social collapse – Page 2

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You were named hedge fund manager of the year with the most amazing public track record which nobody has ever come close to matching. You have been named Analyst of the Year. I spoke to people in Australia where you managed a public fund for Deutsche Bank. They said if you would accept money you would get billions in a few weeks. Everyone says your model is the only real thing and that is why the government wanted it. They wouldn’t do that if it was not real. I watched the Forecaster. It was eye opening. Why do you not take money to manage?

Thank You

BB

ANSWER: Some people think that making money is the only goal in life. I have done it all. Been there done that. Being a global hedge fund manager is on call 24 hours a day. I had to watch everything and probably got addicted as did my sources. We still watch the world all the time. Yet, even now, I have a hard time sleeping more than 3 hours straight. I cannot spend what I have and there are more important things. We could sell advertising on the site and that would be more than enough for most people to live on. I prefer not to get involved for every want-to-be analyst/fund manager would be posting ads and I would not care to get involved even implicitly endorsing something I am not 100% sure about.

What I do is trying to take what I have learned and at least attempt to influence what comes after the crash and burn. You can have all the money in the world, but it will not do you any good if you cannot spend it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to survive a global disaster: a handy guide

February 10, 2016

How to survive a global disaster: a handy guide

Whether it’s a natural disaster, bioterrorist attack or pandemic, experts reckon society as we know it will collapse within 13 days of a catastrophic event. So what do you do next?

Ubisoft’s role-playing shooter The Division wouldn’t be as much fun if players followed Nafeez Ahmed’s advice and stayed rural.
Photograph: Ubisoft

On 22 June, 2001, Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, organised a war game like no other. The two researchers, working with an array of bodies such as the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, set out to simulate the effects of a biological attack on the US. The project was called Operation Dark Winter.

What they discovered was that the country was ill prepared to cope. Within two weeks there would be enormous civilian casualties, a catastrophic breakdown in essential institutions, and mass civil unrest. Food supplies, electricity and transport infrastructures would all collapse.

In short, the world would get medieval on America’s ass. And the same thing would happen all over the globe.

These days we’re spoiled for choice in terms of potential catastrophes. Natural and ecological disasters, nuclear weapons, terrorism, experimental technological accidents (“Oops, we’ve accidentally created Skynet”) – they’re all in the game. In 2008 a group of experts met at an Oxford University conference and suggested that there was a 19% chance of a global catastrophic event before 2100 (with super intelligent AI and molecular nanotechnology weapons at the top of the threat list). It was just a bit of fun, and they added plenty of caveats to that figure, but still, something to think about, eh?

With all this in mind, the Guardian spoke to the academic and author Nafeez Ahmed, who has studied global crises and mass violence, and recently advised Ubisoft on the authenticity of its post-pandemic video game, The Division.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Do You Know When Your Society Is In The Midst Of Collapse?

January 27, 2016

How Do You Know When Your Society Is In The Midst Of Collapse?

As economic turmoil worldwide becomes increasingly apparent, I have been receiving messages from readers expressing some concerns on the public “perception” of collapse. That is to say, there are questions on the average person’s concept of collapse versus the reality of collapse. This is a vital issue that I have discussed briefly in the past, but it deserves a more in-depth analysis.

What is collapse? How do we define it? And, are some of the notions of collapse in the public consciousness completely wrong?

It’s funny, because skeptics opposed to the idea of a U.S. collapse in particular will most often retort with a question they think I cannot or will not answer – “So, Mr. Smith, when specifically is this supposed collapse going to take place? What day and time?”

My response has always been – “We’re in the middle of a collapse right now; you really can’t see it right in front of your sneering face?”

The reason these people are incapable of grasping this kind of answer is in large part due to the popular mainstream conceptions of systemic collapse. These are conceptions that are for the most part delusional and not in line with the facts. The public idea of collapse comes predominantly from Hollywood, and not from personal experience. For the masses (and some preppers, unfortunately), a collapse is an “event” that happens visibly and usually swiftly. You wake up one morning and behold; the television and phones don’t work anymore and zombies are at your doorstep! Yes, it’s childish and cartoonish, but anything less than a Walking Dead/Mad Max scenario and many people act as if all other threats are benign.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

September 7, 2015

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

The horrific refugee problem we see today, so reminiscent of population movements during World War II, next to the Holocaust itself in the historical annals of Crimes Against Humanity, and to which it was then related, remains in our times below the moral radar screen as though somehow inevitable, beyond solution, something that just happens. That is how jaded the world has become. Human flotsam, period; humanity, as the central organizing principle of life, stinks in the nostrils of nations preoccupied with other things to do. This is what I mean by the collapse of social institutions, with no guiding hand (where in all of this, e.g., is the UN or some suitable alternative if such were possible?) to prevent the humanitarian crater where a power vacuum reigns and the bottom has dropped out of global responsibility for the lives and dignity of people.

Events (i.e., human suffering) have already gone beyond what self-proclaimed civilization would allow, raising questions about whether or not there is a moral order shaping, defining, underpinning the international political system and its capacity for ensuring, or at least working toward, social justice and even human sustainability. Children and their mother drown, trucks sealed tight become mass graves, ordinary people, their belongings on their backs, pushing baby carriages, marching/walking along railroad tracks—from a descriptive point of view, prelude to World War III? Perhaps not. The world can contain (somewhat) volatility, but does a lousy job at removing the causes of human misery, indeed seems to require such a condition as validation of power and national sovereignty.

Why do present-day actors, starting with alliances, nations, social movements, and corporate units of the great chain of capitalistic being, finally, individuals in their asocial behavior, have and enjoy the capacity to act with impunity—no effective whistles blown, the smugglers of human traffic (impersonalization as seldom seen in recent years) serving as a microcosm of the whole.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Spectacle So Far

August 11, 2015

The Spectacle So Far

Yes, there is such a thing as “the public,” a term that derives from the ancient Latin, populus (the people), via publicus (of the people), via old French, public — pertaining generally to the mass of adults dwelling in a polity, a society under (political) governance. In the USA, government is vested as a republic, also from the Latin, res publica, meaning the public thing, the vessel that contains the public.

I present these terms to clarify how our society is cracking up. The American public, we the people, lately swoon into a morass of multi-dimensional failure: failure to control their economic lives, to regulate their appetites and their bodies, to understand what is happening to them, to fend off the propaganda and distractions that disable them, and to properly express and direct their wrath at those elements of the polity who deserve it.

True, their awful, epic failures at this moment in history are largely engineered and aggravated by those who have captured the polity and turned it into a looting and racketeering engine. The net result, though, is a self-reinforcing circle of degradation that rots the collective ethos of the public while it destroys the vessel of the republic that contains it.

Societies that act as though they are hostage to these forces of degradation are able to pretend that they are helpless in the face of them; that the public bears no responsibility for its own choices or for the disintegration of the polity they live under. Hence, the current condition of the American public and its disgraceful government.

It’s not difficult to understand how Donald Trump becomes the instrument for the public’s wrath. Whatever his checkered career in land development amounts to, he is at least a freely-functioning and unfettered actor in the political arena.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart

June 26, 2015

Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart
It is impossible to wean an economy that relies on debt and leverage for its “growth” of excessive debt and leverage.

As noted earlier in this series, collapse is not an event, it’s a process, a process we experience as things fall apart. The phrase famously appears in William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Why do things fall apart? I have addressed a number of dynamics in the first four essays of this series, but there are many more expressed in Yeats’ few brief lines.

1. Magical thinking dominates all discussions. The truth, being too fearful to contemplate, is sidelined in favor of magical thinking:

— we can grow our way out of debt by expanding debt

— if we simply print enough money, we can pay for everything we want

— a miraculous new technology (insert current example) will provide limitless energy/food at near-zero cost

— if we tweak the system with some minor reforms, all the big problems will go away

— new technology always creates more jobs than it destroys

and so on.

2. Same as it always was: politics was always corrupt, humans have always been greedy, etc.–in other words, today’s problems are no different from those of the past, which we handled without major difficulty. The possibility that today’s extremes of financialization and political decay might actually be quantitatively and qualitatively different from the past 50 years is dismissed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay

June 23, 2015

Collapse, Part 2: The Nine Dynamics of Decay

Rome didn’t fall so much as erode away. That’s the template for collapse.

While collapse may be sudden, the decay that generated the collapse had been rotting away the foundation for years or decades. In distilling the vast literature on collapse into nine dynamics, I am drawing upon many other authors’ work, including:
The Collapse of Complex Societies
The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects

Here are the nine dynamics of decay that lead to collapse:

1. complacency and intellectual laziness

2. profound political disunity

3. rise of unproductive complexity

4. those bearing the sacrifices opt out/quit

5. decay of effective leadership

6. rise of bread and circuses social welfare and entertainment to distract/placate restive citizenry

7. decline of wealth-producing capacity–status quo living off financial trickery

8. sclerosis–status quo controlled by vested interests

9. resource depletion/environmental damage

All of these dynamics are currently in play around the globe.

Michael Grant touched on many of these dynamics in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Era of Breakdown

June 4, 2015

The Era of Breakdown

The fourth of the stages in the sequence of collapse we’ve been discussing is the era of breakdown. (For those who haven’t been keeping track, the first three phases are the eras of pretense, impact, and response; the final phase, which we’ll be discussing next week, is the era of dissolution.) The era of breakdown is the phase that gets most of the press, and thus inevitably no other stage has attracted anything like the crop of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and flat-out hokum as this one.

The era of breakdown is the point along the curve of collapse at which business as usual finally comes to an end. That’s where the confusion comes in. It’s one of the central articles of faith in pretty much every human society that business as usual functions as a bulwark against chaos, a defense against whatever problems the society might face. That’s exactly where the difficulty slips in, because in pretty much every human society, what counts as business as usual—the established institutions and familiar activities on which everyone relies day by day—is the most important cause of the problems the society faces, and the primary cause of collapse is thus quite simply that societies inevitably attempt to solve their problems by doing all the things that make their problems worse.

The phase of breakdown is the point at which this exercise in futility finally grinds to a halt. The three previous phases are all attempts to avoid breakdown: in the phase of pretense, by making believe that the problems don’t exist; in the phase of impact, by making believe that the problems will go away if only everyone doubles down on whatever’s causing them; and in the phase of response, by making believe that changing something other than the things that are causing the problems will fix the problems.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Era of Response

May 29, 2015

The Era of Response

The third stage of the process of collapse, following what I’ve called the eras of pretense and impact, is the era of response. It’s easy to misunderstand what this involves, because both of the previous eras have their own kinds of response to whatever is driving the collapse; it’s just that those kinds of response are more precisely nonresponses, attempts to make the crisis go away without addressing any of the things that are making it happen.

If you want a first-rate example of the standard nonresponse of the era of pretense, you’ll find one in the sunny streets of Miami, Florida right now. As a result of global climate change, sea level has gone up and the Gulf Stream has slowed down. One consequence is that these days, whenever Miami gets a high tide combined with a stiff onshore wind, salt water comes boiling up through the storm sewers of the city all over the low-lying parts of town. The response of the Florida state government has been to ssue an order to all state employees that they’re not allowed to utter the phrase “climate change.”

That sort of thing is standard practice in an astonishing range of subjects in America these days. Consider the roles that the essentially nonexistent recovery from the housing-bubble crash of 2008-9 has played in political rhetoric since that time. The current inmate of the White House has been insisting through most of two turns that happy days are here again, and the usual reams of doctored statistics have been churned out in an effort to convince people who know better that they’re just imagining that something is wrong with the economy. We can expect to hear that same claim made in increasingly loud and confident tones right up until the day the bottom finally drops out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US fall from virtuous republic to tragic-comic empire described perfectly by Roman historians

May 11, 2015

US fall from virtuous republic to tragic-comic empire described perfectly by Roman historians

The ancient Greek historian, Polybius, celebrated the Roman republic of ~ 150 BC under its constitution with balance of powers among the Senate, two elected consuls, and the general citizens:

“Such being the power that each part has of hampering the others or co-operating with them, their union is adequate to all emergencies, so that it is impossible to find a better political system than this.” – The Histories, Book VI, Section V: On the Roman Constitution at its Prime

Americans and people around the world were equally proud of the United States Constitution as “impossible to find a better political system than this.”

About 100 years after Polybius’ account, Rome’s republic had descended into oligarchic competition for power. Contemporary to Julius Caesar, the Roman historian and government insider Sallust blasted the decline of virtue in government:

“To those who had easily endured toils, dangers, and doubtful and difficult circumstances, ease and wealth, the objects of desire to others, became a burden and a trouble. At first the love of money, and then that of power, began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil. For avarice subverted honesty, integrity, and other honorable principles, and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion, and general venality. Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast, and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart. These vices at first advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterwards, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became rapacious and insupportable.” – Conspiracy of Catiline, The Argument

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Opinion: How this debt-addicted world could go the way of the Mayans

April 28, 2015

Opinion: How this debt-addicted world could go the way of the Mayans

Paying a high price for too many elites and their ‘frivolous cravings’

Nowadays many countries’ social and political structure relies on debt-driven consumption and increasing levels of entitlements.

Blame the policy makers. To drive economic growth, boost living standards, and manage growing inequality, policy makers have used debt and monetary tools to create economic activity. This has resulted in excessive borrowing and imbalances in global trade and capital.

Governments played a part, too, allowing the buildup of social entitlements to win or maintain office. Private companies also encouraged the growth of employee benefits to avoid immediate pressure on wages as well as boost current earnings and share prices.

But such expensive commitments were rarely fully funded.

Rather than deal with the fundamental issues, policy makers substituted public spending, financed by government debt or central banks, to boost demand. Strong growth and higher inflation, they hoped or believed, would correct the problems.

Barron’s Buzz: Who’s optimistic now?

(2:57)This week’s Barron’s features the result of a survey of money managers and a look at Amazon’s cloud services. Barron’s Jack Hough discusses. Photo: Getty Images

The current state of affairs echoes Archaeologist Arthur Demarest’s observation about the Mayan civilization: “Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles…all needed quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, non-productive and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We can’t have resilience without justice

February 7, 2015

We can’t have resilience without justice

Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Tamir Rice. John Crawford III. Levar Jones.

Their deaths — and those of too many others — illuminate the ghastly toll of racism and impunity. It’s a toll we can measure in lives lost, and in communities seared by violence.

But here’s a casualty you might have missed: trust. When people feel unfairly targeted by the police, when good cops fear reprisal from angry communities, trust — the invisible thread that holds livable communities together — unravels.

If we are going to get real about resilience in an age of climate change and other large-scale disruptions, trust looms large.

Think about it. If people don’t trust the authorities, will they pay attention when it’s time to evacuate? Will first responders venture into communities of color to rescue the most vulnerable? Will people from different backgrounds and neighborhoods join hands to rebuild?

It’s not just about climate-related disaster, either. If an epidemic is raging, will sick people remain quarantined, or will they flee and infect others? (That’s what has happened during the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, where people’s reasons to distrust the authorities could fill an encyclopedia.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

January 27, 2015

TIGHTEN THOSE CHIN STRAPS FOLKS BECAUSE HERE COMES A RAPID UNSCHEDULED DISASSEMBLY (RUD)

Please stick with this piece dear reader for it does not end on the same path from which it starts.

Being a child of the 50’s and 60’s, it comes as no surprise to anyone from that era that I’m a bit of a space buff. From the moment I saw my first televised rocket launch I was hooked and have never fully recovered from my childhood obsession. Beginning withProject Mercury and the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard in 1961, followed shortly by the three orbits of John Glenn, then progressing through Project Gemini where America practiced the space skills needed to eventually land on the moon and culminating with the Apollo Program and (supposedly) several trips to the moon, one thing they all had in common was the seriousness of everyone involved. Going to space was serious business performed by serious people. There was no joking around because failure wasn’t an option.

Who can forget the early years watching stern (mostly baby faced) engineers hunched over their monitors at the Launch Control Center in Cape Canaveral (Kennedy) and Mission Control in Houston, nearly all wearing the standard dress uniform of white short-sleeve shirt with tie along with the mandatory plastic pocket protector, headsets firmly affixed to one ear while the other was left open to hear those around them.

There were always several huge loose leaf binders at their side, dog-eared and well thumbed, complete with handwritten notations and addendums. And of course, endlessly pacing the back of the room or moving from one monitoring station to another, there was the Mission Director riding herd over his minions. There was no doubt by anyone in that room who the man in charge was and where the buck stopped.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Mass Abductions in Mexico Reveal a Decaying State – SPIEGEL ONLINE

November 23, 2014

Mass Abductions in Mexico Reveal a Decaying State – SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The close-up images show a handful of black teeth sifted out of leftover ash, and bits of charred bone picked from a landfill not far from Iguala. There are also shots of plastic bag scraps that washed up on the banks of Río San Juan. The murderers allegedly threw them into the river to dispose of the remains of the incinerated corpses.

Cristóforo García is familiar with the pictures, of course. They were broadcast all over the country on the day that Mexico’s attorney general appeared before the media following weeks of uncertainty. The monstrous riddle that has gripped Mexico this fall, he said, had apparently been solved.

The case got its start on the evening of Sept. 26 when police in Iguala, a city 180 kilometers (112 miles) southwest of Mexico City in the state of Guerrero, opened fire on three buses full of students who were on their way to a demonstration. Six people were killed and 43 others have been missing ever since. Evidence seems to indicate that the police turned them over to the contract killers of a drug cartel.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago Washington’s Blog

November 19, 2014

This Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago Washington’s Blog.

Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago

We’ve known for 5,000 years that mass spying on one’s own people is always aimed at grabbing power and crushing dissent, not protecting us from bad guys.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 2,000 years that wars are based on lies.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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Collapse, Part 5: Things Fall Apart
It is impossible to wean an economy that relies on debt and leverage for its “growth” of excessive debt and leverage.