Almost gone.

Give it less than a year before crime suspects get tagged as some sort of ‘terror suspect’ to keep them from being released.

… That slope slippery enough for you yet?

What amazes is the sizable portion of the population that thinks this is a good thing.

We’ve lost our Goddamned minds …

=====

Update: Looks like they’re set to do it.

And we will become a different country when they do.

If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.

“This was not a crisis that had to happen. It was manufactured. It wasn’t an accident, and it’s profited companies greatly.”
~Ellen E. Schultz, author of Retirement Heist.

Whether you want to believe it or not, things are changing for American workers.

And retired American workers.

The Theft of the American Pension, a book review by Thomas Rogers on Salon, highlights one reason why.

You could maybe wonder how or why this is happening, but, perhaps, you might instead trouble yourself consider who benefits most from the destruction of institutions that made a large middle class possible …

I know! Let’s lower taxes on the rich!

That’ll fix everything.

Sure it will…

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“Dad, what happened to our world?”

You want your kids to grow up positive and happy.  But if they ambush you with that question, “What’s going to happen to the world,” you should lie through your teeth.

You need to protect them from horror and heartbreak, don’t you?

That would be good parenting, right?

Let them find out about The End of The World on their own, from their peers, the same way they learn about sex.

Parenting in the Peak Oil Age is, to state the obvious, perplexing.  How do we impart clear-sightedness as well as optimism when all around them, on television, newspapers, movies, and video games, our kids are deluged with the portents of doomsday?  Terrorism, famine in Africa, global warming, Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

First, perhaps, we should seek the qualities of clarity and positivism for ourselves.  We should let go of the fairy tales that have given us false hopes for the future, that science will save us, or better government, or Jesus, or aliens. We need to study the world as it is actually becoming, without wishful thinking or denial, and find within that menacing reality, a hopeful path, a happy story, that will lead us through the mirkwood into the sun-lit meadow beyond.

In this piece, I describe and graph three persuasive scenarios for our future.  One of them may, indeed, be our path out of the dark forest.  I have chosen works by three futurists for this comparison: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It by James Wesley, Rawles, The Long Descent by John Michael Greer, and Muddling Toward Frugality by Warren Johnson.

The forecast depicted by James Wesley, Rawles is the most appalling, so let’s begin with that and get it over with.

By the way, the comma between Wesley and Rawles is a deliberate affectation, his elucidation of which sails over my head, so I won’t attempt to explain it to you. James Wesley comma Rawles. 

TEOTWAWKI

The. End. Of. The. World. As. We. Know. It.  Anyone familiar with Rawles knows his acronym TEOTWAWKI.  That’s a lot of people.  His book How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It is a best seller.  His website boasts 260,000 visits per week.  Per WEEK.  His particular take on survivalism even bears his name, Rawlesian survivalism.

(Little sidebar here, if you want a snappy example of a “monetized” website, check out Rawles’ at SurvivalBlog.com.)

Rawles’ prognostication differs from those of John Greer and Warren Johnson in two basic concepts:

• Human civilization is a teetering house of cards, any one of the foundation cards removed, the fragile structure falls in on itself.  Greer and Johnson, by contrast, maintain that civilization is tough and resilient, capable of taking a lot of punishment before it topples.
• When the crash begins it will happen with astonishing speed and unimaginable horror.

Though he offers diverse “triggers” for the sudden collapse of civilization (pandemic disease, nuclear war), the example that he uses to launch his doomsday plot is nothing so cinematic, in fact it’s rather banal, the failure of the “Rube Goldberg”  electrical power grid in the United States.  Food runs out, people abandon critical jobs to protect their own families, the world gets dark and stays dark, millions of urbanites flee the cities and overrun rural areas, fuel stores are depleted, starvation and violence escalate, and so on.

These ideas are old hat, science fiction writers have been riffing apocalyptic yarns for decades.  Rawles’ unique contribution is the painstaking detail and research he has put into extensive “how to” manuals for surviving, or at least maximizing your chances for surviving, TEOTWAWKI.  His “lessons” are fascinating and useful, whether or not you subscribe to a survivalist mindset.  His guidelines for assembling a first aid kit, for example, are top notch.

But there are dilemmas with Rawlesian survivalism.  It’s expensive to implement, in money, energy, time, and focus.  To carry out his plan you would need to be well heeled, have lots of spare time, possess excellent health and physical fitness, and you would need to relocate your home to a safer area, away from the interstate corridors down which the panic-stricken city folk would flee.  You would need to move to a remote area, probably in the “Western Redoubt,” an area that consists of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, eastern Oregon, and eastern Washington.

The preparation for survival would become, in fact, your full-time job, a way of life, and for devout Rawlesian disciples, a spiritual path.  How’s that? Rawles states that it would also be beneficial to embrace Christian Conservatism, if you have not done so already.  Rawles brings up his Christian faith again and again, in various guises, under the premise that religious unity is desirable in post-collapse communities.

The other problem with Rawlesian survivalism is that it is just so damn sad.  I can’t bear to think about it for more than a few minutes at a time.  If the events Rawles describes come to pass, I will be unprepared and die in the first few weeks with millions of other “denialists,” so let’s pray he’s wrong and pin our hopes on the theories of Greer and Johnson, at odds from James Wesley Comma in this fundamental regard:  the decline of civilization may (not will, but may) play out over a much longer period, decades or even centuries.  We’ll look first at Greer’s rendering.

Catabolic Collapse and The Long Descent

John Michael Greer has not been given the credibility he deserves, at least in scientific circles. He is a Druid, and not just that, he is a Grand Poohbah (or whatever) among east coast Druids. Tree lover. Nature worshiper.  Pagan.  Kook.

He is also a first rate writer and a conscientious researcher, a scientist by any meaningful definition of the title.  His principal prognostication for the future is a dynamic decline he calls “catabolic collapse.”  He posits that civilization is so rugged that it will take a lot to knock it out.  Pounded against the ropes, we come out swinging.  Knocked to the canvas, we lurch back on our feet and keep punching.

Declines are inevitably followed by resurgences, like the stock market, but the analogy only goes so far.  Down on Wall Street crashes are followed by recoveries that reach ever higher peaks.  Down here on our battered, over-populated, reeling planet each decline will be longer-lasting and deeper; each recovery is slower and never quite reaching previous heights.  Graphed over time, Greer’s catabolic collapse looks more like a jagged set of stairs, heading downward, inexorably.

What is shoving us down this stairway into the basement of humankind?  You already know the answer.  The depletion of our natural resources.  There are too many of us, and we are using up all of our stuff.

Can anything stop the catabolism?  Sure.

• Enlightened government wherein politicians begin working together to reduce national energy consumption, protect the environment, and bring to an end the rapacious cannibalism of multi-national corporations.
• Personal transformation wherein humanity turns away from gluttony and greed, and we all plant organic gardens.
• Scientific breakthroughs wherein genius inventors create machines that eat garbage and spew out energy like Back to the Future, or matter transformers that fabricate anything you want like on Star Trek, or faster-than-light starships that spread our human seed to the far corners of the galaxy like, well, you can pick from among thousands of science fiction adventures.

Short of these wan hopes, perhaps we should find a better story on which to hang our hopes and convince our kids.  Let’s  sit around the fire and listen to Warren Johnson spin his appealing tale.

Muddling Along through the End of the Industrial Age

Warren Johnson‘s Muddling Toward Frugality is the most optimistic prognostication of the three, offering the possibility of a sustainable civilization characterized by decentralization, close-knit families, small communities, and the re-emergence of primary trades.  His notion of the Kali Yuga, the Final Stage, depicts our future not as the End of Days, but as the Beginning of a simpler and better way of life.

The transition from our affluent world, according to Johnson, will be both inexorable and unplanned, a hodgepodge of infinitesimal adjustments, by societies and individuals, caused by environmental pressure, or push back, the environment construed to mean an inseparable mix of ecological and economic realities, crushing debt, unemployment, the increasing gap between rich and poor, and most immediately, depletion of natural resources, fossil fuels (of course), and also metals and minerals, soils and fresh water, and living resources such as oceanic fish and timber.

Over long periods of time, dwindling resources result in behavioral adjustments by individuals, and economic adjustments by societies, all of us muddling along and making do as prosperous lifestyles become harder and harder to sustain.  The key here is in the phrase “long periods of time.”  Johnson also acknowledges the possibility of abrupt collapse if the decline of the industrial age is too rapid or if sudden disaster overwhelms us.  How long is “long?”  Many decades, at the least, centuries most likely.  Centuries.

Johnson’s most attractive notion is his vision of a world that is far different than our Industrial Age, but not worse.  He suggests that the charms of an agrarian, small-town, simpler (and sustainable) lifestyle outweigh the materialistic accouterments of the present civilization, and that we will have plenty of time to get used to a new way of life,  and that we will come to value it and love it.

I call that a pretty good story.

Final Exam

If economic “subsidence” is inevitable, if there is nothing individuals can do to prevent it, then what are you to tell your children?

What are you to do in your day-to-day personal life, your behavior, your spiritual path, your dharma?

That’s the real question, isn’t it?

©  2011 by Bob Jenkins

Cornwallis surrenders to Washington at Georgetown. The victory was in part made possible by the victory of the French Fleet over the Royal Navy - one of the few victories the French ever enjoyed over their long-time foe.

People making arguments against the level of our relatively minimal involvement in Libya seem to lose sight of a simple truth: you cannot free a slave, or a subject populace.

They can only free themselves.

Meanwhile, in San Jose, California…

“As a result of police officer layoffs, anonymous noise complaints, burglar alarms and non-injury car crashes will now fall under the category of ‘non-response.’”

CBS San Francisco has the full story.