{"id":4116,"date":"2015-01-05T19:29:51","date_gmt":"2015-01-06T00:29:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4116"},"modified":"2015-01-05T19:29:51","modified_gmt":"2015-01-06T00:29:51","slug":"forecast-2015-life-in-the-breakdown-lane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=4116","title":{"rendered":"Forecast 2015 \u2014 Life in the Breakdown Lane"},"content":{"rendered":"<h1 class=\"title\"><a title=\"Forecast 2015 \u2014 Life in the Breakdown Lane\" href=\"http:\/\/kunstler.com\/other-stuff\/forecast-2015\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Forecast 2015 \u2014 Life in the Breakdown Lane<\/a><\/h1>\n<p>Don\u2019t look back \u2014 something might be gaining on you,\u201d Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the US economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood\u2026!<\/p>\n<p>\u00a1<em>No hay problema<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one \u2014 with the exception of a few \u201cdoomer\u201d cranks \u2014 wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep. The staggering credulity this represents would be a fascinating case study in itself if there were not so many other things that demand our attention right now. Let\u2019s just write this phenomenon off as the diminishing returns of career log-rolling in politics, finance, media, and academia. All the professional \u201cthought-leaders\u201d pitch in to support the \u201chologram\u201d of eternal progress that issues their paychecks and bonuses. This culture of pervasive racketeering that we\u2019ve engineered has made us obtuse. The particular brand of stupidity on display also points to another signal vanity of our time: the conviction that if you measure things enough, you can control them.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forecast 2015 \u2014 Life in the Breakdown Lane Don\u2019t look back \u2014 something might be gaining on you,\u201d Satchel Paige famously warned. For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2090,150],"class_list":["post-4116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-civilization-collapse","tag-collapse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4117,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4116\/revisions\/4117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}