Collapse

[Chris]

Another one from Dmitry Orlov, this time about Germany, the ongoing migrant crisis and the ensuing political repression there. The actual piece about Germany was written by a German at the height of the migrant crisis. I think it was born out of panic at the time and is perhaps overstating the seriousness of the situation, but I still thought this is worth a read. If even half of this is true, it would certainly indicate that Germany is heading towards a political collapse or major upheaval of sorts.

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2018/1...gain.html#more

The Reichstag is Ready to Burn Again



Exactly three years ago I ran an article sent to me by Alex S. from Germany, reproduced in its entirety below along with several translations. It has turned out to be remarkably prescient; in the intervening three years, events in Germany have unfolded entirely in accordance with his predictions. Germany's political system is coming apart. In response, Merkel and those who stand behind her appear to be reactivating the script followed by the National Socialists after the event of February 23, 1933: a fire at the Reichstag was used as an excuse for a political clampdown on the opposition. Similarly, immediately after the demonstrations in Chemnitz the German press rushed to label the demonstrators as fascists and extremists.

Perish the thought that they might be representative of quite a huge number of Germans who have now fully realized where Merkel, with her decision to let in a million and a half Moslem migrants, is taking their country: to Hell. Their opinion is not a secret: most recently, AfD (Alternative for Germany) garnered 17-18% at the polls, becoming the second most popular political force in the country. It achieved this electoral success while doing nothing and in spite of having little media access and of being opposed by an implacably hostile press. In its panic, the ruling coalition, which has held a monopoly on power for 14 years, but now runs a risk of being dethroned by the upstart AfD (which was only formed in 2013, as a euroskeptic party and a brainchild of economics professors) has sounded the alarm: there is a conspiracy afoot to overthrow Germany's democracy! A handful of “conspirators” has been arrested and charged with pogroms against Syrian refugees, using Theresa May's “highly likely” standard of non-proof, and officials who dared challenge this story have been sacked. They can’t even extradite the radical imams of North Rhine-Westphalia, with their boxes of AK-47s, but here they found an entire revolutionary conspiracy in a teacup!

It is really quite remarkable how abysmal the quality of the leadership has become in all of the leading Western nations. Be it Theresa May, with her non-Brexit Brexit, her robotic dance moves and her “highly likely” Novichok ruse, be it Macron’s pitiful photo ops with bird-flipping gangsters, and let’s not even mention the unmentionable Mr. Trump... Add to the list Frau Merkel, determined to serve out her fourth term even if this involves setting the country on fire, even if she has to be carried out feet first. In the case of the United States, this is part of a long-term trend: there was a two-term philanderer who then tried to push his wife into office Eva Peron-style; there was then a two-term near-imbecile chip off the old block; there was then a two-term impostor who cleverly used his skin color to blend in with the upholstery. All of this made the pathetic dénouement that is Trump almost inevitable. But Germany has had a reputation as a well-run place, low on drama, high on efficacy and achievement. Well, not any more!

What is happening now in Germany is quite disgusting, but you ain’t seen nothing yet! The wave of political repression, as the political monopoly attempts to delay the inevitable, will run its course and do its damage. But then, if we are to see an outright AfD victory, the most disgusting part of the drama will unfold, as those recently dethroned scamper over to lick the AfD leadership’s boots and beg to serve them, pretending to have had a sudden conversion on the road to Damascus and to be glad to finally be on the right side of history.

Three years ago, when Alex sent me this article, my reaction was “Dammit, you are right!” and so I translated it into a bunch of languages and disseminated it as widely as I could, to warn people that this time is coming. And now I am running this article again, to warn people that this time has come.



An Exit Strategy for Traitors
[Ein Fluchtplan für Verräter]
[Une strategie de sortie pour les traîtres]
[Предательская стратегия ухода]
[Una strategia di uscita per Traditori]


[Germany—the country at the center of the European Union and its economic powerhouse—is something of a black hole. 70 years after the fall of Nazism, it is still an occupied country, under military and political domination of the US. The national press, popularly referred to as Lügenpresse (the lying press) faithfully echoes the party line set in Washington. Germany's spineless politicians, popularly renamed from Volksvertreter (people's representatives) to Volksverräter (traitors to the people) are no better. And so we are unable to see what is actually happening there, as the European Union is, in the words of Russia's FM Sergei Lavrov, “committing suicide” by letting in the invading hordes from the Middle East. And so this short report by Alex, who tells us what he sees, is most welcome.]

Do you remember the last time you saw a man with wild eyes, strange clothes and a giant sign around his neck saying “The End Is Nigh”? “How ridiculous and pathetic!” you might have thought. Now, imagine the reality of your country changing within weeks to a point where you come to the same conclusion as him, suddenly feeling that his approach might be ever so reasonable. When a large part of your fellow-humans catch a strange sort of illness, one which leads to complete insanity faster than in the worst zombie outbreak, you might find yourself out of more viable strategies.

This exactly is happening to me, as well as most people I know, right now, right here in our export-champion, model-democracy Germany. Sane people are finding themselves isolated and helpless amid insane politicians, an antagonistic press, paralyzed communities and a large inert populace unable to even fathom what’s happening. I am of course talking about the so-called “refugee crisis,” but because even this name is working against us, I will call it what it really is—a war against Europe by means of invasion. It is now vitally important to call things by their right name, because this distinguishes friend from foe.

But it is even more important is to understand why this is a war rather than a crisis caused by refugees. Everything about this development bears the hallmarks of a military/intelligence operation.

First of all, look at the timing and the scale. It really took off around September, and within less then two month it is already threatening the stability of Europe as a whole, to a point where even the European “Leaders” are talking about the end of the European Union. Credible numbers are not available, but the German government estimates the number of “refugees” that have already arrived somewhere between one and two million, so the real number is probably much larger. Almost all the camps are crammed with far more people than is claimed. Some towns are being forced to cope with more “refugees” than they have citizens, some double as many. The estimates for next year amount to something between two and five million more “refugees.”

Ask yourself, why would millions of men (the overwhelming majority are young men) suddenly and collectively decide to leave their families behind, leave their country, travel thousands of miles and head for either Germany, Austria or Sweden, ignoring all the other safe countries on the way? Who told them that this would be worth it? Where did they all get the money to pay for it? Why was there absolutely no effort at any border to stop them? Why did this not start earlier? After all, the middle east has been a war zone for years—ever since the USA exploited 9/11 to start “spreading democracy.” How could this happen within days, weeks at most. Did the first hundred thousand send a message to the rest that it was OK for them to come too? If so, how?

Secondly, look at the character of the average “refugee.” Why are they all well-fed, well-clothed, self-confident young men showing no signs of stress or hardship? Why are they leaving their families behind? Do they know their wives and children can follow them later? If so, how? Why do these men not want to stay behind and try to rescue their countries? Why do they all own high-quality mobile phones charged with seemingly endless minutes? It is clear that the “refugees” have been briefed on exactly what kinds of social benefits they can demand, and how to go about doing it, and so they are audacious and become violent if met with resistance. They even demand expensive medical treatments, which are granted and taken for granted. Why? There are no background checks for any of these people—naturally, because there is no time to do ten thousand-plus background checks every day. For all we know, these people could be criminals, mercenaries and terrorists. An unknown number have serious diseases, such as hepatitis, TB and even the plague. No one keeps track of that, no one registered them, no one limits their freedom of movement. Those who register do so mostly with forged Syrian passports, which Turkey hands out like candy, even to black Africans who look nothing like the Syrians. Tens of thousands of “refugees” have “disappeared” from their camps, some even stopped the special trains midway to their destinations by pulling the emergency brake and ran off into the wilderness. Where to and why—no one knows. No one asks questions, but what is clear is that we have completely lost control over European territory.

Thirdly, there is the little matter of collaboration and treason. Even if this is a genuine refugee crisis, why is that none of the policies of the German/European government make any sense? And why is the press acting continuously and uniformly in favor of their policies, and is downright hostile toward the European populace? If millions of people have to flee immediate peril, there are a lot of different ways to care for them without endangering the integrity of Europe and ruining several national budgets. But instead of discussing what to do, how to do it and how to pay for it, the plan seemed to be predetermined, decided and fixed long ago.

The political “solution” is to soak every city and town in Germany, Austria and Sweden with people of unknown origin and intention. Flanked by a press hailing the process, underestimating their numbers and suppressing reports of crimes committed by the “refugees,” damning and demonizing every form of opposition. Every branch of government, all authorities and parties, in concert with the press, stand should to shoulder in pushing this agenda against the overwhelming indignation of their citizens and closing their eyes to the fact that this is against the law. Censorship, propaganda, hate speech, defamation and open rejection of basic democratic rights against any opposition, are simply exploding right now. A prime example of this is Germany's vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who called an undefined but large part of the German populace who dare to oppose this insanity “Pack” (vermin).

Everyone who takes a stand in Germany now, opposing any refugee-related policy by the government, is subjected to insults is labelled as a right-wing extremist, a hateful criminal and a danger to society. Some get singled out and persecuted in public using extensive defamation campaigns. The author Akif Pirinçci became the latest victim after giving a speech at the PEGIDA demo, the accusation against him based on a shameless misrepresentation of the facts.

Even the most peaceful protest is immediately threatened with a ban (but most are still granted permission anyway). Every speech or publication mentioning treason or comparable accusations is instantly subject to investigations under the charge of demagoguery or threat of violence. Current examples can be found daily in the major mainstream outlets such as Der Spiegel, Die Welt, Bild and the like. If this situation came about by chance, such a spontaneous consensus would have been extremely unlikely. But from day one this has been an obvious propaganda/defamation campaign against the truth and against the interests of the European populace.

The German press even earned itself a new name that sticks: “Lügenpresse” (the lying press) is a word that can be heard on every corner. In private, the politicians are being called traitors all the time.

The national railroad company is ordered to offer special trains free of charge for the “refugees,” bringing them into every corner of Germany the fastest way possible while delaying regular trains.
Vacant houses and apartments are confiscated by force and given over to the “refugees” free of charge. Every “refugee” given rental housing is paid for by the communities, as much as 500 Euros per person per month. This is a big opportunity for some scumbags to make money really fast, by making, ill and elderly Germans homeless.

The police and the press have been ordered to suppress reports of any crimes the “refugees” commit, and so you will not find any in the press, nor even in police reports. But if you ask around, you will hear plenty of stories about rampant assaults and rapes in every city and many towns in Germany. Some “refugee” camps burned down, but most were burned down by their inhabitants, mostly in protest or because of minor disagreements. Police sirens are heard in every city every hour now.

When the “refugees” started shoplifting, then raiding supermarkets, the government told the retailers to keep quiet about this, and has been paying for everything that was damaged or stolen ever since. The only exceptions are alcohol and cigarettes—all other retail goods are free, no questions asked.

The small business sector has declared the “refugees” unemployable, due to zero qualifications, unwillingness to work and lack of language skills. However, the experts in the press somehow see a “big opportunity” to grow the economy. There is no critical discussion and no plan for the future. The only advice Chancellor Merkel gave to Germany was “Wir schaffen das” (We will do it), not elaborating exactly what we will do, nor how. But anyone brave enough to think for themselves can easily guess.

To keep it short, any political common sense and human instinct would prohibit such reckless, potentially irreversible, not to mention illegal behavior. Its end result is clearly visible: it is either the ruin of Europe—mainly the countries targeted by the “refugees,” which are Germany, Austria and Sweden—or war. Since I don’t believe that either coincidences or stupidity of this magnitude is possible, this is either treason or high treason. At least two charges have been filed against the current government, one for organized immigration crimes, and just recently for high treason. About 400 people became party to this action afterward. They are unlikely to succeed, because the judiciary is complicit. But if it isn’t obviously high treason now, it will become so within weeks—called out by everyone, because there is no end in sight.

The rest of organized society is equally treasonous. The press has openly declared itself an enemy of democracy and the general public, and at best a collaborators. The church, even while immediately threatened by violent Islam, prays for more immigrants, damning people who dare to utter doubts. The intelligentsia is either silent or applauds our altruism. The treason is complete. Police and the military are completely overwhelmed. The military was reduced in size long ago to the point of utter ineffectiveness and has been stressed out by international missions. The police is simply not equipped to handle millions of potential enemies fanned out all over Europe, awaiting the order to attack.

For foreign observers, this may sound far fetched and exaggerated. But consider this: in some areas of Germany, when you call the police now, no one will answer the phone. When they do, they are unable to do anything. A friend of mine called the police hotline (not the regular local emergency number) and was advised to form some sort of militia to solve the problem. A town of 600 has a dozen policemen at most, but often around a thousand “refugees” to handle. No one will come to their help if these “refugees” decide to take what they seem to believe is theirs already—because someone told them so, I guess. We are adrift in a sea of enemies, and the front-line in this war will run along the welcome mats at our front doors.

I find myself in a nightmare unable to wake up. Most people feel helpless and unwilling to accept the sad truth: we have been betrayed by everyone (except perhaps the police and the military) we entrusted with our safety and our hopes for the future. Even though the end of the global economy in its current form seemed a given to me, this kind of treason and ill intent to bring it all down took me by surprise. Among the twenty or so people I talked to about this in confidence, absolutely everyone is convinced that this is heading toward civil war—and fast! The only question remaining is whether the Germans start it, or the “refugees,” or some other party. We are one mayor terror attack away from sheer chaos. I have heard from several people connected to European security circles that the illegal weapons market is completely sold out, with many dealers holding on to their weapons for their own personal use. This is a rumour, but since we have been forced to depend on hearsay for any real information right now, I tend to believe it.

There is a small protest movement making headlines in Germany and even internationally. The PEGIDA movement has been gathering every Monday in Dresden to protest European immigration policy for a whole year now. They have had plenty of support since bad immigration policy has given rise to this manufactured “Völkerwanderung” (mass migration). On the October 19—the one-year anniversary gathering—around 35-40 thousand people came to protest peacefully, only to be attacked by several thousand violent “protesters” from the Antifa movement. An allegedly anti-fascist group, so violent and fascist in their behavior they would make for excellent recruiting material for the actual fascists of the SA or the NSDAP. One of the PEGIDA followers was beaten and severely wounded with a metal pole even before the gathering started. Several hundred policemen had to fight for their lives for hours. The Antifa, which is known to many as the second executive of the government, is nothing but an effective mobile force to quell resistance, exactly like the SA, only without the nice uniforms. Wherever demonstrations are announced, the Antifa members will travel there to express their opinion with “hard-hitting” arguments.

Unsurprisingly, PEGIDA is a prime target for hatred and defamation right now. As small as it is, the establishment seems to consider it as real danger, since their complete press gag order against it during the last year did not choke it off. But as important as they might be locally, the outcome seems to be irreversible. The invasion has succeeded already. With each passing day the numbers turn more and more against us. By now the best outcome is a civil war within months, reversing this development. The worst outcome is complete disintegration of European nations within the next few years, rendering large parts of the continent ungovernable. The divorce between the government and the people is almost complete by now. No sane person believes the press or the politicians. The ones who do retreat into fantasies of hate and self hatred. Never before was it more visible to me that this society is completely broken, with every key element, acting against both individual and collective interests, seemingly following orders while digging their own graves.

Once again, unquestioning obedience has taken over German society, but this time without the consent by the masses, because this time the final solution concerns them. The chaos that will follow will by no means be an accident: it is engineered and ordered.

Once again, yet another generation will have to answer to their grandchildren: How could you let this happen?

Alex S.

[Aragorn]

Thank you for your sanity here. Was like oxygen. I addressed this issue in my stream last night by calling BS on the CO2 alarmism by those who would benefit from the taxes while the same ones are behind the global disrespect for Nature and the oxygen providing large forests of the Earth. If CO2 was truly an environmental issue, cutting down forests would be illegal.

Exactly. So why isn't it?

Science is not a strength with too many people and that is routinely exploited by those who live to do just that.

The problem is that scientists who go in against the (main)stream quickly find themselves without a grant. And somebody's got to pay the bill, you know?

---

[...] One thing I've noticed since my childhood is that the sun used to be yellow, now it's white. That would indicate it is heating up, but that is a subjective observation of course.

You are not the first person to observe this. Many others have reported observing the same difference in the sun's hue between their childhood days and present time. And I would agree, but at the same time, I do also have to put a few things into perspective. The color of the sun as we see it here on Earth is in part determined by the atmosphere, and with it, the time of day. In the evening, the sun will appear more yellow, orange or red than at noon or in the morning.

Now, the scientific consensus is that our sun is currently smack in the middle of its lifetime as a star. But the thing is that a dying sun would be leaning toward orange and red, while new stars tend to lean toward a more bluish hue. So I'm guessing that our local star wasn't quite at the middle of its lifetime yet, and is now about to reach that stage, thereby becoming hotter and whiter in hue.

The curious thing however is that we're seeing this change in hue within our own lifetime, while the sun's life expectancy would normally be somewhere in the vicinity of ten billion years.

What is not in dispute in my opinion, is that the Earth is warming up, especially in arctic areas. The data on that is indisputable.

No, the data on that are actually quite disputable. Only a few days ago, I saw a YouTube video about the problem with climate change predictions, but for the life of me, I can't find it again. It's not in my browsing history — which means that I may have been watching it in an anonymous browser window, which doesn't store any cookies or browsing history — and several searches for the terms on YouTube don't yield the same video anymore.

The video was very informative in that it addressed the facts that...

• Climate change predictions have all failed to come true as the scientists said they would.

• Earth was actually cooling down between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. I can personally attest to that, because I stood outside waiting for the bus to work at -25 °C in the winter of 1984-1985. And in the winter of 2011-2012, we actually had daytime temperatures here of -18 °C, while in the years before that, daytime winter temperatures here would sit between -5 °C and 5 °C, and then most of the time, it would never freeze for more than three days in a row without temperatures climbing back above 0 °C during the day. Any snow that had fallen during the night would normally be melting away again during the day.

• While there is a correlation between the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and the climate change phenomenon, correlation does not imply causality, and for most part, the rise in carbon dioxide levels follows the warming trend, not the other way around.

• The data regarding temperature curves and carbon dioxide levels has already been falsified on several occasions in order to get the matter politically supported and accepted.

• There are climatological changes happening all throughout the solar system. For instance, Jupiter's giant red spot — a mega storm that has already been observed since the middle ages — is shrinking and has almost completely disappeared, while a smaller but similar storm on Jupiter is now becoming clearer and clearer.

If the Gulf stream was slowing down, the North of Europe would be much colder already, but instead it is much warmer than usual. In Hungary, the climate has turned decidedly subtropical, instead of the usual continental pattern (more like Georgia than Iowa). Winter has essentially disappeared and the warm season is at least two months longer than it used to be. The warming trend is far more noticeable, the further north you go.

Exactly. The data doesn't add up, the predictions have failed, and they've been falsifying the data on more than one occasion.

If the Sun is indeed cooling down, that would make greenhouse gases the main culprit in global warming, just like most scientists have always maintained. That means we are in even bigger trouble than commonly thought as it means we already have runaway global warming despite a solar cooling effect helping out.

But that's not the case here. That's merely the alarmist narrative. The truth of what's happening to our climate is far more convoluted.

---

Thanks for the point about CO2, Aragorn. The methane being released will dwarf the CO2.

It already is. Methane is released by, among other things, the decomposition of plastics. And the oceans are already saturated with methane. They won't be able to take much more.

[Chris]

An oldie, but goodie from James Howard Kunstler about what ails the American Republic. In my own experience, much of this analysis applies to the rest of the industrialised world as well, the UK in particular, which is a mirror image of "Middle America", similarly distressed and in the process of tearing itself apart politically over Brexit. As Michael Moore famously said, the middle of England IS Middle America and the Brexit and Trump votes paralleled each other to a significant degree. In terms of political and generational distress, Germany, France, Japan, etc... are not that far behind.


https://www.theamericanconservative....kafkas-castle/

Beyond Cynicism: America Fumbles Towards Kafka’s Castle
On America's 'long emergency' of recession, globalization, and identity politics.


Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic. — Tom McGuane

Can a people recover from an excursion into unreality? The USA’s sojourn into an alternative universe of the mind accelerated sharply after Wall Street nearly detonated the global financial system in 2008. That debacle was only one manifestation of an array of accumulating threats to the postmodern order, which include the burdens of empire, onerous debt, population overshoot, fracturing globalism, worries about energy, disruptive technologies, ecological havoc, and the specter of climate change.

A sense of gathering crisis, which I call the long emergency, persists. It is systemic and existential. It calls into question our ability to carry on “normal” life much farther into this century, and all the anxiety that attends it is hard for the public to process. It manifested itself first in finance because that was the most abstract and fragile of all the major activities we depend on for daily life, and therefore the one most easily tampered with and shoved into criticality by a cadre of irresponsible opportunists on Wall Street. Indeed, a lot of households were permanently wrecked after the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008, despite official trumpet blasts heralding “recovery” and the dishonestly engineered pump-up of capital markets since then.

With the election of 2016, symptoms of the long emergency seeped into the political system. Disinformation rules. There is no coherent consensus about what is happening and no coherent proposals to do anything about it. The two parties are mired in paralysis and dysfunction and the public’s trust in them is at epic lows. Donald Trump is viewed as a sort of pirate president, a freebooting freak elected by accident, “a disrupter” of the status quo at best and at worst a dangerous incompetent playing with nuclear fire. A state of war exists between the White House, the permanent D.C. bureaucracy, and the traditional news media. Authentic leadership is otherwise AWOL. Institutions falter. The FBI and the CIA behave like enemies of the people.

Bad ideas flourish in this nutrient medium of unresolved crisis. Lately, they actually dominate the scene on every side. A species of wishful thinking that resembles a primitive cargo cult grips the technocratic class, awaiting magical rescue remedies that promise to extend the regime of Happy Motoring, consumerism, and suburbia that makes up the armature of “normal” life in the USA. They chatter about electric driverless car fleets, home delivery drone services, and as-yet-undeveloped modes of energy production to replace problematic fossil fuels, while ignoring the self-evident resource and capital constraints now upon us and even the laws of physics—especially entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Their main mental block is their belief in infinite industrial growth on a finite planet, an idea so powerfully foolish that it obviates their standing as technocrats.

The non-technocratic cohort of the thinking class squanders its waking hours on a quixotic campaign to destroy the remnant of an American common culture and, by extension, a reviled Western civilization they blame for the failure in our time to establish a utopia on earth. By the logic of the day, “inclusion” and “diversity” are achieved by forbidding the transmission of ideas, shutting down debate, and creating new racially segregated college dorms. Sexuality is declared to not be biologically determined, yet so-called cis-gendered persons (whose gender identity corresponds with their sex as detected at birth) are vilified by dint of not being “other-gendered”—thereby thwarting the pursuit of happiness of persons self-identified as other-gendered. Casuistry anyone?

The universities beget a class of what Nassim Taleb prankishly called “intellectuals-yet-idiots,” hierophants trafficking in fads and falsehoods, conveyed in esoteric jargon larded with psychobabble in support of a therapeutic crypto-gnostic crusade bent on transforming human nature to fit the wished-for utopian template of a world where anything goes. In fact, they have only produced a new intellectual despotism worthy of Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot.

In case you haven’t been paying attention to the hijinks on campus—the attacks on reason, fairness, and common decency, the kangaroo courts, diversity tribunals, assaults on public speech and speakers themselves—here is the key take-away: it’s not about ideas or ideologies anymore; it’s purely about the pleasures of coercion, of pushing other people around. Coercion is fun and exciting! In fact, it’s intoxicating, and rewarded with brownie points and career advancement. It’s rather perverse that this passion for tyranny is suddenly so popular on the liberal left.

Until fairly recently, the Democratic Party did not roll that way. It was right-wing Republicans who tried to ban books, censor pop music, and stifle free expression. If anything, Democrats strenuously defended the First Amendment, including the principle that unpopular and discomforting ideas had to be tolerated in order to protect all speech. Back in in 1977 the ACLU defended the right of neo-Nazis to march for their cause (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43).

The new and false idea that something labeled “hate speech”—labeled by whom?—is equivalent to violence floated out of the graduate schools on a toxic cloud of intellectual hysteria concocted in the laboratory of so-called “post-structuralist” philosophy, where sundry body parts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze were sewn onto a brain comprised of one-third each Thomas Hobbes, Saul Alinsky, and Tupac Shakur to create a perfect Frankenstein monster of thought. It all boiled down to the proposition that the will to power negated all other human drives and values, in particular the search for truth. Under this scheme, all human relations were reduced to a dramatis personae of the oppressed and their oppressors, the former generally “people of color” and women, all subjugated by whites, mostly males. Tactical moves in politics among these self-described “oppressed” and “marginalized” are based on the credo that the ends justify the means (the Alinsky model).

This is the recipe for what we call identity politics, the main thrust of which these days, the quest for “social justice,” is to present a suit against white male privilege and, shall we say, the horse it rode in on: western civ. A peculiar feature of the social justice agenda is the wish to erect strict boundaries around racial identities while erasing behavioral boundaries, sexual boundaries, and ethical boundaries. Since so much of this thought-monster is actually promulgated by white college professors and administrators, and white political activists, against people like themselves, the motives in this concerted campaign might appear puzzling to the casual observer.

I would account for it as the psychological displacement among this political cohort of their shame, disappointment, and despair over the outcome of the civil rights campaign that started in the 1960s and formed the core of progressive ideology. It did not bring about the hoped-for utopia. The racial divide in America is starker now than ever, even after two terms of a black president. Today, there is more grievance and resentment, and less hope for a better future, than when Martin Luther King made the case for progress on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. The recent flash points of racial conflict—Ferguson, the Dallas police ambush, the Charleston church massacre, et cetera—don’t have to be rehearsed in detail here to make the point that there is a great deal of ill feeling throughout the land, and quite a bit of acting out on both sides.

The black underclass is larger, more dysfunctional, and more alienated than it was in the 1960s. My theory, for what it’s worth, is that the civil rights legislation of 1964 and ’65, which removed legal barriers to full participation in national life, induced considerable anxiety among black citizens over the new disposition of things, for one reason or another. And that is exactly why a black separatism movement arose as an alternative at the time, led initially by such charismatic figures as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. Some of that was arguably a product of the same youthful energy that drove the rest of the Sixties counterculture: adolescent rebellion. But the residue of the “Black Power” movement is still present in the widespread ambivalence about making covenant with a common culture, and it has only been exacerbated by a now long-running “multiculturalism and diversity” crusade that effectively nullifies the concept of a national common culture.

What follows from these dynamics is the deflection of all ideas that don’t feed a narrative of power relations between oppressors and victims, with the self-identified victims ever more eager to exercise their power to coerce, punish, and humiliate their self-identified oppressors, the “privileged,” who condescend to be abused to a shockingly masochistic degree. Nobody stands up to this organized ceremonial nonsense. The punishments are too severe, including the loss of livelihood, status, and reputation, especially in the university. Once branded a “racist,” you’re done. And venturing to join the oft-called-for “honest conversation about race” is certain to invite that fate.

Globalization has acted, meanwhile, as a great leveler. It destroyed what was left of the working class—the lower-middle class—which included a great many white Americans who used to be able to support a family with simple labor. Hung out to dry economically, this class of whites fell into many of the same behaviors as the poor blacks before them: absent fathers, out-of-wedlock births, drug abuse. Then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 wiped up the floor with the middle-middle class above them, foreclosing on their homes and futures, and in their desperation many of these people became Trump voters—though I doubt that Trump himself truly understood how this all worked exactly. However, he did see that the white middle class had come to identify as yet another victim group, allowing him to pose as their champion.

The evolving matrix of rackets that prompted the 2008 debacle has only grown more elaborate and craven as the old economy of stuff dies and is replaced by a financialized economy of swindles and frauds. Almost nothing in America’s financial life is on the level anymore, from the mendacious “guidance” statements of the Federal Reserve, to the official economic statistics of the federal agencies, to the manipulation of all markets, to the shenanigans on the fiscal side, to the pervasive accounting fraud that underlies it all. Ironically, the systematic chiseling of the foundering middle class is most visible in the rackets that medicine and education have become—two activities that were formerly dedicated to doing no harm and seeking the truth!

Life in this milieu of immersive dishonesty drives citizens beyond cynicism to an even more desperate state of mind. The suffering public ends up having no idea what is really going on, what is actually happening. The toolkit of the Enlightenment—reason, empiricism—doesn’t work very well in this socioeconomic hall of mirrors, so all that baggage is discarded for the idea that reality is just a social construct, just whatever story you feel like telling about it. On the right, Karl Rove expressed this point of view some years ago when he bragged, of the Bush II White House, that “we make our own reality.” The left says nearly the same thing in the post-structuralist malarkey of academia: “you make your own reality.” In the end, both sides are left with a lot of bad feelings and the belief that only raw power has meaning.

Erasing psychological boundaries is a dangerous thing. When the rackets finally come to grief—as they must because their operations don’t add up—and the reckoning with true price discovery commences at the macro scale, the American people will find themselves in even more distress than they’ve endured so far. This will be the moment when either nobody has any money, or there is plenty of worthless money for everyone. Either way, the functional bankruptcy of the nation will be complete, and nothing will work anymore, including getting enough to eat. That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will beg someone to step up and push them around to get their world working again. And even that may not avail.


James Howard Kunstler’s many books include The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation, and the World Made by Hand novel series. He blogs on Mondays and Fridays at Kunstler.com.

[Dreamtimer]

Just a couple of points here: I have a son who graduated from college in the North West and the students were nothing like what's being stereotyped about US Universities.

They were smart, caring, professionally oriented, non-reactionary, I could go on. It's easy to cherry pick examples and then portray them as the way, but in reality, just like the climate, things are much more complex.

I find most young adults I come across to be sane, thoughtful, hard working, and quite far from the programmed types being talked about.


The author says 'both sides' when there are many. Even as he himself is writing about many sides.

I'm very weary of the 'both sides' trope being used as an excuse for misdirection and misunderstanding.


Yesterday evening I found myself in Baltimore listening to live music in a venue of mostly black people. My husband and I went to see a particular musician and this ended up being the case. There was a wide age group and some great artistry. I might have just seen a rising star, a young woman with a voice that would blow you out of the room.

At no point, even when someone was rapping, was there any anger or hatred or despair. There was strong community, great talent, creativity and intelligence. No divisions. No sides. The fact that we were white was of no consequence.

I doubt Mr. Kunzler has had these types of first-hand experiences, or hears anything about them.


He miswrote at the end. What he meant to say was this:

That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will begin to step up and get their world working again. As they are.


He really needs to get out of the ivory tower and down with the people.

[Chris]

Just a couple of points here: I have a son who graduated from college in the North West and the students were nothing like what's being stereotyped about US Universities.

They were smart, caring, professionally oriented, non-reactionary, I could go on. It's easy to cherry pick examples and then portray them as the way, but in reality, just like the climate, things are much more complex.

I find most young adults I come across to be sane, thoughtful, hard working, and quite far from the programmed types being talked about.


The author says 'both sides' when there are many. Even as he himself is writing about many sides.

I'm very weary of the 'both sides' trope being used as an excuse for misdirection and misunderstanding.


Yesterday evening I found myself in Baltimore listening to live music in a venue of mostly black people. My husband and I went to see a particular musician and this ended up being the case. There was a wide age group and some great artistry. I might have just seen a rising star, a young woman with a voice that would blow you out of the room.

At no point, even when someone was rapping, was there any anger or hatred or despair. There was strong community, great talent, creativity and intelligence. No divisions. No sides. The fact that we were white was of no consequence.

I doubt Mr. Kunzler has had these types of first-hand experiences, or hears anything about them.


He miswrote at the end. What he meant to say was this:

That is exactly the moment when Americans on all sides will begin to step up and get their world working again. As they are.


He really needs to get out of the ivory tower and down with the people.

Well, doomers will be doomers, I suppose. If you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I'm not necessarily endorsing collapsitarian viewpoints, I just think we should be aware of them, if for nothing else, mental preparation. However, I do find that Industrial Civilisation is in trouble and it will come to an end one way or the other. There are numerous convulsions that accompany the winding down of Industrial Civilisation and the utter uselessness of Universities and the activities that go on in them these days would be near the top of my list.

I don't know what American University students and young people are like, I haven't met that many in person. The young university students I have met in Europe were mostly utterly clueless and beyond saving or hope. Just completely brainwashed automatons, even morons. The ones in Asia were far smarter and ten times more hard-working, but there is a certain amount of groupthink and utilitarianism in Asian cultures that can get tiresome after a while.

[Emil El Zapato]

We'll see how that plays out. This was the consensus scientific view around the time Day After Tomorrow came out. As far as I know, there are no signs of this scenario coming true currently. I take a more long-term view and the fact is we are barely out of the last ice age, with current Co2 levels I really doubt we'll fall back into another one. During most of earth's history, the planet was a lot hotter than today and there was basically a uniform tropical climate over much of the planet's surface. I think we're returning to those days, which means much higher sea levels and major earth changes, but also a much longer growing season in those parts of the planet that will benefit from global warming, chiefly Russia.

At the moment, Siberia is populated by an alcoholic 80-year old and his two pet bears, yet it is bigger than the United States and Mexico put together. Completely new cities will be built and this region will probably house most of the planet's population in the future. For one, it has half-a dozen Mississippi-sized rivers that are currently completely unitilised and just flow uselessly into the Arctic sea. A single Siberian lake, Lake Baikal, houses most of the Earth's fresh water supplies. There is similar potential in Canada, Alaska and Greenland. I think we will see major changes ahead for how the Earth's population is distributed.

I think science 'might' be willing to acknowledge that warming to oven temperatures as on Venus or cooling to a snowball are both within the realm of possibility. And it would be determined in a fashion similar to the 'butterfly effect'. From an economic perspective the paradigm of continuous growth seems akin to a pyramid scam to me. Some economists would argue that innovation is the key to continued growth but there is limited space for all that proposed expansion, something would have to give.

I see one solution which has always been my 'vision' for humanity without even considering the additional pressure of perpetual growth. Colonization of the Universe. I see that occurring as a by-product of the nature of man and things. The Earth is approaching late middle-age prematurely thanks to its best tenants proclivities, over-peponess (my inadequate attribution to Aiainawa).

It's the only way out, whether we philosophically agree or not.

[Aragorn]

From an economic perspective the paradigm of continuous growth seems akin to a pyramid scam to me. Some economists would argue that innovation is the key to continued growth but there is limited space for all that proposed expansion, something would have to give.

You hit the nail on the head, right there. It is a pyramid scam, because the resources are finite and thus one cannot have an economic growth in one place without causing an economic recession in another place, and it is those sitting at the top of the pyramid who dictate where the growth will occur, and where the recession will be. The game has never been about how much money or wealth one can amass. The game is about who has it and who doesn't.

It's all about power. And that is why I hate capitalism — whether regulated or not.

[palooka's revenge]

You hit the nail on the head, right there. It is a pyramid scam, because the resources are finite and thus one cannot have an economic growth in one place without causing an economic recession in another place, and it is those sitting at the top of the pyramid who dictate where the growth will occur, and where the recession will be. The game has never been about how much money or wealth one can amass. The game is about who has it and who doesn't.

It's all about power. And that is why I hate capitalism — whether regulated or not.

bingo. and to be more precise, power over. there is another form of power i find far more comforting. that is, i could kick your ass! but i choose not to. instead, i choose to not play your game...

[Chris]

You hit the nail on the head, right there. It is a pyramid scam, because the resources are finite and thus one cannot have an economic growth in one place without causing an economic recession in another place, and it is those sitting at the top of the pyramid who dictate where the growth will occur, and where the recession will be. The game has never been about how much money or wealth one can amass. The game is about who has it and who doesn't.

It's all about power. And that is why I hate capitalism — whether regulated or not.

That is not how economics works. The Global Economy really is a fragile ecosystem of sorts, on a global scale. As soon as there is dislocation in one part, everyone else is affected. The Great Recession and now Brexit is proving this comprehensively. In order to have global growth, you need most of the world to have some growth, otherwise the system collapses like a house of cards. We have global, just-in-time delivery supply chains, a single wrench thrown into this delicate machine collapses the whole thing. So it is actually far worse than what you say, because there cannot really be a recession in one place and growth in the rest of the world, except for small isolated cases, such as Venezuela or North Korea, that are not really part of the Global Economy.

That is why Brexit is such a huge threat to the global economy. I work as an import manager and I'm acutely aware how even a small delay in just-in-time deliveries can create and entire chain of events, that create a negative feedback loop. Even a small disruption in global trade would be catastrophic to the developed world as we only have a few hours' worth of stuff warehoused or stocked away at any one time. The tiniest disruption leads to shortages in a few hours or days at most. You can see this during hurricanes or other natural disasters, when hoarding empties shelves and gas pumps almost instantly.


Dmitry Orlov writes about this extensively, but one of the unintended benefits of the huge inefficiencies in the Soviet economy were that is was ironically made a lot more resilient and collapse-proof as a result. People managed to survive its collapse more or less intact, because there was just so much stuff lying around with nobody to claim it, and due to the inadequacies of collectivised agriculture, most people were already growing a good amount of their own food. If our fragile global economy collapses today, people in major cities start going hungry by the end of the week and there will be civil unrest by monday, probably mass cannibalism by Christmas.

[Chris]

JHK on cultural collapse manifesting in the deliberate fudging of gender roles and boundaries. Note that he used to be a columnist for the NYT, so he probably knows that increasingly Maoist culture in these publications better than most.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/9733/

Lost in Space

Speaking as a black woman… wait second! Can I do that? Well, why not. We’re now a nation consumed by make-believe, in which you can declare anything you want about yourself and insist that everyone else agree that it is so. If I identify this way, you must believe me! (Or else I will come after you with my cos-play mob and destroy you.)

The avatars out on the cutting edge of culture want to dissolve all the boundaries between all categories of everything — except us and them: their allies and their enemies. Everything else is slated to become — by force, if necessary — a big, turbid, zero-gravity soup of intersectional relativity. The reasons for this sanctioned insanity are not exactly what you think they are.

Case in point: The Sunday New York Times Magazine profile of one Jill Soloway, Hollywood producer / director and now memoirist of the book She Wants It: Desire, Power and Toppling the Patriarchy (“out this week,” note that little detail.) Mx. Soloway (Mx. being the newest engineered intersectional salutation) runs a movie production company named Topple, best known for putting out the TV show Transparent, about an older man who decides he’d be happier pretending to be a woman, and all the good family feeling that such a decision might engender, so to speak.

Gender was complicated for Mx. Soloway, for whom puberty arrived late, but with the sudden appearance of large breasts. “Do other people’s memories of their teenage years include things like soccer competitions or blue ribbons?” they write. “All I have is the memory of being suddenly overwhelmed by becoming sex to others.”

Aha, the curse of large breasts. What a life-annihilating affliction.
And yes, you read that right. Mx. Soloway now insists on being addressed as “they” (The Times obliges), invoking a linguistic hall-of-mirrors in which there are always two of you: the one located in space and the one in the mirror — shall we surmise? — or perhaps there is another explanation. One might goof on the narcissistic buffoonery of this stuff all the livelong day, but that would be tiresome and cruel, so I will just come to the point and tell you what is going on here, what it is all about.

It is about fashion, status, and prestige as has been the case in human social relations since earliest (hu)man put a banana leaf on its head, to the awe and wonder of others gathered ‘round. All three of those conditions depend on a person being special, a figure apart from the boring, moiling, deplorable mob of morons who agree to be hostage to their own biology. Biology is a disease to be overcome, and you can do that by asserting your will. For instance, in the case at hand of Mx. Soloway, you can get breast reduction surgery, cut off your hair, and wear baggy clothes. This does not make you a man, but it allows you to affect to renounce your “sexual assignment.” Anyway, who wants to be a man? (The enemy!)

Rather, you pretend to exist in a make-believe liminal realm in between, relieved of all the pain-in-the-ass tensions of being one or the other, and therefore, to some degree, the tensions of being a mature mammal. Is not the game of “pretend” the chief occupation of childhood, either a happy one or otherwise? And is not Hollywood all about the game of pretend? And so, in Hollywood, the most zealous pretenders acquire the highest prestige. The trick is to get other people to agree that your pretenses are bona fide (the Emperors New Clothes gambit). One way to accomplish that is to elaborate a fantasy that has already been set in motion as a fashion statement. With good old-fashioned American Puritanism coming back into fashion under the guise of Maoist authoritarianism emanating from the campuses, nothing carries higher status than anathemizing human sexuality, working every angle to abolish it, to banish it from the world, and to punish those who object.

There are a few little problems with this. One is, you’re still stuck with your actual biological sexuality, whether you like it or not. Every cell in the body is imprinted — except in rare instances of what used to be called “birth defects.” There’s no “returns” policy at the sexual assignment bureau. Accordingly, people who stop short of completely screwing up their bodies with genital amputation and radical hormone treatments are still subject to sexual promptings of the type associated with their cellular DNA. Mx. Soloway has demonstrated this in her own work, as The Times explains:

After the author [Mx S.] falls in love with a lesbian while still married, the two enthusiastically make a short comedy about female ejaculation. The Topple crew pitched in, building a giant vagina and helping with costumes. Mx. Soloway calls the film, inevitably, “If You Build It, She Will Come.”


One of The New York Times’s chief roles in our society has been to confer prestige on the people they chose to write about. The Times is a mighty churning engine of status-granting, locked in a feedback loop with the readership it is working to flatter so as to place them in the social hierarchy du jour. Unfortunately, what they have to work with du jour is cultural collapse, which is exactly what converts degeneracy into prestige. It’s an unappetizing process, and its products — supposedly “gender-fluid” adult mammals — have exactly such an unappetizing presentation. What is most fashionable these days is obviously unreal, and to become a fashion-victim of that can’t have a happy ending.

[starry night]

howdy! I thought I'd chime in here, cause I find myself stirred up by this thread, and also because I have been following this general topic, on and off, for maybe a decade? and so have read some of the points of view being brought forward here, and might have something salient to add to the conversation.

My sense is, that bottom line, we are trying to understand these huge, complex, dynamic systems: solar, climate, economics, population movement, in order to suss out causes and effects. How do we make sense of all of this? what do we do about it? where are the leverage points? what can we expect, moving forward? how do we make the best of it, how do we deal with this mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually; how do we survive it?

I entered into this "discourse" (yes, I am a Foucault fan) coming from a decidedly "outsider" point of view. I had my 15 minutes of fame as an early (maybe the first?) female blogger talking about Peak Oil, around the time The Long Emergency came out, when the Transition Towns movement was just getting started, before they joined forces with - dangit, can't think of the name - the institute in Canada. I got involved in local politics, bringing Richard Heinberg to speak to the state legislators, was on the committee to organize a 350 rally (and then Obama scheduled HIS rally the same day, so that was a bummer!), that sort of thing.

I got deep into the doomer mentality, concluded (in part, because of Kunstler) that the solution had to be addressed on the community level, as nothing was working on any other level. My interest in intentional communities shifted to "eco" intentional communities. I ran myself ragged. Eventually I burnt out.

One of the first things I noticed, was all of the advice about the "post-collapse skills" that I would need to develop, were in the realm of either food or energy production. This triggered deep fear in me, that I would not survive, because not only are neither of these my skill set, but all of the voices seemed to be saying that the arena that I felt was important--the human, social aspect--was not valued. Was not even noticed as important.

Not to mention the emotional aspect of confronting this whole thing! Which, given my background in "persuasion" (from both a personal and academic perspective) I knew was absolutely key to the messaging, if nothing else. People shut down when they are overwhelmed, etc. etc.

Well, eventually a few women, and some of the facilitators who were involved in Transition Towns, helped me clarify that yes, the social, community-building aspect is typically overlooked--to put it bluntly, this has historically been "women's work," the assumed, unpaid labor, that is not compensated, so would not be "valued" as "currency" to trade in the post-whatever world.

This (further) "radicalized" me, and I found myself parting ways with those that analyzed the systems, but were NOT taking the "deeper layers of the cake" into account.

The emotional-spiritual axis. gotta take a call

[Chris]

howdy! I thought I'd chime in here, cause I find myself stirred up by this thread, and also because I have been following this general topic, on and off, for maybe a decade? and so have read some of the points of view being brought forward here, and might have something salient to add to the conversation.

My sense is, that bottom line, we are trying to understand these huge, complex, dynamic systems: solar, climate, economics, population movement, in order to suss out causes and effects. How do we make sense of all of this? what do we do about it? where are the leverage points? what can we expect, moving forward? how do we make the best of it, how do we deal with this mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually; how do we survive it?

I entered into this "discourse" (yes, I am a Foucault fan) coming from a decidedly "outsider" point of view. I had my 15 minutes of fame as an early (maybe the first?) female blogger talking about Peak Oil, around the time The Long Emergency came out, when the Transition Towns movement was just getting started, before they joined forces with - dangit, can't think of the name - the institute in Canada. I got involved in local politics, bringing Richard Heinberg to speak to the state legislators, was on the committee to organize a 350 rally (and then Obama scheduled HIS rally the same day, so that was a bummer!), that sort of thing.

I got deep into the doomer mentality, concluded (in part, because of Kunstler) that the solution had to be addressed on the community level, as nothing was working on any other level. My interest in intentional communities shifted to "eco" intentional communities. I ran myself ragged. Eventually I burnt out.

One of the first things I noticed, was all of the advice about the "post-collapse skills" that I would need to develop, were in the realm of either food or energy production. This triggered deep fear in me, that I would not survive, because not only are neither of these my skill set, but all of the voices seemed to be saying that the arena that I felt was important--the human, social aspect--was not valued. Was not even noticed as important.

Not to mention the emotional aspect of confronting this whole thing! Which, given my background in "persuasion" (from both a personal and academic perspective) I knew was absolutely key to the messaging, if nothing else. People shut down when they are overwhelmed, etc. etc.

Well, eventually a few women, and some of the facilitators who were involved in Transition Towns, helped me clarify that yes, the social, community-building aspect is typically overlooked--to put it bluntly, this has historically been "women's work," the assumed, unpaid labor, that is not compensated, so would not be "valued" as "currency" to trade in the post-whatever world.

This (further) "radicalized" me, and I found myself parting ways with those that analyzed the systems, but were NOT taking the "deeper layers of the cake" into account.

The emotional-spiritual axis. gotta take a call

That is really useful info, thank you!

I know how easy it is to fall into the doomer mentality. I still value Kunstler mostly because of his continued advocacy of better communities and especially urban environments. This is especially important in the US, where most cities are way too car-centric and too dependent on fossil fuels to function. I'm not a doomer and I do think that better transportation and energy technologies are already coming in to help us transition to a more sustainable future. JHK would disagree with me on that one, but I do think the evidence is pretty strong that we will transition eventually to a significantly better living arrangement and New Urbanism (of which Kunstler is considered an unofficial spokesman) will help us get there. The point where I agree with both JHK and Dmitry Orlov is that cultural and social collapse has already run its course in large parts of the Western World, but I do think that proper social and cultural structures can be rebuilt, along with liveable and sustainable communities. This won't happen everywhere, as we also have climate change to contend with, but I am optimistic that it will eventually happen in enough places to make a difference.

[starry night]

That is really useful info, thank you!

I know how easy it is to fall into the doomer mentality. I still value Kunstler mostly because of his continued advocacy of better communities and especially urban environments. This is especially important in the US, where most cities are way too car-centric and too dependent on fossil fuels to function. I'm not a doomer and I do think that better transportation and energy technologies are already coming in to help us transition to a more sustainable future. JHK would disagree with me on that one, but I do think the evidence is pretty strong that we will transition eventually to a significantly better living arrangement and New Urbanism (of which Kunstler is considered an unofficial spokesman) will help us get there. The point where I agree with both JHK and Dmitry Orlov is that cultural and social collapse has already run its course in large parts of the Western World, but I do think that proper social and cultural structures can be rebuilt, along with liveable and sustainable communities. This won't happen everywhere, as we also have climate change to contend with, but I am optimistic that it will eventually happen in enough places to make a difference.

Me too. (Orlov scared the bejeezus out of me, but I am grateful for the wake up call!)

I am also very grateful for Kunstlers wake up call, and his advocacy for New Urbanism. I live in one of the most car-centric locals in the US, I believe--I gave up on my political advocacy career when I discovered that the biggest lobby in the state was the road builders! And, not coincidentally, we also have very high pedestrian and bicycle mortality rates.

Continuing my backstory: Even before I became aware of the collapse, I was drawn to community living. Palooka and I met in a mutual search for an intentional community, and we first lived together in a tiny tiny tiny community that we founded. I had an MA in Communication, focusing on Organizational, Group, Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication, and had crashed and burned at the end of my coursework so did not pursue a PhD at that time.

When I was able to study again, I wanted to learn more about intentional communities, and how to facilitate meetings in them. There was no academic route for this, so I built my own program, training with the experts in the intentional communities movement who, after 20-30 years in the field, were ready to pass on what they had learned to the next generation of facilitators. It was an amazing opportunity, and I am very grateful for it.

I also got the chance to visit a lot of intentional communities in the US, mostly based on the co-housing model, mostly dealing with (white) middle-class problems. (back when there was one, LOL.) Still, people are people, and my trainers had a much broader background, so it gave me first hand experience with the kinds of things that seem to be common to at least this subgroup of humanity, and also *solutions* on the process level. Or rather, what are the best processes, the best practices, when it comes to finding solutions to the problems that inevitably come up when living intentionally, in community?

Cause if anything is going to get done, it is going to get done by people, who are coming together from their own histories, positions, etc. have their own interests, points of view, triggers, deeply held beliefs, y'all know the drill!

I learned a lot.

Then came the realization of the end of the world as we know it: TEOTWAWKI (remember that acronym?)

I became drawn to the question of okay, so how DO we rebuild, incorporating the social-emotional axis? And at the time I started the next phase of my journey, I was still pretty freaked out, so the question was, what if we have to do it on the fly? In a state of emergency, while we are on the move from one climate zone to another?

That's when I got interested in "self-organizing" communities--as it was presented in the doomer/prepper discourse.

So started to get training in Open Space facilitation, and also, in drawing on the deeper traditional/tribal models (we've been around for a long time!) which started to line up with my Spiritual process/development... and this is what I am working on, still. But that is for another thread.

Back to Kunstler. So I am trying to sort out the point he is making. And I think it is important to tease out the role of the media, in all of this. And the messages. Which is, obviously, a whole lot of the work we are doing here at TOT. Sorting it all out!

I want to understand what he is saying, and I also want to understand where he is coming from, as a person with his own "stuff," so to speak, to help me make sense of it. Methinks he is triggered. I know I was certainly triggered by some of what he said, and I had to go emote until I could come back and write something that wasn't just coming from my upsettedness, so to speak.

Because I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, in terms of rejecting other points of view just because something somebody said pissed me off. I mean, I do that all the time momentarily, but my goal is to work through my stuff so I can "hear" again.

Anywho, palooka is home, so I need to get off his laptop (the keyboard to my iPad is kaput) and come back to this later.

[Amanda]

What a breath of fresh air this thread is - not - for its content but for the conversation and thought provoking intent. The collapse of consumerism has to be close. I have had people mention the constant rise of financial sectors and how the ascent cannot be prolonged. Here in Australia real estate is starting to decline.

My thoughts can sometimes turn to consumerism and how the constant purchase of 'things' cannot be infinite. Eventually people will have to stop making purchases due to 'things' ending up in landfill. This line of thinking then leads me to Neuro Linguistic Programming. Is the inevitable collapse just another Heligian Dialect moment?

All I can see - and - you don't have to be psychic or have a Chronovisor to see it, is this: Eventually all the food will be contaminated with pesticides and GMOs et cetera and all anyone will be able to do is to make the best possible choices of what is available - yes/no/maybe?

Factor in the Geo-Engineering in the sky and the chemicals in processed food and the negative impact of living in a constant soup of 'invisible' wi-fi and the list goes on. How will it all end? Will it end? Will it morph into another paradigm? Will that paradigm be an improvement or will it be worse?

I read today these words: Researchers have created a theory that, we are all living a nightmare here on Earth and the only escape is Death. Certainly makes for an excellent thinking exercise. As for Politics and control - they - just in my opinion (doesn't make me right and everyone else wrong) are what need to be changed. Politics needs to be addressed and the People need to govern themselves and all the control mechanisms (like licences for just about everything, what you can grow or do or not do) need to be removed. A fresh start is the only way - yes/no/maybe?

I have often thought that between everyone - if we listened to everyone - we could amass all knowledge and build a solid 'new' base on which to live.



Much Peace & Much Respect - As we learn about our World - Amanda

[starry night]

I read today these words: Researchers have created a theory that, we are all living a nightmare here on Earth and the only escape is Death.

yes, I think this is the experience of a lot of loving essence on the planet right now. I know I have had to come face to face with this, as it was one of my core beliefs. And I have taken that way "out," in many lifetimes past. In fact, the knowing of this had kept me alive in my own nightmare. There was no out. I always come back.

As I have become committed to healing, and as I have been willing to go into the pain, and discover more healing through that, I finally got a trigger that took me all the way down to my own "ground zero," so to speak. I had enough consciousness to call a friend who understood my process, and she simply told me "you know what you have to do." I did not want to hear it, but I needed to hear it. I needed to release that judgment--that the only escape was death. That I could not survive the pain.

And so, I did.

What happened next astonished me. It was in the context of hours/days/weeks of emotional movement--part of my own kundalini awakening, if you will--in which I felt that judgment precipitate out of my etheric body, into my crown, and all the way down to my toes! I had fever and chills and vomited five times over the course of about 36 hours.

And there are always "more layers of the onion," but so far, knock wood, I have been free of this impulse in the five years since. I now know, from that experiential place, that I can survive the feelings.

My deepest hope is that we will be able to finally clear enough individually to be able to heal the gaps between us, and find the balance points that have never been found in the loss of power and overpowering that has gone on.

And Amanda, on a personal note, as a survivor of MC/RA, I am so very grateful for your work. I have just been reading your whistleblower thread, and will go post a bit there (unless I lose access to the laptop--I think palooka might want it back).