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Apocalypse, Or Not?

Apocalypse, Or Not?

Properly reasoned economic theory certainly reduces the science to one of black and white conclusions, which suits conclusion-jumpers. But the whole point of it is to explain society’s errors, so that they may be corrected. It is only by understanding the errors of state intervention and socialism, both communistic and fascist, that solutions can be found. Solutions then need to be applied, not taken into a mountain or forest retreat never to be implemented.

The real world does not work on black and white economic theories. It progresses along a muddled course, torn between statist mistakes and society’s unending patience with government intervention. Governments are the source of all wars and wealth destruction, but societies tolerate them. Philosophers have argued over this from Plato versus Aristotle onwards, and we are still here, two and a half millennia later, chewing over the same bones.

History records our philosophical chewing, and Man’s continuing conflict with and tolerances of the state. It records the rise and fall of kings, emperors, dictators and governments. Hermits and other preppers come and go, either unrecorded or, like Saint Simeon Stylites, noted as little more than historical footnotes. To future generations, prepping will almost certainly be a bygone curiosity, and humanity will continue despite government suppression.

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Crime of the 21st Century

Crime of the 21st Century

Perpetrators of Apocalypse, or, The Seven Circles of Hell

Gustave Doré

Time to have a talk / it will not be fun / buckle up. Feel free to skip to the end at any point for pleasant pictures of adorable animals.

You and I are witnessing the twenty-first century’s great crime: a global holocaust whose first victims have already perished. And I mean holocaust, from Greek holókaustos, translated as “whole” and “burnt” – the whole enormity of life daily sacrificed to flames. That is not hyperbole. Driving this crime is the collapse of the world’s stable climatic and atmospheric systems. Fossil energy economies are doing this. They transform the world into a deathly, suffocating hothouse sabotaging the climate and atmosphere. That’s what they do.

Carbon energy kills 3.5 to 6 million people per year through air pollution alone. Beyond that, this crime is also killing people via extreme hurricanes, wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves, expanding the range of deadly diseases like malaria and Lyme, famines, and conflicts like the Syrian civil war. There is good reason to believe these disasters will destabilizegeopolitical relationships and lead to world war. Every one of these types of disasters will continue to intensify—that is inevitable at this point.

What is not inevitable is degree of intensity. Quantity of death can still be curtailed; we can prevent billions of deaths, even forestall human extinction. But the tragic fact is that some immense minimum of murder is certain. The body count will exceed those of any crimes that have come before. Monarchs and dictators designed the twentieth century’s vast death; this new crime is perpetrated by a global oligarchy – a hereditary aristocracy – a network of governments ruled by a super-wealthy elite. The most culpable among this elite are members of the oil, gas, and coal industries.

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Inside America’s Doomsday Bunkers: “Built To Withstand Apocalypse”

Inside America’s Doomsday Bunkers: “Built To Withstand Apocalypse”

Evidence that officials in the government are planning for an apocalyptic scenario is hiding in plain sight. America’s doomsday bunkers are built to withstand the apocalypse but kept quiet from the public, as the elites’ plans for survival do not include us.

First developed during the Truman Administration, in the early days of nuclear weapons development, the government decided that in event of an apocalyptic scenario, the ruling class must be able to continue to control the masses. COG (continuity of government) measures then expanded greatly during the Cold War. If the government is preparing for something, perhaps you should too. None of us really know what could go down, although a complete economic collapse seems possible at this point.

Across the ages, in every survival story, a disaster of some sort plays a prominent role. Sometimes the part is played by the government, sometimes it is played by Mother Nature, and other times, the role is taken on by a random mishap. If we have learned one thing studying the history of disasters, it is this: those who are prepared have a better chance at survival than those who are not. –The Prepper’s Blueprint

The government wants to ensure that the military will still be able to do whatever the elites command under any disastrous scenario.

[The elite ruling class] can afford to make careless decisions because they are insulated from the results. If there is a war with Russia, which could easily turn into a nuclear war, they’ll have plenty of spacious bunkers to hide out in while the rest of America burns. And that’s been our government’s plan in regards to nuclear war since the beginning of the Cold War.

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Martha Stewart Will Definitely Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Martha Stewart Will Definitely Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

I have always been a big fan of Martha Stewart.  I know, sometimes she does stuff like gluing moss on lampshades which causes you to wonder if she ever uses that lamp and why it doesn’t catch fire, and rolling grapes in goose liver pate sounds like it won’t be on my bucket list, but let’s put those things aside for a moment and talk about how Martha is better prepared than just about anyone to survive the Zombie Apocalypse. And it’s not just because she’s rich.

Please note that, as always, I use the Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor for any type of civil unrest, long-term disaster in which the unprepared are going to want what you’ve carefully stored, and events during which people eagerly await the government’s handouts to rescue them from their Darwinian fates.

But, let’s talk about Martha. I’ve always seen her as a mentor, even though I’ve never had the privilege of meeting her.

She understands the value of a home-cooked meal with every detail from scratch. She grows her own veggies and herbs, maintains orchards, and raises chickens. She can sew, bake, garden, and run a multi-billion dollar business. She’s survived some things that would have driven a lesser woman to her knees. Remember how a few weeks back when I talked about prepper friends, I said that some of them weren’t exactly preppers but would be fantastic neighbors and allies? One word for you: MARTHA.

Here are just a few of the reasons why I’m quite certain that Martha Stewart will survive anything the Zombie Apocalypse could throw at her.

She can cook anything, anywhere.

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Averting the apocalypse: lessons from Costa Rica

Averting the apocalypse: lessons from Costa Rica

Costa Rican centenarian. Photo by Monique QuesadaEarlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled out by economic growth.

In the coming decades, we’ll be able to reduce the carbon intensity of the global economy by about 1.9% per year, if we make heavy investments in clean energy and efficient technology. That’s a lot. But as long as the economy keeps growing by more than that, total emissions are still going to rise. Right now we’re ratcheting up global GDP by 3% per year, which means we’re headed for trouble.

If we want to have any hope of averting catastrophe, we’re going to have to do something about our addiction to growth. This is tricky, because GDP growth is the main policy objective of virtually every government on the planet. It lies at the heart of everything we’ve been told to believe about how the economy should work: that GDP growth is good, that it’s essential to progress, and that if we want to improve human wellbeing and eradicate poverty around the world, we need more of it. It’s a powerful narrative. But is it true?

Maybe not. Take Costa Rica. A beautiful Central American country known for its lush rainforests and stunning beaches, Costa Rica proves that achieving high levels of human wellbeing has very little to do with GDP and almost everything to do with something very different.

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Financial Problems: The Most Likely Disaster to Strike Anyone

Financial Problems: The Most Likely Disaster to Strike Anyone

Preppers think about a lot of doomy, gloomy stuff about various types of apocalypses. After all, disaster is everywhere.

We watch the spread of pandemics, like the pneumonic plague and Ebola. We prepare for hurricanesand wildfires. We keep our eye on events that could turn into episodes of civil unrest, watch the weather for pending snow storms, and have kits to see us through power outages. Every prepper knows about the terrifying threat of an EMP and many of us are well versed in what to do in case of a nuclear strike.

But, there is ONE major disaster that is the most likely to befall any of us at some point in our lives and it isn’t zombies, North Koreans, or the plague.

It’s financial problems.

You may be currently having this issue right now. Maybe you don’t make enough money. Maybe the primary breadwinner has lost his or her job. Maybe someone has massive medical expenses. Maybe there is some other epic expense that you never saw coming.

It doesn’t matter how it happens – it just matters that you see it as something for which you need to prepare. Financially stability is one of the most important preparations you can make.

There are 3 keys to surviving financial problems.

Financially stability doesn’t come from being wealthy. In fact, you can make a million dollars in a year but if you spend a million and one dollars, you aren’t really financially stable.

Instead, financial stability comes from being able to dial back your spending if necessary and deal with a monetary emergency. It comes from being able to pay your bills and have some money left over. It comes from being prepared for that rainy day that we all hope will never happen.

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End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

End Games: the Apocalyptic Trope That Swallowed the World

Photo by Mikey | CC BY 2.0

Everywhere you look these days, you see the trope: the “end of the world” is nigh from a nuclear war. You see it in somber headlines, in weighty punditry, even in throwaway jokes in the middle of, say, a TV review: “Looks like the BBC finally has a comedy hit — just as the world is about to blow up!” Ha ha. The current situation with North Korea is being portrayed as if it’s a reboot of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with two massively armed superpowers on the brink of all-out global conflagration.

But putting aside the entirely context-less hype and fear-mongering of our media and political elites, even if there were some kind of war between the US and North Korea, it would not remotely lead to anything like the “end of the world.” The US has thousands of immediately launchable nuclear weapons; North Korea has, er, none. And even if you believe Pyongyang’s propaganda (and if you swallow it about their nuclear weapons program, why not believe their BS about the happy workers’ paradise they have there?), you’re still left with the fact that North Korea might be able to put a weapon on a missile at some point in the future. OK, then they could possibly lob this missile (or heck, two or three of them, maybe) in the direction of the United States – which, we assume, would just stand back and watch this happen, despite having North Korea absolutely blanketed with surveillance and having the ability to destroy any launcher the instant it reared skyward. And then North Korea would be obliterated by a US retaliation.

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Korean War Part II: Why It’s Probably Going To Happen

Korean War Part II: Why It’s Probably Going To Happen

Though a lot of people in my line of work (alternative economic and geopolitical analysis) tend to be accused of “doom mongering,” I have to say personally I am not a big believer in “doom.” At least, not in the way that the accusation insinuates. I don’t believe in apocalypse, Armageddon or the end of the world, nor do I even believe, according to the evidence, that a global nuclear conflict is upon us. In fact, it annoys me that so many people seem desperate to imagine those conclusions whenever a crisis event takes shape.

I think the concept of “apocalypse” is rather lazy — unless we are talking about a fantastical movie scenario, like a meteor the size of Kentucky or Michelle Obama’s Adam’s apple hurtling towards the Earth. Human civilization is more likely to change in the face of crisis rather than end completely.

I do believe in massive sea changes in societies and political dynamics. I believe in the fall of nations and empires. I believe in this because I have seen it perpetually through history. What I see constant evidence of is that many of these sea changes are engineered by establishment elitists in government and finance. What I see is evidence of organized psychopathy and an agenda for total centralization of power. When I stumble upon the potential for economic disaster or war, I always ask myself “what is the narrative being sold to the public, what truth is it distracting us from and who REALLY benefits from the calamity.”

The saying “all wars are banker wars” is not an unfair generalization — it is a safe bet.

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Prepping Lives Of The Rich & Famous: “Far Away From All The Issues Of The World”

Prepping Lives Of The Rich & Famous: “Far Away From All The Issues Of The World”

It used to be that the term “doomsday prepper” evoked a certain visual of an ultra-conservative, bearded woodsman with slightly less than stellar hygiene practices living in the middle of no where with an arsenal of weaponry and a sufficient hoard of dried and canned food to live for years.  But recently that all seems to be changing.  And whether the election of Trump was the catalyst that drove the world’s rich to start prepping or simply allowed them to open up about being preppers all along, one thing is certain, “prepping” is growing in popularity among America’s billionaires.

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Evan Osnos takes a look at some of the super-rich that are taking extreme measures to prepare for the apocalypse.  One such wealthy prepper is Silicon Valley’s Reddit CEO, Steve Huffman, who admits that he went so far as to get corrective eye surgery, not for convenience or appearance, but bacause “If the world ends…getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass…without them, I’m fucked.”

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”

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It’s A Retail Apocalypse: Sears, Macy’s And The Limited Are All Closing Stores

It’s A Retail Apocalypse: Sears, Macy’s And The Limited Are All Closing Stores

retail-apocalypse-public-domainIt has only been two weeks since Christmas, and already we are witnessing a stunning bloodbath of store closings.  Macy’s shocked the retail industry by announcing that they will be closing about 100 stores.  The downward spiral of Sears hit another landmark when it was announced that another 150 Sears and Kmart stores would be shutting down.  And we have just learned that The Limited is immediately closing all stores nationwide.  If the U.S. economy is doing just fine, then why are we experiencing such a retail apocalypse?  All over America, vast shopping malls that were once buzzing with eager consumers now resemble mausoleums.  We have never seen anything quite like this in our entire history, and nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.

Not too long ago I walked into a Macy’s, and it was eerily quiet.  I stumbled around the men’s department looking for something to buy, but I was deeply disappointed in what was being offered.  After some time had passed, an employee finally noticed me and came over to help, but they didn’t have anything that I was looking for.

And it is a sad thing, because over the past several years when I have gone into Macy’s looking to spend money, most of the time I have come out of there without spending a penny.  Macy’s has made some very bad decisions recently, and I am hoping that they can still turn things around.  But for the moment, they are closing stores and cutting jobs.  The following comes from the New York Times

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Trumpocalypse? Suddenly Liberals Are The Ones Stockpiling Food, Guns And Emergency Supplies

Trumpocalypse? Suddenly Liberals Are The Ones Stockpiling Food, Guns And Emergency Supplies

prepper-photo-by-nomadic-lass-on-flickrNow that the shoe is on the other foot, many liberals all over America have suddenly become extremely interested in prepping.  Fearing that a Trump presidency could rapidly evolve into a “Trumpocalypse”, a significant number of leftists are now stockpiling food, guns and emergency supplies.  In fact, even though many had expected a sharp drop in gun sales following Trump’s victory, what actually happened is that fear of what is coming under Trump pushed background checks for gun sales to an all-time record high on Black Friday.  The election of Donald Trump has awakened the left to a degree that we haven’t seen in decades, and some on the left are embracing hardcore survivalism without any apologies.

What is ironic about all of this is that on the other end of the political spectrum interest in prepping is probably the lowest that it has ever been in the history of the modern prepper movement.  A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how it was like “a nuclear bomb went off in the prepping community“, and nothing has changed since that time.

In fact, since I originally wrote that article we have gotten some hard numbers that show how dramatically optimism about the future has surged among those on the right.

Just before the election, CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey found that only 15 percent of all Republicans believed that the economy would improve over the next year, but after the election that number skyrocketed all the way up to 74 percent.

But among Democrats it is a different story altogether.  That same CNBC survey found that optimism about the economy on the left fell by more than half after the election.  At this point, it is sitting at just 16 percent.

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The End Of America?: 13 Catastrophic Events Which Could Soon Lead To An American Apocalypse

The End Of America?: 13 Catastrophic Events Which Could Soon Lead To An American Apocalypse

Apocalyptic - Public DomainIs the strongest and most powerful nation on the planet headed for an apocalypse which will bring it to its knees?  We live in a world that is becoming increasingly unstable, and apocalyptic themes have become very common in books, movies, television shows and video games.  It is almost as if there is an unconscious understanding on a societal level that something very big and very bad is coming, even if the vast majority of the population cannot specifically identify what that is going to be.  Last week, the Global Challenges Foundation released a new report entitled “Global Catastrophic Risks 2016” in which they discussed various apocalyptic events that they believe could wipe out more than 10 percent of the population of our planet, and they warned that these types of events “are more likely than we intuitively think”

Sebastian Farquhar, director at the Global Priorities Project, told the Press Association: “There are some things that are on the horizon, things that probably won’t happen in any one year but could happen, which could completely reshape our world and do so in a really devastating and disastrous way.

“History teaches us that many of these things are more likely than we intuitively think. Many of these risks are changing and growing as technologies change and grow and reshape our world. But there are also things we can do about the risks.”

According to this new report, we are five times more likely to die from the various apocalyptic catastrophes that they analyzed than we are from a car accident.

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Blowback Denial, Climate Denial, and Apocalypse

Sanders Trump 6f237

Last week Donald Trump suggested something Bernie Sanders would never dare: getting rid of NATO. I took some time to read people’s comments and tweets online about it, and a huge number seemed to believe that NATO and the U.S. military have been performing a service for Europe, and that it’s time for Europe to pay its own bills. But will someone explain to me what the service is?

The United States dragged NATO into a — thus far — over-14-year-long war on the people of Afghanistan that has turned a country in poor shape into hell on earth, compounding the damage inflicted by U.S. (and Soviet) policies since the 1970s.

The United States dragged European nations into a disastrous war in Iraq in 2003, without NATO. But when Belgium allowed a prosecution of U.S. commander in Iraq Tommy Franks to move forward, Donald Rumsfeld threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Brussels. Franks’ apparent crimes suddenly became part of a noble and legal humanitarian effort.

The United States and France used NATO to destroy Libya in 2011 and proliferate weapons across the region. The United States and Turkey have been compounding the chaos by generating reasons for NATO to exist in Syria. And perhaps NATO headquarters views the wars that created ISIS, and the U.S. support for Al Qaeda in Syria in just those terms. But to an ordinary observer, a war on terrorism that continues to increase terrorism has a fundamental flaw.

Former CIA Bin Laden Unit Chief Michael Scheuer says the more the U.S. fights terrorism the more it creates terrorism. U.S. Lt. General Michael Flynn, who quit as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, says blowing people up with missiles is generating more blowback, not less. The CIA’s own report says drone killing is counterproductive.

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Field Notes to Life During the Apocalypse

Field Notes to Life During the Apocalypse

shellrig

Shell’s Arctic drilling rig. Photo: Greenpeace.

When the apocalypse arrived no one knew it could be so seductive. In the Pacific Northwest global warming has meant winter days fit for lounging outside in t-shirts. Wildfires feeding on drought-stricken forests are producing surreal tangerine-orange sunlight. The heat has wreaked havoc on everything from snowpack to marine estuaries, but it is also resulting in a longer growing season and greater crop diversification.

This is not to put smiley faces on the four horseman. Humanity, after taking over the driver’s seat of evolution, has crashed it into the brick wall of industrial civilization.

Nonetheless, the apocalyptic world is what we make of it. We are now in a salvage operation where our goals are to recuperate and regenerate the disappearing world.

Blame cannot be spread equally. The culprits, the states, corporations, and institutions, are so few they can be named. For decades they have worked feverishly to block any meaningful transition away from a fossil-fuel economy. In 2015 atmospheric carbon dioxide blew past400 parts per million, the highest level in the last 23 million years, and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. The old world, formed over hundreds of millions of years, is ending because of the sixth great extinction, deforestation, collapse of fisheries, pollution, sea-level rise, wildfires, invasive species, and coral-reef die-offs.

 

The new world is the “anthropocene biosphere.” Some scientists say our impact is so profound humans have initiated just the third stage of evolution in 3.8 billion years. This includes mass loss of biodiversity and homogenization of what remains. Carried on the arteries of commerce, “neobiota” like cats, rats, and mussels are so prolific they’ll be immortalized in the fossil record. We’ve broken the “photosynthetic energy barrier” with oil coal and natural gas. We have colonized or modified every ecological niche. We have reset evolution through industrial and monoculture farming, pollution, breeding, genetic technologies, and emerging synthetic biology. 

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Beyond Extinction: Transition to post-capitalism is inevitable

Beyond Extinction: Transition to post-capitalism is inevitable

In Margaret Atwood’s powerful essay on the reality of climate change — and its implications for the future of oil-dependent industrial civilization — she tells two vastly distinct stories of our future.

The first is a tale of dystopia — a future so bleak, it would make Hollywood moguls looking for the next science fiction blockbuster of action-packed (post)apocalypse salivate with anticipation. Here, Atwood tells a story of human failure: of short-sighted choices based on fatal addiction to business-as-usual, and an egoistic hubris rooted in centuries of globalisation.

The post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max: Fury Road (credit: Warner)

In this scenario, we largely ignore the overwhelming evidence of climate change, and the result is that industrial civilization enters a period of protracted collapse, fuelled by accelerating war, famine, and natural disasters.

The second is a vision of utopia — a collectivist dream-world in which everybody works together, harnessing the best of human ingenuity across society, economics, politics and technology, to peacefully restructure the fundamentals of human existence. Here, Atwood tells a story of human success: of far-sighted decisions based on confronting the follies of business-as-usual, and by embracing our unity as a species.

Image of a future techno-utopia by Staszek Marek

In this scenario, we act on the overwhelming evidence of climate change, and the result is that industrial civilization enters a period of carefully calibrated transition to a techno-utopian post-capitalist, post-materialist infrastructure, avoiding the worst of today’s scientific warnings.

Crossroads

Of course, both these scenarios are extremes, but there is a purpose to such extremes. Atwood uses the power of story to help us awaken to the starkness — and gravity — of the choice we now face: a choice, effectively, between hell and heaven on earth.

And Atwood is spot on when she notes that this is not just about climate change.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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