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Is the United Kingdom on the Road to Economic Collapse?

October 4, 2022

Is the United Kingdom on the Road to Economic Collapse?

There’s trouble across the pond and it’s only going to get worse as winter quickly approaches.

While it’s most fashionable to talk about the dire economic situation currently taking place in the US, the situation in Europe is so much worse.

There are talks of massive energy bill hikes and even the lights literally going out across Europe. This is the product of the toxic combination of a misguided sanctions war against Russia and Europe’s decision to transition towards inefficient green energy sources.

As a result, folks across the pond are going to be in for a rough winter.

If you’re an America, you should feel safe knowing that our situation could be much worse…at least for now.

Now for residents of the United Kingdom, that’s a different story.

The UK is now facing inflation levels that haven’t been seen in decades. On top of that, energy and food prices have been soaring lately.

Liz Truss, the UK’s new prime minister, is now tasked with trying to get the country’s economic house in order.

Truss is currently proposing a plan to cut taxes (good), while raising spending (bad). It’s basically a moderate form of Keynesianism, which does not resolve any of the UK’s structural economic problems.

Instead of cutting spending and red tape, while also getting the UK’s monetary house in order, Truss’s new economic proposal worsens the country’s fiscal situation and will only further ignite inflation.

What’s taking place in the UK is not unique to the island. Most economies in the West are over-taxed, over-regulated, and feature central banks who have no regard for monetary restraint.

It’s small wonder why these countries are in such dire straits.

Will the UK be one of the first high-profile victims of the economic doom spiral engulfing the West?

Check out George Gammon’s most recent video on why there’s nothing but bad things coming to the island nation.

P.S. – The West is experiencing an existential economic crisis.

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

October 4, 2022

If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

Image Credit: TRT News

Right about now, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. With all the chaos out there. This is the Age of Too Much Chaos. Every day brings a new catastrophe, it seems, and with it, an ever-mounting sense of dread, urgency, anger, and helplessness — the weird, upsetting feelings of now. End Times Vibes.

How to make sense of all this? I bet you’re struggling, and that’s OK, because me and a friend are here to help.

My friend? He just gave the most important speech of the 21st century, containing the most crucial idea of the 21st century — only nobody was listening.

I know, I know. You doubt me. Don’t worry, by the end of this, I guarantee — you won’t. Instead, your mind will be blown.

Here’s what he has to say.

We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.

The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet.

Got that? Let’s keep going.

Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning. People are hurting — with the most vulnerable suffering the most.

Hey, he sounds like a lot like…you, Umair, I bet you’re thinking. So who is my friend? Well, he’s not really my friend. He’s the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Those are his opening remarks to the General Assembly, this year. Lol, and you think you have bad mornings.

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

Escalation: Recent Events Suggest Mounting Economic Danger

September 18, 2022

Escalation: Recent Events Suggest Mounting Economic Danger

A common refrain from people who are critical of alternative economists is that we have been predicting crisis for so long that “eventually we will be right.” These are generally people who don’t understand the nature of economic decline – It’s like an avalanche that builds over time, then breaks and quickly escalates as it flows down the mountain. What they don’t grasp is that they are in the middle of an economic collapse RIGHT NOW, and they just can’t see it because they have been acclimated to the presence of the snow and cold.

Economic decline is a process that takes many years, and while you might get an event like the market crash of 1929 or the crash of 2008, these moments of panic are nothing more than the wreckage left behind by the great wave of tumbling ice that everyone should have seen coming far in advance, but they refused.

In 2022 the job of warning people is far easier than it used to be because we are well past the midpoint of the process of decline. But, believe it or not, I still get people today who claim that we analysts are “doom mongers.” The power of willful ignorance is truly amazing. It’s enough to make a person blind to stagflationary crisis, supply chain disruptions, quickly inflating prices, stock market carnage, bond market instability, record consumer debt, and international conflict.

At this point, I think if a person can’t see the dangers ahead they are probably a waste of time and space and are destined to be buried in the ice; there’s nothing that can be done for them…

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

5 Reasons Not to Predict the End of the World

September 17, 2022

5 Reasons Not to Predict the End of the World

“Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

— Haruki Murakami

So you want to talk about the end of the world without sounding like a crank?

Rule #1 should be: Don’t predict when it will happen.

A lot of the writing on this site has to do with the collapse of civilization (and what that means). Following Jem Bendell, author of the now (in)famous “Deep Adaptation paper”, I anticipate “inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe, and possible extinction”.

Of course, all civilizations collapse. And all species die. Eventually, everything ends. But we are now in a process of acceleration toward that end. When will this happen? Who knows. The best answer I have read is “sooner rather than later”–which doesn’t really say much.

I have noticed, though, that a lot of people who are in the Doomer and Post-Doom communities are not so circumspect when it comes to putting a date on the end of the world.

Here’s five reasons why you shouldn’t put a date on the end of the world.

1. You’re wrong. (Collapse is complex.)

The collapse of any civilization is a complex phenomenon. Our global industrial-capitalist civilization is incredibly complex. And it stands to reason that the collapse of that civilization will be complex as well. And that makes predicting it that much harder.

I think some of the tendency to over-simplify collapse is driven by an unconscious desire for control. We feel out of control in our lives. Contemplating collapse only amplifies this. Imagining a simplified collapse gives us a sense of control. A false sense. The desire for control is a big part of the reason people deny collapse. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that we would see vestiges of this desire in the doomer and post-doom communities.

When you talk about collapse as something simple, you’re wrong. Because it’s complex.

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

This Winter, Collapse Is Coming to Britain

September 5, 2022

Britain Is Standing at the Edge of Social Collapse’s Abyss — And It’s About to Jump

Image via Mark Thompson on Twitter

These days, my British friends ask me the same question, with the same faint tinge of terror in their voices. “So. How bad is it going to be?” What they mean is…well, let me try to explain why they’re asking.

Right about now, Britain’s setting records. Not good ones. It’s the rich world’s worst performing country in a stunning multitude of regards — falling incomes, crashing economy, skyrocketing inflation, dwindling confidence and optimism. Twice as many people died in Britain this summer of Covid than they did last summer. They were mostly elderly people, and that’s a parable for what modern Britain’s become: a stunningly cruel, indifferent, embittered society, inured to the grim reality of its own collapse.

Britain is the world’s preeminent bellwether of social collapse at this point in history. No nation in the rich world — and barely any in the poor one, really — come close. The rest of the world is dusting itself off after a rough few years, and restarting the engines of progress. But in Britain? Well, the engines of regress are pumping. Literally — sewage into the rivers. What kind of country wants to cover itself in its own — never mind.

For some reason that the world can’t quite fathom, Britain has decided to turn itself a kind of Neo Victorian dystopia, by way of American style ultra libertarianism. Think about how baffling and strange this really is for a moment. The nation that was renowned for its NHS and BBC, which invented the idea of the public park and the modern public library and museum. Now? It’s the kind of place with would make Dickens entire cast of villains, from Uriah Heep to Fagin, cackle in morbid glee.

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

Your Window Of Opportunity To Get Prepared Before The Catastrophic Events Of 2023 Is Rapidly Closing

September 1, 2022

Your Window Of Opportunity To Get Prepared Before The Catastrophic Events Of 2023 Is Rapidly Closing


I don’t know how I could say it any more clearly.  At this moment, the vast majority of the population is completely and utterly unprepared for what is ahead of us.  Every day, there are more signs in the news that global events are starting to spiral out of control, but instead of using this summer to get prepared much of the population is partying instead.  This greatly frustrates me, because I have been working extremely hard to try to sound the alarm.  People should be using the window of opportunity that we have this summer to take action, because the months ahead of us will be filled with famine, war, pestilence, natural disasters and severe economic troubles.  Summer officially ends in late September, and I believe that global events will accelerate greatly throughout the remainder of 2022 and into the early stages of 2023.

Most people always think that they have more time to prepare.

But as the people of Mississippi’s largest city recently found out, the opportunity to get prepared can end very abruptly…

Mississippi’s largest city has run out of water indefinitely, leaving 180,000 locals unable to drink from their taps, flush toilets, or shower.

The ailing OB Curtis water plant in Jackson was taken offline after it was overwhelmed by recent flooding, which destroyed backup systems put in place to relieve the elderly plant’s main treatment machinery.

Now, the capital city that is home to 150,000 people and 30,000 surrounding communities are pressed to conserve their rations as officials begin to distribute cases of water bottles in a ‘massively complicated logistical task.’

We are being told that it could take up to four months to completely repair the water plant.

So what will all those people do as they wait?

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

What Will An EU Economic Collapse Look Like?

August 28, 2022

What Will An EU Economic Collapse Look Like?

Riding the Zeitgeist: A theory of change

August 26, 2022

Riding the Zeitgeist: A theory of change

‘What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist‘ George Bernard Shaw

The word ‘zeitgeist’, originating with philosopher Hegel, is the descriptor for the spirit of a time. In 2019, a zeitgeist coalesced around the urgent need for climate action, and climate change became an acceptable and predominant point of conversation. There were many influencing factors – Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, international convention upon international convention, science upon science – but no singular reason for why, in 2019, just about everyone started talking climate. Unconsciously and sub-consciously, this zeitgeist had taken shape through liminal osmosis.

This same zeitgeist now propels big business and governments into ‘climate action’. With support from large sections of the climate-environment movement, techno-fixes that boost GDP and aim to maintain business as usual, are being rolled out under the guise of a ‘renewables’ transition. This ‘spirit of our times’ is a fraught fusion of progress and climate action, failing to recognise that one is the cause for the other.

Zeitgeists, by nature, are ethereal, multifarious, and ill-disciplined creatures, not easily tamed, nor dominated. The current ‘climate action’ zeitgeist, and its fractured nature, is not a fait accompli, but a malleable phenomenon prone to influence and change. As ‘progress’ cannot be sustained and ‘green hyper-growth’ will only destroy the Earth faster than business as usual, the spirt of our times is amenable to shifting – to becoming one less fanciful, and more closely matching reality.

Current zeitgeists now defining the beginning of the 21st century are in hot contention, not least because the era of progress has ended, and the #GreatDescent, well and truly begun…

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

Physical Preps and Tools

August 22, 2022

Physical Preps and Tools

This is the article about “stuff” you can buy. 
​
What we are facing is not going to be short term, and it’s not going to affect one small area. The duration is forever. It will affect literally everything, in progressively compounding ways. First we’ll go through ever-increasing, and unending, scarcity and downscaling. People everywhere are going to be disabused of their previous expectations of abundance within a few months. The decline of globalized industrial civilization will lead to a collapse of the global economy. We are at the cusp of rapid and severely disruptive changes. The infrastructure of our civilization will break down, giving rise to a predicament that will swamp the government’s ability to manage. It will lead to widespread disorientation, anxiety, and social breakdown. Eventually within your area grocery stores won’t exist, hospitals won’t be open, firefighters and police won’t come to your aid, etc. And this decline will happen far faster than people expect.
There will always be a continuum of best practices that give you a higher probability of survival. As I’ve written about before, the realistic absolute best would probably be some intentional community of highly skilled people on a great amount of land (adjoining a national/state park or BLM land on 3 sides maybe) and having the ability to grow enough food for all of those people year-round, as well as provide your own top-notch security. In such a situation (with a lot more expanding of ideas), you’d probably have the best chance of surviving pretty much anything besides all-out nuclear holocaust. On the other end of the spectrum is someone who lives a normal life and has a few extra things they think could be useful in an emergency situation in the garage or the closet, but who hasn’t thought or planned beyond that and has no contingency plans.

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

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

August 19, 2022

Why Complex Systems Collapse Faster

All civilizations collapse. The challenge is how to slow it down enough to prolong our happiness.

Dennis Jarvis
Temple of the Great Jaguar, GuatemalaDENNIS JARVIS

During the first century of our era, the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius that life would be much happier if things would only decline as slowly as they grow. Unfortunately, as Seneca noted, “increases are of sluggish growth but the way to ruin is rapid.” We may call this universal rule the Seneca effect.

Seneca’s idea that “ruin is rapid” touches something deep in our minds. Ruin, which we may also call “collapse,” is a feature of our world. We experience it with our health, our job, our family, our investments. We know that when ruin comes, it is unpredictable, rapid, destructive, and spectacular. And it seems to be impossible to stop until everything that can be destroyed is destroyed.

The same is true of civilizations. Not one in history has lasted forever: Why should ours be an exception? Surely you’ve heard of the climatic “tipping points,” which mark, for example, the start of the collapse of Earth’s climate system. The result in this case might be to propel us to a different planet where it is not clear that humankind could survive. It is hard to imagine a more complete kind of ruin.

So, can we avoid collapse, or at least reduce its damage? That generates another question: What causes collapse in the first place? At the time of Seneca, people were happy just to note that collapses do, in fact, occur. But today we have robust scientific models called “complex systems.” Here is a picture showing the typical behavior of a collapsing system, calculated using a simple mathematical model (see Figure 1).

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

Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?

August 17, 2022

Is Civilization on the Brink of Collapse?

 

We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last

August 14, 2022

We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last

The archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Missouri, are sobering reminders of our fate.

Doomsday Selfie – by Mr. Fish

CAHOKIA MOUNDS, Missouri: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure—-known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

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

WEF Playbook: Collapse Sri Lanka Today, the West Tomorrow?

August 11, 2022

WEF Playbook: Collapse Sri Lanka Today, the West Tomorrow?

Unless you’re reading this from Belarus or North Korea, safely outside of the WEF clutches (for now), your state is losing its sovereignty right in front of your eyes.

Here’s a perfect case study from Sri Lanka.

You might’ve seen sensationalist coverage of the riots in Western media, but likely none that deeply explores the underlying cancer that’s metastasized on the island.

Social unrest is the symptom; technocratic social engineering is the disease.

Sri Lankan gas prices are through the roof; food is scarce; the government has defaulted on its crushing debts; the ruling fat cats, who drink and gamble while the country crumbles around them, have only gotten richer in the interim (sound familiar?).

In response to the crisis, the overlords have opportunistically treated Sri Lankans to digital fuel passes via QR codes to ration supplies:

 

The economy didn’t magically implode on its own. Rather it’s the culmination of years of self-serving mismanagement by the ruling family and intentional, calculated manipulation from the global technocrats at the WEF and its appendages.

Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for 12% of Sri Lanka’s GDP. Millions of Sri Lankans depended on the influx of visitors for their livelihoods. Brutal COVID-19 lockdowns eliminated essentially that entire economic sector overnight.

To compensate, the proposed solution – at the behest of “Sri Lankan NGO society and civil society” – was to eliminate imports of foreign agricultural fertilizer and pesticides. President Rajapaksa, of the ruling family, forced a sudden switch to all-organic farming.

Organic farming is optimal for human and environmental health – but, in this case, the government made no effort to train farmers or to provide viable alternative natural fertilizers.

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

Collapse Won’t Just Reset Society, It Will Destroy It

August 6, 2022

Collapse Won’t Just Reset Society, It Will Destroy It

I

The collapse of techno-industrial civilization is likely to occur on the present business-as-usual mode of social functioning, probably by 2030, but there are scenarios where it could be before Christmas 2022, if the West and Russia slide into nuclear war; that is our position, supported here. This article is a response to Adam Van Buskirk’s paper “Collapse Won’t Reset Society” (Van Buskirk, 2022), who argues that collapse does not lead to the Mad Max/zombie apocalypse scenario, even in the case of all-out nuclear war. We could not disagree more; hence this response. But the Van Buskirk article is typical of “normie” responses to the confrontation with civilizational collapse, so it is instructive to critique his article as a sample of a general pattern of thought. Indeed, the senior member of this duo was reminded of the famous record album cover by the English rock group Super Tramp, Crisis, What Crisis? (1975), featuring a guy laying back relaxing in a deck chair, under an umbrella, with chaos and destruction all around him. He is oblivion to the dark fate that is rushing to engulf him. Most people, including academics and general members of the chattering class, are like that guy in the deck chair.

According to Van Buskirk “collapse” (a term which will need to be explicated below) and “the threat of imminent destruction” is a “thrilling possibility” to some people from both progressive and conservative groups, including “backwoods fundamentalists, deep green radicals, apocalyptic cults, and pessimistic online doomers.” That is indeed true, with “collapse” being a hot topic on YouTube, discussed daily at sites such as Canadian Prepper, The Angry Prepper, The Prepared Homestead, Ice Age Farmer and The Modern Survivalist (“Ferfal”), to name but a few. This selection, by the way, is highly racially diverse, so doomsday is not an exclusive preoccupation of “Whiteness.”

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

Is a Partial Collapse Possible? — Part 2

August 4, 2022

After exploring the possible ways the West could (continue to) collapse in Part 1, let’s turn our mental gaze towards the East, and see what are the global implications of such a shift in centers of power — if there are any…

However, it will be China who will take the brunt of the damage made to the world’s production facilities, as it was producing a myriad of goods for Europe and for the States to consume and built their products from. Even if the West would enter a decade long depression though, China would still recover after going through its own round of deepest recession in living memory. They would eventually reorganize their economy to fit the needs of the BRICS states, serving them with products instead of Europe and the US. They could do this on the back of a yet to be released common currency of the block (replacing the Dollar in international trade) and based on resources suddenly becoming relatively cheap and abundant, as the West would consume a fraction of what it used to.

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

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