles Eisenstein essay - it’s beautifully written and so very much to the point. Excerpts:
"For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come..." "Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice..." "That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful."Recommend it highly and thank BlueBear for posting the link (which I'll do again for reference: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/?_page=5
This big quake, predicted at 9.5, is overdue. Yellowstone, not so much, right now. The west coast Cascadia quake will decimate civilization from Canada to California.