Domes & Embedded Energy

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on SUN4Living on April 13, 2014

Interview: Monolithic Domes Founder David South

https://soundcloud.com/doomstead-diner/david-south-monolithic-domes

Eddie did some chronicling of the daily learning that went on at Monolithic Domes, in retrospect now that the Workshop is over I thought I might take some time tonight to look at the Bigger Picture with respect to Domes in general, and the Monolithic Method in particular.

Wednesday’s workshopp was particularly rich in information of sorts I did not have specific knowledge of before, parameters for building ferrocement domes and making them solid and resilient on the engineering level. A remarkably few people are expert in this stuff, and David South has more experience with more Domes up globally than anybody else. If you want to know domes of this type, this is the go-to guy. Not just for Doomers, but for everyone from the United Nations to various Saudi Sheiks and the NASCAR folks too.

The Monolithics though are quite energy intensive in the building, and at least for the larger scale domes need quite a bit of high tech materials and equipment to put up. Not outrageous when you consider the scale of some of these domes and the fact a crew of 5-10 people can put one up, but still quite a bit of stuff that will be hard if not impossible to come by in the not too distant future. That includes particularly the polyurethane foam that forms the initial dome structure, the Dome Balloon Vinyl skin, the Basalt rebar and the pumps used for spraying the Foam and the Shotcrete.

The fact construction of the larger domes depends on these materials and equipment does not diminish their utility NOW though, while they still can be constructed at a reasonable price. The ferrocement structure itself can last a very long time, providing good shelter for years to come. So it makes sense to build such structures now while you can, embedding the energy into the structure, as opposed to burning it simply for the purpose of willy-nilly Happy Motoring.

Such large Open structures have a multitude of uses as well, and given they are resistant to disasters such as Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Floods, Earthquakes and Wildfires they make a lot of sense where Climate Change is a preeminent problem. They are quite airtight as well, which could be important in scenarios where Nuclear Fallout is a problem. The structures can be purposed for indoor intensive food production through Hydroponics, Aquaponics and Aquaculture; in fact in the next year the Monolithic folks are planning on putting up a Commercial Facility for just this sort of production on the campus of the Monolithic Institute.

The inability to acquire and use some of the tools and materials that enable the construction of the really BIG DOMES does not eliminate the potential for building quite similar domes on a somewhat smaller scale utilizing similar methods, and during the week here the Diners attending the course have been Brainstorming on ways to adapt the building techniques to more locally available materials, renewable structural components like Bamboo, and substituting Human Labor for operations currently done with the aid of fossil fuel powered machines. Although the 100′+ Domes possible with the Monolithic Method aren’t possible with such materials, it is probable you could construct Domes in the 50′ range utililiIng natural fibers, adobe or cobb, and finishing with concrete reinforced with various materials either scavenged or grown. Such smaller domes would be quite capable of doing the same things the larger ones do, you would just need to construct more of them. We hope to begin experimenting with some of these ideas over the months to come and we will report more on this on the SUN Website.

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A primary area we are looking at in terms of utilizing the Monolithic methods for Housing in the near future is for providing Affordable Rental Housing in the $150/week range. With many people descending from the Middle Class into the ranks of the Working Poor, the need for this type of housing is apparent, and the Domes provide a means to build this up in a modular fashion without taking on a lot of debt.

The fundamental weakness as far as the Monolithic method is concerned is its dependence on the high tech material used for creating the Balloon used as a framework/scaffold for spraying polyurethane foam and hanging rebar and either spraying “shotcrete” or trowling on concrete by hand. The high tech materials are likely to become unavailable as the economic system further deteriorates, so the ability to build the domes using these items will eventually disappear.

The loss of the high tech materials doesn’t make the construction of ferrocement domes impossible, there are other methods available for doing this, at least on the small-medium scale. The largest domes in the 100′+ category likely become impossible to build without access to these materials. However, the basic construction materials of aggregate and rebar will likely be available a good deal longer, and can be used to construct both smaller domes as well as other types of structures.

Given these parameters, the sooner we get to building the larger domes the better, and constructed with Basalt Rebar (another high tech product), these domes will have an extremely long lifespan before they fail. Because concrete is porous to water, eventually using Steel Rebar for reinforcement this will rust and fail, after which the concrete will eventually crack and begin to collapse. Once the integrity of the Dome structure is compromised, the rest of the dome becomes rubble shortly after that.

Why is it important to get the domes up now while we still can? First, because of their utility and efficiency right now, second because as shelter, they will last a whole lot longer than the current McMansions we are using for shelter. They are also multi-purpose, with the open space of the interior useful for indoor growing methods, which will likely become increasingly important as climate change continues to wreak havoc with conventional farming methods.

While the largest domes built using the Monolithic techniques are quite impressive, such large structures really aren’t necessary, and in some cases actually counter-productive. In the case of using them as grow domes for hydroponics or aquaculture, if at some point the water system becomes contaminated you lose an enormous amount of the produce in one shot. On the other hand, if you grow a similar amount through smaller distributed and independent domes, an infection in one system doesn’t affect the other ones, so such a system is more resilient.

In the long term, the domes in the typical size range of 20′ to 60′ in diameter, not all dependent on the high tech materials and equipment that the Monolithic domes depend on. These domes are the most easily constructed by individuals at relatively inexpensive costs, with a variety of materials possible to use in reinforcement as both basalt and steel rebar become less available. Far as Cement and Aggregate are concerned for making Concrete, the limestone is available locally and there is no shortage of sand. What will be difficult of course is moving such heavy stuff around without fuel to run the trucks.

Although the Monolithic Domes once constructed are an extremely energy efficient structure, the materials and methods used to create them represent Embedded Energy which is available right now, but is unlikely to be available as we move forward into a low available energy world in the future.

Realization that this is the medium to long term case first means that it is worthwhile to build as many of these types of domes as possible now, and make them as long lasting as possible. For this purpose, the “Ecoshell” construction method using just Concrete in conjunction with Basalt Rebar that doesn’t rust can create a dome with the potential of lasting Centuries with no maintenance, and the vinyl balloons used to scaffold the ecoshells can be reused many times. Although these structures lack the insulation values of the Monolithic Domes, alternative means of Insulation can be applied later which may not be as long lasting as polyurethane, but can be periodically renewed from locally available materials. Given the cost of the balloons also, the ability to reuse them many times substantially decreases the cost per building as the number of buildings created w ith it increases.

Monolithic Domes dependence on high tech materials presents a weakness as a long term solution, but are very useful now in the preparation phase and transition to a lower per capita energy world. Moreover, many of the techniques can be adapted to more locally available and renewable materials. Embedding available energy now into these structures can go a long way toward easing the transition off the Fossil Fuel Jones.

What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?

Off the keyboard & microphone of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on April 1, 2014

Discuss this article at the Podcast table inside the Diner

It does look like TSHTF in the world of HFT Algos Gone Wild in the last couple of days. Numerous large Pension funds have filed suit against the entire cartel of TBTF Banks over the rigging of the markets with HFT algorithms.

For the unfamiliar with this nonsense, I have done a short Rant as a primer to get yourself up to speed. Nothing you don;t know if you haven’t followed Zero Hedge the last few years, but the fact it is hitting the civil courts at least and the fact CNBC Pundits are getting all in a tizzy makes it a notable milestone in the collapse of this economic system.

The clearly agitated BATS CEO came out swinging, blasting Katsuyama and Lewis “Shame On You,” for apparently telling the truth of what occurs in the stock ‘market and letting everyone in on it’. The tension grows when he presses Katsuyama on whether he really believes it is rigged… who then erupts “I believe the markets are rigged.. and that you are a part of the rigging.” Then the gloves come off “you wanna do this, let’s do this!” and then it got worse (or better)…

A little snippet from the Rant here:

The latest Hoopla in the financial world is the recent exposure of rigging in the FOREX markets utilizing HFTs, or High Frequency Trading Algorithms. This is nothing really new of course, Zero Hedge has been highlighting the issues with HFTs for years, going back at least as far as the famous Flash Crash of 2010 in the pit of the S&P 500, with the famous call of the tape by Ben Lichtenstein.

Of course, that form of trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange has become pretty much an anachronism now, live Homo Sapiens don’t do the trading waving bundles of money or Stock Certificates at each other most of the time, computers just exchange quotes for buy and sell orders, at clock speeds measured in Nano-seconds.

Even if this was honest trading (which it is not for numerous reasons I will identify here as we go along), obviously the only people who can afford the Supercomputer time to be running this racket are the TBTF Banks and a few mega-large Hedge Funds. J6P individual Investor if he even really does exist anymore simply can’t compete at all in this type of Casino, so if you are betting this way you pretty much are just rolling the dice all the time, trying to out-guess what the folks running the Algos will do based on Newz pronouncements and other stupid variables. Nobody is trading here on the real WORTH of anything, mainly the TBTF banks are just trying to soak the “Muppets”, the backroom name for suckers still gambling their money in this market….

For the rest, listen to the latest Rant…

Frostbite Falls Daily Rant Update

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 30, 2014

Discuss this article at the Podcasts table inside the Diner

Frostbite Falls Daily Rant #21: Ukraine, IMF & Russia Circle Jerk

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/142097059&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

Bonus Tracks: Peak Stupidity, Doom All Around You & Amerikan Hologram

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/141816204&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/137835598&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/140977629&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

Recently I added a new feature to the Doomstead Diner, an Audio “Daily Rant” available for download on MP3, or which you can listen to straight off the Diner Soundcloud account. The Widget for the most recent Daily Rant also appears on the Diner Blog Homepage on the upper right of the Menu Bar. I wrote a prior Plug Post for the Rant, The Frostbite Falls Daily Rant RETURNS back at the end of February when I got rolling with this, so this article is an update on progress after one month of Ranting via mp3 and the Magic of the Internet.

The name Frostbite Falls Daily Rant comes from the title of a regular blog I used to write on Jim Quinn’s The Burning Platform. At the time I wasn’t consumed doing many other Doom related internet tasks, so I was cranking out 3000 word tomes every other day or so, becoming somewhat notorious for being long winded on TBP. LOL.

Anyhow, since starting the Diner, my actual writing time is somewhat less, so I publish just once a week now in my Sunday Brunch article. Just about daily though there is something to rant about on some level of collapse, so since we began our Collapse Cafe Podcasts and Vidcasts I’ve become a bit more conversant with this technology and decided to just do a monologue whenever I have something to rant about. “Daily” is a bit of a misnomer, since really I only have time to do one of them every 2-3 days or so, but it is more often than Weekly. “Bi-Weekly Rant” doesn’t have quite the ring to it that Daily Rant does though, so the name remains “Daily”. Close enough.

So far I’ve recorded around 20 of these Rants, they run anywhere from 5-10 minutes each, nice small packages of Doom to download to your Iphone and listen to on the way to work sitting in traffic on the Schuykill Expressway or while you do your gardening in the backyard. Doomers are so BUSY these days prepping up for Civilization Collapse they often don’t have time to sit down and read 3000 word polemics. LOL.

The topics generally center around the latest in Economic or Geopolitical Doom, which these days revolves mainly around the nonsense going on down in Ukraine, but also China of course, the Student Loan debacle, right up to Doom All Around You which you can easily find Locally as well as Overseas..

Generally speaking I’m not publishing the Transcripts for the Daily Rants, but below here is the Transcript for today’s, which is more musing on the latest shenanigans coming from Ukraine, Russia and the IMF Brussel Sprouts. It loses something when in text format, so for most of them they will only be available as Audio. Apologies to those who prefer reading to listening, and if you really prefer to read it contact me on the Diner and I’ll send you transcripts in email.

Although in the modern day incarnation I turned into a Blogger, I originally come from Pirate Radio, the 1970s version of Free Speech via Electronic Media of the day, before the Internet existed. So for me, I like the Audio format as a bit of a Nostalgia Trip into my youth. Beyond that, the fact is most of the population these days does not like to READ to acquire information, they have been conditioned to get information through the electronic media of Radio and Television. Since my objective is to reach as many people as possible with the TRUTH about our collapsing Industrial Civilization and Economy, it only makes sense to offer at least some of the information up in this format. Most detailed information still comes via text and in debate and discussion Inside the Diner, but my hope is that the Audio Rants will make the whole thing more accessible to more people. SAVE AS MANY AS YOU CAN, as one of my tag lines goes.

In any event, the update here after 1 month is that the FFDR and Collapse Cafe are doing spectacularly well, getting around 2000-3000 Listens/Month and doing absolute WONDERS for the Alexa Ranking on the Diner, now climbing the Doom Charts rapidly, #1 With a BULLET!

Coming next week, we will have Livestreams and Vidcasts coming from our Convocation down in Texas, and we welcome listeners (and readers) to drop in and chat with us as we drop in on the net with the Techno-Gimmickry. You’ll find the announcements inside the Diner HERE

Meanwhile, Keep the Faith, Prep Up and DON’T QUIT yet, because it ain’t OVAH till the Fat Lady Sings.

Transcript for the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant March 30, 2013

Ukaine IMF Bribery & Russian Military Muscle

Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant here on the Doomstead Diner.

After taking a few days off from geopolitics to cover Energy Myths popularized by the MSM and Industry Shills and the Peak Stupidy that infuses our current Civilization, it’s time to return to the breaking Hotspot of the military and economic measures and counter-measures being employed in the Ruskie-NATO battle over Ukraine. Money, Energy, Rolling Tanks and the winning personality of KGB Capo di Tutti Capis Vlad the Impaler all conspire to make this the best Kabuki theatre ongoing in the collapse world today.

Who will WIN this fabulous PRIZE of a nation in debt up to it’s eyeballs and curently as governable as a nest of hornets? Vlad the Impaler has Crimea River now pretty well sewed up on the Military level, but the Illuminati apparatchiks at the IMF just forked over $18B in new loans to keep the Western Ukrainians floating another day and in the Eurotrash Camp.

My favorite Brit Prep School Bottom Butt Boy and Illuminati Shill Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been on a Propaganda TEAR the last few days, excoriating Vlad as being a dumbass who did not have all his ducks in a row with China, and who won’t be able to stand up to the economic sledgehammer the Brussel Sprouts will drop on him here while he continues to flex Military Muscle and tries to dominate the energy market that way.

It’s definitely true here that if the Chinese do not back up Vlad but rather do an end around to acquire energy elsewhere, Vlad is pretty much in a world of shit economically. Also true is that if energy prices fall too much Vlad can’t sell at a profit, nor can he raise money from the international credit markets if they are putting the thumbscrews down this way.

Which brings us round to the Magical way in which the Brussel Sprouts are currently buying Western Ukraine loyalty, which is by fronting them up another $18B in credit to keep going, since they are basically tapped out and can’t pay any bills.

Will the average J6P Ukrainian see any of this $18B in funny money? Of course not. This money is all earmarked to go straight from the IMF Ledger onto the ledgers of various Ruskie Banks and Oligarchs in order to keep THEM solvent and not go belly up on loans they owe to the Western TBTF banks. So while on the one hand this ploy is designed to force Vlad into a corner, at the same time it is a bailout of Ruskie Banking!

You have to ask yourself, WTF did the IMF come up with $18B to fork over to Ukrainian Gangstas and Neo-Nazis? Did lots of folks drop by the the IMF bank on the corner of Main Street and 1^st Avenue and deposit money so the IMF would have money to loan to the Ukrainians? Of course not, since the IMF doesn’t have retail offices for Depositors, the way they get money is to borrow it from the CBs of countries like the FsoA and Germany. Where did they get the money? The countries themselves are broke and insolvent, so WTF does this new money come from? You start to see the circle jerk involved here, where credit can be issued out infinitely long as you are Friendly to the folks who create the credit. The problems only come when said credit doesn’t buy anything, basically because there is nothing to buy. Well, not nothing really, just less than the amount of stuff necessary to supply EVERYONE with cheap energy and cheap GMO foods.

Since they know they can’t supply everyone, the credit is issued out in dribs and drabs here to most peripheral countries, and only with massive restrictions on how it gets disbursed out. In the case of Ukraine, the $18B in funny money will do exactly jack shit to improve their economy, all this does is keep some Ruskie Banks from going belly up. The Ukraine economy itself goes further belly up, IMF Austerity measures choke the local population into desperate poverty, so they get pissed off at whoever is propped up into power by whichever side.

Far as Oligarchs are concerned on either side of this divide is concerned, all any of them care about is to keep moving gas and oil from the Ruskie side where it gets dragged up from the ground at ever increasing cost to then sell it to Eurotrash who have ever less credit available to buy it with.

This dynamic doesn’t change no matter WHO supplies the energy here in the end, the Ruskies or the Saudis or the Iranians, basically the Eurotrash cannot afford to buy it from any of them. The only way they get more money to buy it comes from funny money from the IMF, irredeemable debt that will never be paid back. You only get said credit if you present an obstacle to keeping the whole system going, or if you are Too Big To Fail, like the FsoA and Germany.

Fail they all will though, and it will be quite something to behold when they do.

And that is all the Doom, this time until Next Time, here on the Doomstead Diner.

Seeya Later Doomers.

The 1st Diner Convocation

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on SUN4Living on March 22, 2014

Discuss this article at the SUN Table inside the Diner

Bonus Track: Amerikan Hologram

https://soundcloud.com/doomstead-diner/american-hologram-frostbite

Amerikan Hologram is #18 in the new Frostbite Falls Daily Rant Podcasts on the Doomstead Diner.

The last few rants have been focused on the Kabuki theatre playing out across the pond between Russia and NATO along with, swimming in the other direction, the implosion of the Chinese Credit Market. For tonight I’d like to return home here to the Land of Good & Plenty to look at some of the persistent myths, lies and just plain old BULLSHIT many Amerikans of my generation believe WERE true at some time in the past, even if they do grant they probably aren’t true anymore.

When I talk about my generation I’m talking about Boomers of course, who are crawling all over the web these days like cockroaches since they are retiring by the truckoad and got nothing better to do with their time. Or rather nothing better most of them can afford to do with their time, since only a relatively small minority have fat pensions to supplement Social Security. At the price of gas these days, Motoring around in an RV to visit the grandkids between stops at golf courses isn’t happening so much anymore. If they are fortunate to own an RV, it’s likely sitting in a trailer park in Yuma with the A/C on full all day while they do their cruising around the Blogosphere complaining about how Amerika has gone down the toilet and how great it was in the Old Days. To be fair, it’s not just the Boomers, it’s also the real Oldster population of Silent Generation folks who were kids during WWII doing this sort of bullshit complaining…

For the rest, listen to the Podcast!

In a bit over a week from now, after a couple of years jawboning collapse on the Doomstead Diner, the Knights of the Round Table on the Diner are finally going to meet up IRL down in Texas. “In Real Life” is the meaning of that acronym for people who don’t frequent Cyberspace that much, in contrast to the In Virtual Life you pursue as an Internet Junkie, where often people have Identities and Personalities not precisely like their IRL ones.

Whether you pursue an Anon paradigm or not, the way in which you react to people and discuss your ideas is generally a good deal different IVL as opposed to IRL. People tend to be more Strident about their beliefs IVL, social niceties are not as commonly kept to IVL as IRL. Usually IRL you pursue a Politeness paradigm, you don’t INTENTIONALLY try to piss people off for instance. What this means though also IRL is that often people do not discuss the things most BUGGING them or most crucial to their World View, because they don’t want to deal with the CONFLICT that comes from that IRL.

So, IRL the general paradigm is “Don’t Discuss Religion, Politics or Sex“, because all of these topics tend to get the emotions running hot, particularly if the people chatting them up have diametrically opposed viewpoints, which in a “Multi-Cultural” society they often do. It is of course highly unlikely you can get a “civil” discussion going about Sex IRL between a Fundy Christian, a Fundy Muslim and a Gay Rights Activist. In fact you generally do not get such civil discussions going even IVL over the Net, but at least it cannot break out into Fisfights in Cyberspace. Nor can anybody pull a GUN on you over the net either! LOL. You get what we on the diner call “Napalm Contests”, otherwise known as Flame Wars. As intense as these things often can become, you still are in relative SAFETY to pitch out your opinions over the net, and the worst that happens generally speaking is if you make too much of a nuisance of yourself on somebody else’s website you get banned, or if it is your own website you ban the person making such a nuisance of themself. I make the effort not to Ban anyone, but that is not to say I do not make life difficult for nuisance creators of this sort, I most certainly do that. In fact I have developed a whole bevvy of means to make life difficult for Trolls and Napalm Artists without Banning them.

Anyhow, with that general knowledge in mind here, over time on a website such as the Diner, people of Like Minds do come together, in our case discussing AT LENGTH just WTF to do about a Collapsing Civilization we all see occurring around us on a basically Daily Basis? How do YOU personally deal with this now, what PLANS have you made for the day TSHTF? Will those plans WORK, and if so, for how long? The flaws in everybody’s plans are discussed at length as well, then ideas get pitched out how to fix those flaws. In our case, we developed a Construct called SUN, for Sustaining Universal Needs as the IVL idea for handling the many problems we already see evident here, and as a result gave birth to a new website and Nonprofit 501c3 company to further develop these ideas IRL. This all occurred with none of the principals involved EVER meeting each other IRL, up until NOW. It is remarkable we got even THIS far here, given the fact that in all the discussions NEGATIVE WAVES always crop up as various Diners chip in their 2 cents on why the whole idea is bullshit and can’t work.

Not only our local Diners will occassionally remark it is useless to try to prepare for a Collapsing Civilization, we constantly get even more depressing input from our friends over at Nature Bats Last, where it is not just Civilization Collapse they consider inevitable now, it is Near Term Human Extinction, along with probably every other living organism above the level of the Tardigrades. In the face of so much Negativity, it’s not always easy to keep Spirits Up amongst the Heliopaths, our nomeclature for the Diners who are involved in turning SUN from a cyber-idea into reality. We do Soldier On though regardless, as in the words of Illuminati Scumbag Winston Churchill

If you find yourself going through Hell, KEEP GOING!

Anyhow, after a couple of years of discussion of the problems, we are going to meet up in Texas at the “Toothstead” to begin with, which is the ongoing project of a retreat location one of the Heliopaths, Eddie the Dentist is constantly working on to develop its self-sufficiency in terms of food and energy production. After a couple of days of celebration there, 5 of us are heading over to Monolithic Domes in Italy, TX to participate in a 5 Day “Crash Course” in how to construct Ferrocement Domes, which are probably the sturdiest structure you could ever build and also come in a relatively low prices per square foot of usable interior living. Useful for everything from Domiciles to Grow House and storage units, and pretty easy to erect anywhere without a massive amount of heavy equipment, though of course if you are spraying Shotcrete you do need access to some higher tech equipment. Which is why if you are going to get such things built, NOW is the time to build them rather than AFTER TSHTF, when doing so will be a whole lot more difficult.

As part of this group Adventure, we are going to be recording much of what goes on and presenting the material on our Collapse Cafe and Podcast pages as Vidcasts and Podcasts, and we also hope to bring live discussion on as well for the duration of the Convocation, courtesy of such marvelous technological Gimmickry currently available like Livestream, Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting. Here on the Diner, we will be Announcing these Live Broadcasts during the week inside the Diner in the Convocation thread that this article is linked to. If you wish to join with us in discussion about the various topics and problems currently Ongoing and very likely to get a whole lot worse in the not-to-distant future, stay tuned to the thread and look for the Links that will bring you into them. You’ll need a working Webcam and Mic of course, and may need to download some Client software or Plugins also. The Geeks on the Diner will be available to assist you in this if you are a technological Luddite.

For me, this is a very exciting adventure, though every time I leave the Last Great Frontier for an excursion to the Lower 48 nowadays it makes me nervous. Any given day the ATMs could lock up; any given day a “Terrorist Attack” or “False Flag” could go down instigating Martial Law, the Airlines could be grounded and I would not be able to make it back to my Perch here in Alaska, which I still consider to be among the best places left on Earth to be when it all goes to Hell in a Handbasket. A risk worth taking though, and you can’t stop living or let your fears get the better of you in a situation like this. For myself also, even if it did occur I could not make it back here, I know I have my Fellow Heliopaths in the Lower 48 who will give me a bit better location to park my butt before I head for the Great Beyond than a FEMA Death Camp.

I look forward to meeting IRL my IVL Heliopath friends from the Diner, WHD, Lucid Dreams, Gypsy Mama, Eddie the Dentista and Haniel the Tech Wizard who picked up the Ball from my friend Peter in Ocean Falls who set up the Diner software and who now keeps it running and relatively free from too many glitches or sabotage by the NSA.

The Doomstead Diner and the SUN website continue to grow and develop here, we have in the works coming also Moodle Education Software for bringing yourself up to speed on means and methods for better securing yourself for the hard times to come, and we hope to soon also begin the process of transferring these ideas into IRL communities, sprinkled all around the FSoA, and the rest of the Globe as well. We will be engaging in Demonstration Projects IRL in Texas, South Carolina and Minnesota to begin with, and we welcome inquiries into setting up Demos wherever you are located also. You can contact us on the SUN website to find out more about that.

Following the Convocation in TX beginning next week, at the end of May on the Memorial Day Weekend, Diners intend to be present as well at the Age of Limits Conference held at the 4 Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. We hope to be able to bring you more Vidcasts and Podcasts from there as well, with interviews and discussions with some of your favorite Doomer Pundits like Gail Tverberg of Our Finite World, John Michael Greer of the Archdruid Report, Dmitry Orlov of Club Orlov and Albert Bates from The Farm in TN, along with many other who will be attending this conference.

Coming through the rest of the week here leading up to the Convocation will be more Blogs from the other Heliopaths, with their thoughts on the coming Collapse as well as their perspectives on what it takes to transform IVL life IDEAS like SUN into IRL Communities that can make it possible to bridge to the Future in a BETTER TOMORROW, not a worse one or none at all. Check in on the Diner Blog this week to read more about that.

After that, I hope to see some of you via the Magic of the Internet while we proceed to Burn that Hotel Down in Italy TX. We are an Amerikan Band of Doomers, and we will Party Down here as we walk into the waning days of Industrial Civilization. It’s not too late to join us there either, contact us on the Diner and we will give you all the specifics.

BE THERE, OR BE SQUARE!

(at least IVL, anyhow)

The Death of Debt

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 16, 2014

Drawing ever closer to the Singularity

Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner

https://soundcloud.com/doomstead-diner/global-doom-report

Anyone who has been following Economic and Political Newz over the last 5 years knows there are two words you will find in practically every article written during this period, DEBT & GROWTH.

The Debt issue comes up whenever you talk about any country, from the PIIGS to Japan to the FSoA, and the massive overhang of debt these countries have accumulated through the Age of Industrialization. It’s measured in the $Trillions$, it’s measured as Percentage of GDP, and it keeps getting BIGGER every year by any measure you want to make, and that is just the stuff listed as Debt, like Treasury Bonds, Gilts, Bunds etc. It doesn’t even include “Unfunded Liabilities” which are things like Social Security and Medicaire, and even private Pension Funds as well.

The ANSWER to all the Debt always presented as coming down the Pipe at some point is further GROWTH, that other totally ubiquitous word that is featured in every speech from every Politician in every country, along with appearing in the papers of every Economista out there. Growth will Save Us! We need to Export more! We need to be productive and competitive in the Global Marketplace! EVERYBODY wants to Grow and to Export more, and certainly no politician ever talks about Shrinking and Importing more stuff as a means to become successful.

The issue of course is that EVERYBODY can’t be an Exporter, for every Exporter you need an Importer to buy your stuff. What if the people you want to SELL your stuff to have no MONEY? How can you sell anything to them if they got no money? It doesn’t matter what it is that you want to sell, whether it is just Raw Commodities like Iron Ore or Manufactured products like Carz, Iphonez and Big Screen TVz, they gotta have the MONEY to buy it with.

How do they GET this money to begin with? It is LOANED to them, basically from the Top Down through the Elite class of a given society, which takes out these loans in the Name of the People. The People of the State are the Bag Holders on these loans the Elite sign for in their name, and the Elite sieve off a decent portion of it for themselves and sequester it in foreign bank accounts, but that is another story for another day and not really the fundamental problem, though it certainly exacerbates it a good deal depending just how Corrupt & Greedy the Elite in any given country are.

For Chinese to build all the Industrial Infrastructure they did over the last 20-30 years, they had to borrow GOBS of money. For American Konsumers to buy the products that came out of said factories, they ALSO had to borrow tons of money. Everybody has to borrow Money to get this rolling, because that is how ALL the money gets created in the first place, it is Lent into existence, and this creates an Asset and a Liability. Whoever makes the Loan holds the debt of whoever took out the Loan as an Asset, whoever took out the loan has it on their books as a Liability. Once created this way, this money can then circulate around the economy in the form of Paper Notes in the Olden Days, or nowadays as Digibits but it is the same general principle. Interest is created on top of this, and this of course is the final failing of the system, but more on that later.

You can think of the beginning of a monetary system as a Singularity, a Zero Point. At Zero, nobody has Credits and nobody has Debits on their personal or corporate balance sheets. Once you take control of something, say a patch of land that grows food, you now can issue Debt to everyone else to buy that food from you. Same idea if you control Oil Fields. You now can issue Debt to others to buy that Oil from you. If you control Manufacturing Plants, you can issue debt for people to buy the products of that Factory. Your Zero Point now gets split up into +1 and -1. It still nets to Zero, except of course for the Interest Charges on the newly loaned money, which each year compound up, so there is never enough money at the end of each year to fill this gap without constantly Inflating the money supply. Which means of course, ADDING MORE DEBT!

To do this and to still have Stuff to sell in return for this ever increasing Debt load, whoever is issuing the Debt has to constantly increase the control they have over various Resources of the Earth, primarily Energy of course since the Age of Industrialization began. Gaining such control generally takes Military Force, although once you get a given society to buy into the Legal System and the Monetary System you are running, you can use that to gain control as well. See Confessions of an IMF Hit Man for this.

Who gets to be the Lender in such a schema? Whoever holds control of the Resource Base upon which you are making these Loans. So as the system Evolved in its modern incarnation since around the time of the Medici Banksters, various Feudal Lords and eventually Nation States got control over territorial Resources, and each state could issue Money based on those resources. The more you controlled, the more money you could Issue. The Brits got particularly good at this early on with a Powerful Navy that controlled the Sea lanes for trade, and the Bank of England has been issuing out money on this stuff since 1692 when said bank was Chartered. Similarly, in the aftermath of WWII when most of the rest of the Industrialized world in Europe was a Pile of Rubble, the FSoA was able to start issuing out Dollars on its great Resource base of the era, all those Oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma of course.

For the first 25 years of this act in the play from 1945 to 1970 or so, the FSoA was totally in the Cat Bird Seat as far as issuing debt was concerned. We had the most producing Oil Wells, we had undamaged Industrial Infrastructure ramped up to supply WWII armies with Planes, Tanks and Bombs, and we had the Bread Basket of the Great Plains able to produce Copious Food at Low, Low Prices every day, courtesy of the Cheap Oil coming up out of the ground under Jed Clampett’s Farm. The Baby Boom arrived, and the Amerikan Economy expanded Exponentially, though of course the proceeds of this expansion were not too evenly distributed. in fact you had large pockets of Poverty developing even back then, and this blew up in the late 1950s and 1960s with the Race Riots from Alabama to Watts. The economy was expanding so rapidly at this time though that the Elite came up with the Great Society program, basically a buy off of the disenfranchised with various forms of Public Assistance.

On the aggregate Debt level though, things started to Go South in the early 70s, once the EZ Oil started to run thin in the FSoA and we became an Oil Importer rather than Exporter. At this point we had to start exponentially increasing Debt Issuance to be able to buy Oil from Saudi Arabia, basically holding a Gun to their heads to accept our Debt as the MONEY to buy their Oil. The Saudis played along, and with their resource base we were able to keep expanding, while at the same time putting Outta Biz the old Soviet Union, which just did not ever have the same Credit Creation apparatus the West had developed over the Centuries for this.

The exponential increase in total Debt and the total money Supply measured in US Dollars has been ongoing since the 1970s, it was the only way to keep the Industrial Game rolling here over the period.

We could keep issuing the debt and everybody else would take it as money because we have the Big Ass Military. You don’t take our Debt, we will Bomb You Back to the Stone Age, basically. Various countries from Vietnam to Iraq have been subject to this sort of coersion over the years. South American countries were taken over by different means, utilizing the Hit Men from the the IMF mostly, sprinkled in with Regime Destabilization from our friends in the CIA. In pretty much all cases though, the system has been propped up through this period through the threat of violence as the Stick on one side, and the offer of Loan Money to buy into the American Dream of Fast Cars and Hollywood Entertainment on the other. Everybody can be RICH like Americans! We’ll LOAN you the money to do it!

In Actuality of course, it wasn’t America making the loans, it was the TBTF Banks, controlled as they always have been by a very small Oligarchy. They control the creation of credit, the only thing “Amerika” does as a “Democratic” nation is to staff a Military Operation that backs up their right to create the credit and control the resources. In fact Amerika itself has to Borrow Money from these TBTF Banks, through the artifice of the Central Bank of Da Fed, which is in fact a Privately Owned subsidiary of the TBTF Banks!

You don’t Own the money you hold, it is just a claim on resources that many other people hold also. Over the time period that this system has expanded, those claims have become ever more diffuse and widespread, with the abstract “worth” of many assets dependent simply on what someone in a position to issue EXTREME levels of debt money can pitch out. Examples of this are the Railroads, the Interstate Highway System, and the Internet. All of them have value only insofar as they still can work, and working depends on constant input of energy and maintenance. They all are costly things to maintain. The builders sieve out profit in the building of them, the public is left with the liability of maintaining them in the aftermath, when they have become dependent on them.

Recently in one of his articles, William Blum bemoaned the fact we are not using taxation revenues to maintain the Infrastructure we developed here. Thing is, Tax revenues never built it, and they can’t maintain it either. The stuff does not pay for itself, there is no Free Lunch here.

This is the basic History of the modern incarnation of Money that we are working with, so now is time to look at what is actually occurring with this artifice.

To keep the Daisy Chain going, new money in the form of new loans constantly has to be created. If it is not, you run into Liquidity Problems. All the Old Money invested is essentially Locked Up in various ways, you can’t really sell out a large position in any asset class you have money invested in without driving down the value of that asset class. This would be the problem faced by the Chinese with respect to USTs for example. Nominally, they hold $3T or more of this Toilet Paper, but if they tried to sell even a minor portion of this of say 10% or so, it would crash the market for USTs. If you have 10 tons of Gold in your basement safe and try to sell all of it to cover other bad bets you made, this crashes the Gold Market. Etc. So nobody holding large positions of anything wants to rock the boat and sell a lot of it at once. They want to “Stealth Sell”, trying to get rid of it in dribs and drabs without rocking the boat too much.

Problem with this is that if some asset class starts to go Belly Up in a big hurry (like say the Chinese Credit Market), in order to stay Solvent you may have NO CHOICE but to try to sell a large position in something else to cover your leverage in the bottoming asset class. That is where the Chinese market presents the most danger right now, and NOBODY KNOWS how much funny money the TBTF banks have invested in the Chinese Shadow Banking industry at all. What’s the counter party risk if a Coal Trust in China goes Belly Up? Nobody Knows.

Here’s a little bit from my favorite Illuminati Shill, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

The proof is in the monetary pudding, and this shows that EMU is already in worse shape than Japan in early 1998 by a large margin. Private lending is contracting at 2.3pc, the M3 money supply has ground to a halt and EMU-wide unemployment is stuck at a near-record 12pc.

The ECB and the TBTF EuroBanks aren’t creating enough new loans, so money supply is drying up. Similarly in China, the Shadow Banking Industry which in January issued out something like $150B in new Loans issue out close to Zero in February, and various trusts all leveraged up to beat the band are cracking under the pressure.

No new loans, the system grinds to a halt. Thing is, to issue out the new loans you have to have the resource base upon which to issue them, and you have to issue out the loans not just to the extractors of the resources but also to the consumers of the resource. If you look at Fracking of NG for example, if you offer up loans to Drillers to access more gas but don’t simultaneously offer up new loans to consumers, they can’t buy the new gas at any price you offer it up at.

The issue is, just about all consumers of such energy are in such deep debt up to their eyeballs already TBTF Banks are choking on issuing them more Credit, and the only way it happens is with Skanky deals through the IMF and World Bank. A few large corporations are still able to access debt, particularly Energy companies since the same people who control those companies control the Banks that issue the credit, but if they can’t sell the product to tapped out consumers, even their credit lines will end up being cut eventually.

We can’t rebuild the industrial infrastructure on Taxation revenues, nor can we pay off the Bad Debts of the TBTF Banks on such revenues. The TBTF banks weren’t bailed out from your Taxes, they were bailed out by Da Goobermint expanding its Debt load on Da Fed Balance sheet. The choice was made to do this because if you did not do it, said banks would collapse, and with their collapse goes the entire artifice of the Money you are using. Working money would essentially disappear close to overnight, ATMs would all shut down and rebooting a NEW system everybody could agree on with overall resources now so depleted would be a lot harder than it was when they made the original Bretton Woods agreements after WWII, when resources were still in copious supply.

Debt is Dying here, because there are not enough resources around per capita to issue more debt to all the Consumers to consume those resources. Selectively, some areas of the world are being Cut Off from new Debt issuance, places like Greece, Spain, Portugal et al. Places with their own ability to create internal debt like China have expanded it, but that is a very unstable House of Cards. The most well off places are those with the closest connection to the main Credit Creators on Wall Street and the City of London. They have the biggest and most well developed Credit Creation apparatus, and the Debt they create still is “trusted”, though less trusted all the time here of course. When these behemoths finally do die, it is the END of the monetary system we have been using since the time of the Medici.

As of right now, this Monetary System and the TBTF Banks that administer it are in the ICU on Life Support, propped up by Goobermints like the FSoA still deemed worthy of more Credit, but anyone in their right mind needs only look at the exponentially increasing Debt chart above here to realize that there is no way to ever pay off the debt, you just have to keep increasing it until something BREAKS. CODE BLUE in the ICU! Bring on the Crash Cart and the Paddles!

We are going to get another Code in the ICU here pretty soon, it remains to be seen if there is enough Juice left to kick start the Gomer TBTF Banks one more time when it does. Based on what is going down here Geopolitically in Ukraine, it seems unlikely such a kickstart will work again. The Ruskie Banking system is in at least as precarious a position as the Chinese one, and they are likely to suffer financial Lock Up slightly before the West does, but that won’t make Putin any less willing to roll his tanks. He has Energy, and he can run a Command Economy. If the Ruskies lose access to Western Credit and/or see their financial assets seized, Putin’s only alternative is to PHYSICALLY seize assets, like the rest of Ukraine, Poland…GERMANY.

The Death of Debt is the Road to War, they are one in the same thing really. It all stems from an exhausted resource base that too many people Globally are competing to use and exploit. Individuals don’t have much choice when they get cut off, so Suicide becomes a fairly Common Option. Suicide rates in the hardest hit countries are already Skyrocketing, and even here in the FSoA Suicide is on the rise.

Nation-States that are organized with Large Military Apparatus DO have an Option besides Suicide, which is to Go Belligerent as a group and try to kill somebody else instead of dieing themselves. Russia has a large Military force, they have Energy, and they have Vlad the Impaler, ex-head of the KGB, Capo di Tutti Capis. Vlad will not roll over and die here. If the Western Illuminati shut down Ruskie credit and freeze their overseas assets, Vlad will retaliate with the only weapon he has left, his Energy and his Military Machine. It would seem likely that in such a situation, for at least the beginning of it the Chinese would line up with the Ruskies. I doubt short of Global Thermonuclear War there is anything the FSoA could do about that, the Chinese and Ruskies would just roll over Western Europe. Shall we Play a Game?

However, I doubt such an alliance can last too long in the face of the resource problems. I see a lot of Stranded Military units as logistics and supply lines fail here, at which point the issues become all Local.

It is hard to say how fast this scenario will play out, but it seems the likeliest scenario at the moment. One thing it does mean is that if/when it does escalate, we will see Conscription and the Draft into the Military again, at first for 18-25 year olds, but likely to go up to the 30s. Avoiding the Electronic Press Gang into the Military will be quite difficult, you definitely would need to dispose of your Iphone to even have a chance at that.

The next year will see how it goes. Everybody Knows though, it’s not going to be pretty.

Alaska Roads

Off the keyboard and camera of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 9, 2014

Don’t forget to gas up here, you won’t find another fuel stop for around 50 miles

Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner

A couple of weeks ago I had reason to rev up the SUV for the 4 hour or so drive down to the Kenai Peninsula here on the Last Great Frontier and burn a whole lot of ever more scarce Fossil Fuels as part of my Job. Nothing compared to some friends of mine who took a 26 minute flight in the Company Jet from Palmer Airport to Soldotna Airport for the same reason though. LOL. I intended on writing this article directly after that, but alas Vlad the Impaler took his own Fossil Fuel driven excursion into Crimea, burning Orders of Magintude more Fossil Fuel than me and my friends together here, so that took Priority here in my last Sunday Brunch article.

Profligate waste of Fossil Fuel energy notwithstanding, particularly on the drive back the weather was very pleasant and I was under no time pressure, so I made lots of stops to make Road Pics on the way back. “Normally” at this time of year a drive down to Kenai from the Mat Valley would be a fairly Nerve Wracking Adventure, since you travel through a very Mountainous area and the roads would be all snow and ice covered, with no EZ access to assistance either if you get in trouble since many portions of the road don’t feature Cell Phone coverage either. Not this year though, with the “unseasonably warm” temps we have had up here in Alaska over the Winter. The highway was completely free of Ice or Snow, and the drive in both directions was quite free and easy to negotiate.

The heavily trafficked road from Anchorage to Soldotna

It was so EZ in fact, that my driving was basically on Autopilot, as an experienced Over the Road Trucker with near a Million Miles under my belt Accident Free (well over that if you include all my 4-wheeler driving and 2-wheeler driving over the years) I could drive without really thinking about it and my mind was free to wander on other topics. What occurred to me as I drove was how clearly the Alaska Road system demonstrates how the Automotive culture expanded, and why it finally hit its Limits to Growth now.

The Pathway from the Matanuska-Susitna River Valley down to the Kenai Peninsula is around 200 Miles or so, and passes through the main population center of Alaska (such as it is), Anchorage. Anchorage is the main population center for exactly the reason it is named that, it is the best Harbor and landing spot for boats coming into and out of Alaska in Prince William Sound. There are some other decent ports as well, for instance Valdez, the terminus of the Alaska Pipeline. However, Anchorage has more available FLAT LAND upon which to build things, and so developed first as the main Entry/Exit port in Alaska for People and Resources and Manufactured Goods from the Age of Industrialization.

Great reasons to burn some GAS! Go Fishing and Pan Up some GOLD!

As with the rest of the Industrialized world, as the system expanded to extract ever more resources from the Earth from ever more places, first Railroads were built and then Roadways. Alaska has ONE such Main thoroughfare which started with the Alaska Railway during the Gold Rush era here in the late 1800s. The main Rail line goes from Anchorage up to Fairbanks, and it is along this rail line that the Coal still gets transported out of Alaska to be burned in Chinese Electric Plants, while the same Rail Line also brings Chinese Toys to Alaskans in Fairbanks. It also brings tourists to Denali National Park, a few of whom actually climb Denali (Mt. Mckinley) which is the Highest Point in North America topping out at just over 20,000 feet and getting quite close to the Death Zone. Not up there with Everest and K2 at 29,000 feet, but it is a Mountain where Aspiring Climbers cut their teeth on before trying those Death Traps. The Death Zone comes at more or less 23,000 feet, where even for well conditioned High Altitude residents and experienced Climbers, there simply is not enough Oxygen around for a Homo Sapiens to survive for any great length of time. The Biosphere such as it is for Homo Sapiens is a VERY thin layer around the Globe which in the best of times goes from Sea Level to this Altitude, 3-4 miles of worthwhile Biosphere for us here.

Anyhow, you can get withing Base Camp distance of Denali via the Alaska Railroad, you don’t need to hire Sherpas here to haul in your Tents and Bottled Oxygen to make the Adventure here, so it is a good deal cheaper overall to practice your Death Defying Climbing skills here. Not only can you get there via the Alaska Railroad these days though, but you ALSO can get there via your own SUV, driving along the Highway that follows precisely the same pathway as the Alaska Railroad. Along with the Al-Can (Alaska-Canada Highway), these are the two Main Roads that make Alaska accessible in the Age of Oil.

Gss UNDER $4! Let’s go Happy Motoring!

The Al-Can is an amazing tribute to modern Engineering, it crosses the Yukon Territory which is basically ALL Mountains, and didn;t even all get paved until around 1996. Long portions are still only 2 Lanes, and Fuel Stops are few and far between. Forget to Fill Up at one of these stops, unless you got a REALLY big tank you will be waiting around quite some time for an emergency fillup from Road Service.

The trip down to Kenai isn’t quite so outrageous, but nearly so. What struck me as I drove the route was first how few Crossroads there were along the way, and second how little Traffic there was in either direction along the route. I could pull off the road at any time during this drive, and have to wait 5-10 minutes before a single car passed me in either direction. All this asphalt laid down at great expense to begin with, and then with continuing expense each year to maintain all for a Traffic Flow of maybe a few hundred cars in either direction on any given day, often less that in real bad weather.

OOPS! Price a bit higher a ways down the road! I can verify some of the 1970s era pumps still work, I filled up here.

Going back to the days BEFORE the Industrial paradigm hit this portion of the world, there were individual Settlements of Homo Sapiens that lived in places like Anchorage and Soldotna, and down the Coast as well to places like Juneau and Ketchikan. How did these communities trade with each other, intermarry and so forth? All by WATER, via Kayak and it sure was not a Daily thing either. To make such communities viable as a part of the Age of Oil though, they had to be connected up by the roadways, whether they could pay for themselves or not.

And so a Railway & Road got cut from Anchorage to Kenai City, along with the Railway & Road to connect Anchorage to Palmer/Wasilla and another to connect that to Fairbanks. Finally, a Road got Cut from the main Continent of North America into Alaska through the Mountains, the Al-Can. That is as far as it went though, that is where it STOPPED.

You still cannot get from Anchorage to Juneau or Ketchikan via Road, and you never will. The whole terrain si simply not conducive to road building, neither is much of it conducive to Homo Sapiens settlements of anything but the smallest kind, just not enough Flat Land upon which to live. Building expensive roadways between such small settlements is pointless, not much traffic moves along them each day. In order to extract some of the resource base of Alaska these Railroads & Roads were built, but they never paid for themselves, they have to be subsidized by DEBT.

Let’s stop on the way to do some 4-Wheelin’ and Fishin’!

Alaska is a vast Territory, more than twice the size of Texas, but there is less roadway here than in Dallas-Fort Worth alone. That is nice flat land where roads are easily built. You wanna access most places in Alaska, the only way is by Float Plane if you wanna get there quick, Dog Sled to get there the slow and traditional way. Even that is getting less possible with Climate Change. The Origin of the Legendary Iditarod, the “Last Great Race on Earth” comes from an effort to bring Medical Supplies to Nome during a Diptheria Epidemic amongst mostly Natives who had no Immunity in 1925, the “Great Race of Mercy“. From Wiki:

The most famous event in the history of Alaskan mushing is the 1925 serum run to Nome, also known as the “Great Race of Mercy.” A diphtheria epidemic threatened Nome, especially the Alaska Native children who had no immunity to the “white man’s disease”, and the nearest quantity of antitoxin was found to be in Anchorage. Since the two available planes were both dismantled and had never been flown in the winter, Governor Scott Bone approved a safer route. The 20-pound (9.1 kg) cylinder of serum was sent by train 298 miles (480 km) from the southern port of Seward to Nenana, where it was passed just before midnight on January 27 to the first of twenty mushers and more than 100 dogs who relayed the package 674 miles (1,085 km) from Nenana to Nome. The dogs ran in relays, with no dog running over 100 miles (160 km).

The Norwegian Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog Balto arrived on Front Street in Nome on February 2 at 5:30 a.m., just five and a half days later. The two became media celebrities, and a statue of Balto was erected in Central Park in New York City in 1925, where it has become one of the most popular tourist attractions. However, most mushers consider Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo to be the true heroes of the run. Together they covered the most hazardous stretch of the route, and carried the serum 91 miles, the single farthest of any team.

Who BROUGHT the Diptheria to the Natives to begin with here, eh? Water under the bridge though of course, and it was a Heroic effort by many to get that serum up to Nome.

What happenned THIS YEAR to the Iditarod? Because of the thaws we had in January and February, there was not enough Snow cover in Willow where the race begins, so what did they do? They SHIPPED IN SNOW to make a track for the race to begin out of Willow. How many truckloads of snow they had to move here and for how long a stretch I do not know, but if this is not the stupidest and most pointless waste of Fossil Fuels imaginable, I do not know what is. CFS says simply start the race North of Willow where there is still some snow! Except of course this is not financially good for Willow or the race itself to start in some even further backwater town where few people live and few will go cheer the mushers for the TV Cameras.

Take a look at these pics from the Iditarod and tell me what is WRONG with these pictures?

NO FUCKING SNOW! THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG!

It’s hard enough to get a Dog Team to pull a sled 1000 miles on top of snow, but dragging a sled over DIRT is a whole lot HARDER!

The lack of snow cover doesn’t mean we will ever see a whole lot more Roads up here though.The damn terrain here is so rough in terms of Mountains that pretty much no other spurs were built off the origianal Railroad Line, and very few roads got built off the main conduits of the Glenn Highway or the Al-Can. In fact, Alaska doesn’t even have an Interstate Highway funded by the Eisenhower system, Alaska 1 is a STATE highway.

Anyhow, whether you travel North from where I live up to Fairbanks, or South down to the Kenai Peninsula, you travel along a Highway that is basically linear, with any “development” or population centers such as they are sprinkled sparingly off of this road. The whole rest of the territory is BUSH, accessible for the most part only by Float Plane or by Snow Machine, 4 Wheeler, Horseback, Dog Sled or Hoofing it. In all the last 4 cases, the sheer size of the territory means most of these locations never see any people at all.

Without the Carz, actually this would not be a bad place to live…

To get back to the original point of this article, because the road system is so small, it is easy to see why it is not economic to run it. The road traffic between Anchorage and Soldotna is so light you just don’t really need all those miles of Tarmac, and the huge maintenance costs they incur. All the freight between these places could easily be moved by barge, you don’t even really need the Railroad. Fairbanks does need a Railroad to access it, but the roadway that follows that right of way also is a huge money sink. Its only real utility is for Touristas to visit Denali National Park. The Oil Industry people don’t use it, they all Fly back and forth from Anchorage to Fairbanks and to the Slope. The product all gets moved either through the Pipeline or in the case of Coal by freight train. The number of cars rolling each day from Anchorage to Fairbanks is miniscule, and all there is between those two places are a bunch of tiny towns which are only economic as Tourist Traps.

The only reason the road system such as it is can be afforded at all is because it gets subsidized from the resource extraction bizness up here. Costs a fortune to maintain it but without it even FEWER people would live up here.

When the Energy Extraction bizness finally closes down up here, these roads will quickly fracture up and be unsuitable for Driving at Any Speed. They still will provide decent pathways for walkers and foks on Horseback for a while though. During this period, it may be possible to Colonize some of the places off these roads that in a New Climate scenario could be quite lovely places to live and do some Permaculture.

Of course, when you can’t get to the Transformers, things could get a little less comfortable…

…and so it BEGINS

Off the keyboard and microphone of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on March 2, 2014

Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/137343439&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

The Frosbite Falls Daily Rant is the latest Feature of the Collapse Cafe on the Doomstead Diner. It can be found daily on the Homepage of the Diner on the right menu bar.

The transcript for this rant can be found at the bottom of this article.

Day 2 has arrived here in the Valve War between Ukraine and Russia, centered mainly in Crimea at the moment, but bound to move Eastward as time goes by here. I covered a few of the main issues in the daily rant yesterday, for today we will look a little more closely at the logistics involved here.

As you can see from the Infographic at the top of the page, this isn’t a small military exercise by any means. More than 10,000 troops are being repositioned, which is quite a tidy sum considering the Ruskies were downsizing their Military.

2008 Russian military reform

(H/T Newzy Joe on the Diner for this table)

While the Ruskie military is still pretty large, you have to remember that all “active personnel” are not “Boots on the Ground” aka Grunts who do the dirty work and get regularly sent to the Great Beyond in one of these actions. So Vlad is committing quite a large percentage of what is left of his military assets to try and take control of Ukraine.

While the mostly Russian speaking eastern Ukrainians are mostly lined up with Vlad, even they don’t necessarily want to become a vassal state of Russia again. They only got out from under the old USSR hegemony 20 years ago! The Western half of the population definitely isn’t too happy about this state of affairs, so you basically have now a War in all but official declaration, and even that gets closer all the time.

NATO and Obama-sama still haven’t done anything but bluster, and it is unlikely they will do much on the military end at this time. The NATO countries don’t have that many troops they can call up at the drop of a hat (or bomb), and most available FSoA military assets are currently deployed far and wide at a bazillion global Military bases as well as being mired down in places like Afghanistan.

However, just because they don’t have military assets to throw at this problem doesn’t make them helpless, they do have financial ones. Accelerating Capital Flight out of both Ukraine and Russia can do a lot more damage to Vlad the Impaler’s political control than a Firefight in Sevastopol. So this is probably where we have to look for the Action to be next week from the NATO/western Illuminati end.

Logistically speaking, all the “Big Power” Militaries of the Ruskies, the Chinese and the FSoA are over-extended past what they can actually support anymore to try and control far flung regions of the earth. The Chinese are buying up African Land and Oz Mines, but they need their own Million Man Army right at home to keep control. The Ruskies have the same problem, their last failed adventure outside of their own region in Afghanistan was a magnificent failure, and subsequent adventures inside their sphere have not faired much better. All their border states like Georgia are contantly in virtul revolt; just keeping the lid on there stretches them pretty thin. For the FSoA part, we send Carrier Groups willy-nilly around the world as a “show of force” in each latest Hotspot, but we only got like 11 or so of these Carrier Groups I believe. Drop a couple in the Mediterranean, a couple in the Indian Ocean, a couple in the South China Sea, a couple in the North Atlantic, a couple off the coast of Brasil and one in the Gulf of Mejico and POOF, you are frehs OUT of Carrier Groups! Not to mention all a Carrier Group does at best is to allow you to control the local Sea Lanes and drop Death From Above on the nearby locals, they don’t allow you to put enough Boots on the ground in ANY of these places to do much more than take over a few Goobermint Buildings in the central city, for that you gotta mobilize a lot of troops ships, land tanks and APC yadda yadda.

In all likelihood at this point, it appears that the “Powerful” Goombermints and Militaries of Russia, china and the FSoA will soon be engaged much more in keeping their own Local Populations in control, so trying to control anywhere else is pretty much a non-starter. Ukraine is close enough physically to Russia with enough traditional ties they can make this physical attempt one more time, but they will face a constant state of revolt inside Ukraine, just like Georgia and the rest of the peripheral states now really starting to hurt.

The problems in Ukraine will move themselves quickly enough to Poland, Hungary, Belarus etc, and the Western European states will see Blowback as Gazprom energy gets shut off at critical Valves through Central Europe. This further roils the markets and their economies, already very shaky to begin with, so they too will begin to topple.

Building up this whole interconnected Global system has been ongoing for 500 years here. It will come apart a whole lot quicker than that. The World Trade Center is the best analogy I can come up with here. The project had it’s inception right near the end of WWII in 1943, took until the 60s to get funding, and didn’t open up until 1973.

The idea of establishing a World Trade Center in New York City was first proposed in 1943. The New York State Legislature passed a bill authorizing New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey to begin developing plans for the project^[11] but the plans were put on hold in 1949.^[12] During the late 1940s and 1950s, economic growth in New York City was concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. To help stimulate urban renewal in Lower Manhattan, David Rockefeller suggested that the Port Authority build a World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.^[13]

Initial plans, made public in 1961, identified a site along the East River for the World Trade Center.^[14] As a bi-state agency, the Port Authority required approval for new projects from the governors of both New York and New Jersey. New Jersey Governor Robert B. Meyner objected to New York getting a $335 million project.^[15] Toward the end of 1961, negotiations with outgoing New Jersey Governor Meyner reached a stalemate.^[16]

At the time, ridership on New Jersey’s Hudson and Manhattan Railroad (H&M) had declined substantially from a high of 113 million riders in 1927 to 26 million in 1958 after new automobile tunnels and bridges had opened across the Hudson River.^[17] In a December 1961 meeting between Port Authority director Austin J. Tobin and newly elected New Jersey Governor Richard J. Hughes, the Port Authority offered to take over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad to have it become the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH). The Port Authority also decided to move the World Trade Center project to the Hudson Terminal building site on the west side of Lower Manhattan, a more convenient location for New Jersey commuters arriving via PATH.^[16] With the new location and Port Authority acquisition of the H&M Railroad, New Jersey agreed to support the World Trade Center project.^[18]

A good 20-30 years to get those buildings up. They came down in seconds. So it will go with this as well, when it Blows, it will Blow Big and it will Blow Fast. In the words of Leonard Cohen,

Everybody knows it’s coming apart
Take one last look at this Sacred Heart
Before it blows
And everybody knows

Transcript of the Ukraine-Russia War Rant

Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frosbite Falls Daily Rant.

Tonight we are revisiting a topic from a few nights ago, the ongoing spinout in Ukraine. A few nights ago it was a Civil War in progress, tonight it is a WORLD WAR in the making.

Reason? Vlad the Impaler, the Noble ex-head of the KGB over in Ruskieville decided since he could not or would not Pony Up $35-50B in FOREX scratch the Ukrainians need to keep their version of the Industrial Society running, the better option was simply to roll over them with APCs, Helicopters and Troop ships!

On the NATO side of this battle, John Kerry offered up chump change of $1B in loans from the sharks at the IMF, which barely could keep an Oligarch in Maseratis and Airbus Double Decker Private Jets for a week or two, much less pay off on Pensions to the Ukrainian Population.

Why does EITHER side here give a Flying Fuck who is wandering the halls of the Ukrainian Parliament and running the show there? Why not just leave them alone and let them work out their OWN fucking problems?

Two main reasons. First off, Ukraine has a shit load of pipelines running across the territory which ship Gazprom Energy from Mother Russia over to Western Europe, which is a MAJOR source of FOREX revenue for the Ruskie Oligarchs, including of course Vlad the Impaler.

Second reason is Ukraine is (like everybody else) in HUGE debt to the TBTF banks, and if they don’t get some new Hard Currency FOREX Scratch to roll over their old loans, they will default. This will play nasty HAVOC with the Russian banks, which have the biggest exposure, but of course all the TBTF banks in the West are exposed to this mess also in the Daisy Chain Circle Jerk of derivatives, interbank loans and Worthless Collateral they used to rehypothecate still other loans made elsewhere. If anybody here on either side has to write down Ukrainian debt, the TBTF banks will have to pay a LOT of Overtime to their Accountants so they can cover it up and not be blatantly Insolvent, just Shadow Insolvent.

For their own part, the Ukrainians hold one Ace in the Hole, they actually have their fingers on the valves that transit NG over from Mother Russia to Eurotrash. If SOMEBODY doesn’t pony up some more money for them to keep going here, the average J6P Ukrainian has NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE, so why not blow a few Pipelines and pass the Suffering on to the folks to the West and East of them? They shut down the pipelines, the Eurotrash runs short on energy to keep the Lights on, and the ruskies run short of Forex to keep the Rouble floating as a Happy Currency. Everybody suffers with them!

Herein lies the big PROBLEM with Vlad the Impaler’s physical takeover of the apparatus of Goobermint in Ukraine, the Western interests don’t necessarily have to retaliate with rolling their own APCs and Helicopter Gunships into Ukraine on a UN Sponsored “Peacekeeping” Mission, they can simply mount a concerted Financial Attack on the Rouble. Putin’s Goobermint already has plenty of issues maintaining control over the pretty vast Ruskie territory (even though shrunk from the Lacyon days Back in the USSR), if the Rouble gets driven down in FOREX trade and they can’t sell NG to Western Europe, their own economy will flush down the toilet in a big hurry.

For the Ruskies to take control of this problem on the Physical Level, they have to control the ENTIRE transit of Energy from the Ruskie Gas Fields across to the Eurotrash Konsumers of that energy, and they cannot do that simply by holding Crimea, which they also can’t do with a few 1000 Shock Troops. All that enables them to do is hold a few Goobermint Buildings and install some Puppet Leaders there. They have to roll across the WHOLE of Ukraine, and they have to not only prop up Puppet Leaders in Goobermint, they have to keep the local VERY unhappy population from dropping a few IEDs at critical nodes in the NG pipeline transport system. That will take a LOT more boots on the ground to do, and it is highly questionable that Vlad the Impaler could bring such a force to bear. Very similar to NATO trying to control the energy transit down in MENA with so many of the locals hostile to them.

It remains to be seen how this will play out medium to long term, and in what manner. However, both sides are between a Rock & a Hard Place. Under no circumstances can I see will the Energy flow through Ukraine continue Unimpeded. This will negatively affect all of Europe and Russia too. Neither side can back down here, so escalation seems likely. Duck and cover Doomers, we are now at DefCon Orange.

And that’s all the Doom, this time until next time here on the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant.

Paranoia Squared

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on February 26, 2014

Discuss this article at the Guerilla Free Speech Table inside the Diner

Communicating on the Internet is full of all sorts of hazards. Two of the biggest are the loss of Privacy resultant from dropping your thoughts on far distant Disk Drives run by other people and the fact that both Da Goobermint and Private Individuals can ascertain who you are and in some cases also where you live.

Over my years participating on the Internet in chat rooms and on forums and blogs, I have pursued a semi-Anonymous paradigm. I write under a Nom-de-Plume, and my email addresses don’t feature my real name, like say [email protected].

So for the typical user who reads something I write, I am anonymous to them. Reason for this is that dropping your real name out there to the world at large can cause you all sorts of problems if somebody is annoyed at what you wrote. They can find out where you work, and you can get harrassed on the job because of it. In fact, going back to my earliest years in internet participation, I actually got fired from a job because some critiques I wrote of my industry got back to my employer of the time.

After that less than pleasant experience, I elected to do all my writing as an Anon, under the nom-de-plume most of the time in recent years in the Collapse Blogosphere as Reverse Engineer, aka RE. This allows me to write my thoughts more freely, without so much fear of Blowback from it. However, as I got deeper into internet participation and eventually started up my own websites with my own URLs and server space, I began to realize how really limited this level of Anonymity is. When you register a URL (the Uniform Resource Locator which is your Web Address), you have to pay for that, and to do that you have to use a Credit/Debit card with your real name on it. This goes into the database of all the owners of URLs, which can be looked up by anyone. You can pay EXTRA to have your personal info masked to the public at large, but it of course always visible to the NSA as well as all the Admins of various routers that transit the information.

The next area of vulnerability is in participation on privately run websites, where whether you sign up or not, each time you post up your IP address is recorded along with whatever content you dropped on. This IP address is Unique to the computer you were keyboarding on at the time, and records also the Host through which you are connected to the net. In some cases it is possible to nail down a location just from this information. For instance, if you are connected up to a Hotel WiFi and there is no masking or proxy servers being used, any Admin can see what hotel you are staying at when you make a post.

Internet surfers who are both truly paranoid as well as quite savvy will mask their locations by using proxy servers, if they do this then the typical Admin of a website can’t discern their location just from the listed IP address, though Tracing is possible and done by for-pay Security firms specializing in this sort of stuff. Again for the NSA, this level of adding personal security is pretty much a waste of time too unless you are very, VERY good at it. I am certainly not that good, so I simply no longer worry about being listed and followed by the NSA, if they deem my stuff worthy of following.

At the level of the individual website though, the folks who sign themselves up and post Anonymously hope to REMAIN Anon to the population at large. So if/when they find out or realize that the Admin on their favored site has checked into who they are and where they are posting from, they get the feeling their Privacy has been Violated. Has it been?

Not really, because the moment you sign up or even just post up, you GIVE AWAY certain privacy rights. You cannot participate without your IP showing up with the post. From the POV of the website Owner/Admin, you have to know the IP addys, because if you have Troublesome people on your website, this is the only way you can Ban them. Troublesome people include Spammers who throw on Pharmaceutical and Video links in with their post as well as Trolls who drop on the site specifically to disrupt the conversations taking place and deliver their own agenda to the readers.

Here on the Diner, I have a basically No Ban policy except for Spammers, but even so with the Trolls I keep track of the IP addys so I know if somebody is posting under more than one Screen ID. Besides the general practical problem of keeping the conversation civil and on track, there are also legal issues you face if you have a particularly extreme commenter show up on your site. Such a commenter might be someone who is a Neo-Nazi advocating a Violent Revolution who also posts up Diagrams for making IEDs and maybe even Nuclear Bombs. Or somebody who persistently makes links to and embeds explicit Pornography. I have never had either of those types show up on the Diner fortunately, but if they did I would Ban them despite my No Ban general policy. Reason is at this point I can be held legally liable for allowing the stuff to go across my website.

Most of the time though, you don’t face such extreme problems, but you still do keep track of everyone posting, and sometimes issues come up regarding the general Honesty of the poster, which happened here recently in the case of our Favorite Energy Industry Shill, MKing. His real qualifications have been a persistent question on the Diner by many because he is very nebulous about them, and so one of our Admins decided to at least determine if he was where he said he was at an Energy Conference, and it turned out he was. He was in fact validated as at least being there by the research this Admin did, and he wasn’t particularly upset about this.

However, though he was not upset much by this, some other Diners were TERRIFICALLY upset, and in fact one of the Diners deleted his membership as a result of this. The Paranoia became rampant here that people were being SPYED on and that Real Identities would be Outted on the Diner for the Anons. Nothing of the sort has ever happened here, and will not happen if I can prevent it, because this is against my own personal ethics and the way I post on the net! I don’t want my IRL Identity bandied about, so I am not going to advocate any other Anon Poster gets outted either.

Same time though, the more you post, the longer you post and the more deeply involved you get in internet communications, the more likely it becomes that your IRL Identity becomes known. In fact, probably half of the Diners don’t bother with Anons at all, or have very thinly disguised ones. WHD for instance publishes himself as William Hunter Duncan on his own Blog Off the Grid in Minneapolis, and JDW uses his real name of John D. Wheeler all the time. In both cases also their locations are known, so you KNOW these guys are honest on this level.

I have seen how the paranoia regarding Identity and Location will hamstring participation on the net before. One of our most valued contributors, BC2K dropped off the net after I informed him that his location was transparent by IP Addy. Besides that, he used his real name as part of his email addy, so that is a dead giveaway right there. As someone who REALLY wants to remain unknown and private, this was too much to bear for BC2K, so he disappeared from the net far as I can tell. This was a great loss to the Diner Community, but a loss to BC2K as well, because there are always new things to learn here on the net no matter how good a solo prepper you are.

It is OK and in fact worthwhile to have a certain amount of Paranoia with respect to Web participation. At the same time though SQUARING the Paranoia, and allowing yourself to be completely cut off from the communication with others helps no one, including yourself.

There are many basic means of securing yourself from problems that you worry about, like being infected with Viruses and Malware. If this is a real big concern of yours, use a separate dedicated Netbook for participation on Websites that you think might infect your computer. If it does occur, you can wipe the Hard Drive clean and start over, without damaging any files on your main laptop. Don’t use your real name as part of your email address, make a separate email addy on Google or Yahoo just for the purpose of communicating on websites you believe are dicey or compromised. Use Free Wi-Fi at Coffee Shops and Libraries if you want to hide your main Internet Provider and location.

Awareness of the problem and taking your own preventative measures can allow the best of both worlds. You have good security for yourself while at the same time you can participate and glean more knowledge and information from others who are concerned with the same problems you are.

In the end here, we all are known quantities to the folks in control so long as we use the Internet they also control. You cannot use the Internet AT ALL, including email, if you allow your Paranoia to Square itself. Use CFS in protecting your identity and your computer if this stuff concerns you. You can remain pretty safe and still participate, long as you have awareness and knowledge of how the system works and what is visible and what is not. YOU have control over that, not the Admins of websites like the Diner.

From the NSA and Google though, you got no means to remain Anon unless you are simply first class Hacker. You gotta live with that one if you want to participate on the net at all.

Frostbite Falls Daily Rant Returns!

Off the keyboard of RE

….this time, it’s AUDIO!

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/136271393&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

Published on the Doomstead Diner on February 23, 2014

Discuss this article at the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant table inside the Diner

Going back a few years when I was blogging with Jim Quinn on The Burning Platform, I eventually started an Every Other Day Blog called The Frostbite Falls Daily Rant. I was writing a lot during this period, since it was really all I was doing each night as I cruised the Wide World of Collapse.

Times change of course, and after bidding Sayonara to TBP for a while and holing up on the Yahoo Groups on my Reverse Engineering board, like Puff the Magic Dragon, the FFDR sadly slipped into its grave in the closet, with no Little Jackie Collapse dropping in to play with him each day.

With the opening of the Doomstead Diner just about exactly 2 years ago, I revived the FFDR as a Thread inside the Diner on our Forum Software. It’s about 65 pages deep now, with a potpourri of Collapse Errata in it, but it has never had the kind of Front Page Blog play that the old FFDR did when Jim published it on TBP.

In the last year, the Diner has expanded into Multimedia, offering up Podcasts and Vidcasts with a variety of Collapse Pundits, which ended up with me becoming more conversant with Audio Editing, Uploads and Publication. So last week I had a Brainstorm, I could resurrect the FFDR as a regular RADIO TALK SHOW! Not a full blown El Rushbo type thing, just a quick synopsis of some Doom Topic or Topics currently HOT in Doom-o-sphere chat by the Pundits and Commentariat of the various Blogs.

This had still more appeal to me due to Nostalgia for my roots in Pirate Radio back in the 70s & early 80s. So now, the NEW Frostbite Falls Daily Rant is BORN, and will appear regularly on the Blog, where you will find a Widget for it right at the Top of the Right Hand Menu Bar on the Blog Homepage. The most recent on the Chinese Shadow Banking Collapse appears at the top of the page here, and I have produced 2 more already as well, one on Near Term Human Extinction and another one to introduce the show. If you don’t catch them in the Blog Widget, they are also published inside the Diner in the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant thread.

The nice thing far as I am concerned is that unlike writing a decent length Blog, you can record one of these things in a few minutes, add a few minutes more for cleaning up the audio and uploading it, and POOF, it is done. 30 minutes max. A decent blog with all the multimedia I like to include on the other hand takes 3-4 hours usually, sometimes more if it is a real big one. I don’t have time to write 3-4 of these per week anymore, frankly just getting one out for Sunday Brunch each week is a challenge with all the rest of the shit going on at the Diner and on our new SUN project. Of course, you won’t get all the detail you would in a Blog, but then lots of folks always complained I wrote TOO MUCH detail and too long, so this works for the Short Attention Span people pretty well.

Also good for the Time Constrained people who have such Bizzy Lives they can’t devote themselves like I do to hours upon hours every night researching the Latest in Doom. Now, instead of reading about it, you can DOWNLOAD THE DOOM OF THE DAY to your MP3 player and catch up while you do your Gardening or Drive to Work or flipping Burgers on the BBQ.

Now, at around 5-10 minutes a pop here, I won’t be covering every last Doom Story of the Day, just picking out some highlights. I always stop by all the main Doom Outlets and good alternative Media sites to the MSM, so there should be plenty of juicy Doom stories to follow up on later if you so desire.

The Internet won’t last forever here, but while it does last it provides a fabulous medium for communication anyone can access with some ingenuity. What I am doing does NOT cost a lot of money. Really, I spend more in a week on beer than I spend in a month on ALL the accounts I have for web space for the various Diner products (granted, my Beer Bill is not insignificant. LOL). In fact you can do it all for free if you wanna deal with some minor limitations and 3rd party Ads.

Anybody who wants to get up a website and/or forum that concerns itself with dealing with the Collapse and eliminating Industrialization, the Bilderbergers and Capitalism from the face of the earth, me and the Database Cavalry from California will assist you in getting said website up. I have GOBS of server space, so you can hitch a ride on my space for free too with no Ads, no Google enslavement.

The more in this, the merrier. Power of NUMBERS.

IT IS TIME TO PUMP UP THE VOLUME!

Emerging Markets & Peripheral Currency Collapse

Off the keyboard of RE

Note: The Doomstead Diner celebrates it’s 2nd Anniversary this Weekend. We will be holding a Party on the Collapse Cafe over the weekend. If you want to drop in and Party Like it’s 1999, visit the Diner to find Links to the Party on Saturday and Sunday

Published on the Doomstead Diner on February 15, 2014

Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner

The Big Newz on the economic front over the last couple of weeks has been the ongoing collapse of various Peripheral Currencies, including but not limited to the Argentinian Peso, the Thai Bhat, the Brazilian Real, the Ruskie Rouble and the Japanese Yen. The last 3 are actually very Big Players of course, so a complete collapse of any of those currencies would wreak havoc in the world of FOREX trading, and market finance in general.

All sorts of shenanigans have been ongoing here at the same time, with at least 4 high level Banksters commiting “suicide”, along with the Argentinian Banking System Archives being destroyed by Fire in a basically fireproof building. Reminds one a little of the collapsing WTC towers taking out all the Enron files.

Argentine Banking System Archives Destroyed By Deadly Fire

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/05/2014 13:57 -0500

While we are sure it is a very sad coincidence, on the day when Argentina decrees limits on the FX positions banks can hold and the Argentine Central Bank’s reserves accounting is questioned publically, a massive fire – killing 9 people – has destroyed a warehouse archiving banking system documents. As The Washington Post reports, the fire at the Iron Mountain warehouse (which purportedly had multiple protections against fire, including advanced systems that can detect and quench flames without damaging important documents) took hours to control and the sprawling building appeared to be ruined. The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately clear – though we suggest smelling Fernandez’ hands…

We noted yesterday that there are major questions over Argentina’s reserve honesty…

While first print is preliminary and subject to revision, the size of recent discrepancies have no precedent. This suggest that the government may be attempting to manage expectations by temporarily fudging the “estimate ” of reserve numbers (first print) while not compromising “actual” final reported numbers. If this is so, it is a dangerous game to play and one likely to back-fire.

During a balance of payments crisis – as Argentina is undergoing – such manipulation of official statistics (and one so critical for market sentiment) is detrimental to the needed confidence building around the transition in the FX regime.

And today the government decrees limits on FX holdings for the banks…

Argentina’s central bank published resolution late yesterday on website limiting fx position for banks to 30% of assets.

Banks will have to limit fx futures contracts to 10% of assets: resolution

Banks must comply with resolution by April 30

And then this happens…

Via WaPo,

Nine first-responders were killed, seven others injured and two were missing as they battled a fire of unknown origin that destroyed an archive of bank documents in Argentina’s capital on Wednesday.

The fire at the Iron Mountain warehouse took hours to control…

The destroyed archives included documents stored for Argentina’s banking industry, said Buenos Aires security minister Guillermo Montenegro.

The cause of the fire wasn’t immediately clear.

Boston-based Iron Mountain manages, stores and protects information for more than 156,000 companies and organizations in 36 countries. Its Argentina subsidiary advertises that its facilities have multiple protections against fire, including advanced systems that can detect and quench flames without damaging important documents.

…

“There are cameras in the area, and these videos will be added to the judicial investigation, to clear up the motive of the fire and collapse,” Montenegro told the Diarios y Noticias agency.

You really gotta be naive or more likely BRAIN DEAD to think all this insanity is just COINKIDINK. When FOREX markets collapse, PEOPLE DIE. This is what starts SHOOTING WARS. Currency Collapse in all these countries simultaneously is a prelude to WAR. This is what truly gets World Wars started. In a country that experiences a currency collapse, they can’t get any basic necessities of life. Food doesn’t get imported. The country loses access to International Letters of Credit to guarantee shipping. It has always been obvious to me that the peripheral currencies would Collapse before the Dollar, and this run is going to take out some very big players. Even combined, I do not think the PBoC and Da Fed can funnel enough liquidity fast enough to keep all these currencies floating.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is PANICKED that the global monetary system is on the verge of a Deflationary collapse here.

World risks deflationary shock as BRICS puncture credit bubbles

As matters stand, the next recession will push the Western economic system over the edge into deflation

An exchange store staff shows a Chinese RMB$100 banknote) and a US$100 banknote in Hong Kong

…The ECB’s Mario Draghi talked up the need for a “safety margin” against deflation before Christmas but now seems strangely passive, as if beaten into submission by the Bundesbank. I heard him twice in Davos repeating – woodenly, without conviction – that core inflation is merely back to where it was in 1999 after the Asian crisis and in 2009 after the Lehman crisis, and therefore benign.We are not in remotely comparable circumstances. Those two events were at the outset of a new credit cycle. Right now we are nearly five years into an old cycle – already long in the tooth – and 80pc of the global economy is tightening or cutting stimulus. As matters stand, the next recession will push the Western economic system over the edge into deflation.The US has a slightly bigger buffer, but not much. Growth of M2 money has been slowing even faster than it did in the nine months before the Lehman crash in 2008, but then the Fed no longer pays any attention to such data so it may all too easily repeat the mistake. The Fed is surely courting fate with $10bn of bond tapering each meeting into the teeth of incipient deflation, as Minneapolis Fed chief Narayana Kocherlakota keeps warning.Those who think deflation is harmless should listen to the Bank of Japan’s Haruhiko Kuroda, who has lived through 15 years of falling prices. Corporate profits dried up. Investment in technology atrophied. Innovation fizzled out. “It created a very negative mindset in Japan,” he said.Japan had the highest real interest rates in the rich world, leading to a compound interest spiral as the debt burden rose on a base of shrinking nominal GDP.Any such outcome in Europe would send Club Med debt trajectories through the roof. It would doom all hope of halting Europe’s economic decline or reducing mass unemployment before the democracies of the afflicted countries go into seizure. So why are they letting it happen?

Ambrose Muses at the End of this “Why are they Letting it Happen?”

Hey Ambrose! They AREN’T letting it happen! They have been pitching out the Funny Money for 5 years straight now, and it AIN’T working! The CBs are running Outta Ammo!

For those of you not that conversant in how Capital Flows work in the FOREX market, let me try to make a brief explanation for what has been going on here for the last few years.

Da Fed provides basically ZIRP money for the TBTF Banks to do “Investment” with. The PBoC in China does the same thing.

In search of High Yields, this basically Free Money has been sent to do all sorts of Malinvestment in the Emerging Markets.

In the Panic Exit phase, the “Investors” attempt to Jump Ship and exit stage left fast as they can. Sadly for them, there are no BUYERS for the Dogshit they invested in, and prices start dropping on the shit. Their only HOPIUM here is that Da Fed or the PBoC buys the dogshit from them at Par. In fact the PBoC did just buy out some Dogshit Gold Trust to keep that one from going Belly Up into this mess right now, but that basically was chump change compared to the several $Trillion in Dogshit that is over there right now.

What Ambrose would like to see is for the CBs to buy ALL the Dogshit! That would be “doing something”. The CBs may eventually capitulate and try this, but the currency blowback would be enormous. Besides that, the moral hazard in the game is outrageous, and if they do it chances are good that faith is lost in their control of the situation.

So they want to pop the bubble “gradually”, but not everybody is going to cooperate with that. In fact when the Prop Desks sense tightening is coming, they wanna exit stage left before their competitors do.

The rapid outflow of foreign Capital hangs many Locals over there out to dry, and they have to start liquidating other holdings to try and stay solvent and keep their creditors at bay. So Selloff happens on all the major markets Globally, simultaneously.

So far it is not out of control, but how long the PBoC, Da Fed and the ECB can keep a lid on it is an Open Question. They simply do not have leeway left here anymore with their interest rates already so low, the Balance Sheets already off the charts and the Collateral they hold NOW is dogshit. If they heap more dogshit into this pile, “investors” will smell it, and then confidence goes in the CBs.

The result of that? Monetary System Collapse, on the Grand Scale. It hasn’t happened at this level probably since the Fall of the Roman Empire.

There is plenty more from the last couple of weeks on the shit going down here inside the Diner, from the European Markets to the Japanese ones, I’m not going to bother quoting it all in this article. Suffice it to say that markets all over the world have been in turmoil for a good 2 weeks now, and more bizarre stuff occurs each day. Like DEAD BANKSTERS. It’s Raining Pigmen.

So why is it all going down here now? Why won’t Ambrose’s solution of LOTS more Toilet Paper off the Printing Presses of CBs all over the Globe get the economy Kick Started here? Aren’t Central Banks Omipotent? They have UNLIMITED ability to create Money, don’t they?

In a sense they do, in terms of creating credit, which the well connected have virtually unlimited access to as well. What they do not have is unlimited access to resources to buy with the credit they issue. For quite a long time here it seemed like Resources were Unlimited, and during this period the CBs and the Elite cadre of people who control them were pretty close to Omnipotent, determining the direction society took by issuing the most credit to people developing the Industrial Model. To try to simplify and visualize the problem that now exists, I drew a few simple Infographics, starting with the Dawn of Homo Sapiens in the aftermath of the Toba Supervolcanic eruption 75,000 years ago.

All the Ellipses here are not drawn to scale, they just are designed to show the progress here of the World System from the Hunter-Gatherer era through to the Industrial Era.

As we begin here in the post-Toba cleanup years, there are very FEW People, and a world chock FULL of resources. People over time divided up into two classes, the Haves and Have Nots. However, during this early time the number of Have Nots was very small, just about everyone was a Have since all you needed to do to have something was pick some berries or catch some fish. Nobody owned any land, you just set up your Shelters wherever there was some good food to eat and water to drink.

Over time of course, the world packed itself up with H-Gs, since we were a very clever and successful species and could exploit just about any decent environment on the planet. This led to reduced Mobility as various tribes staked out claims to territory, so even though there is still no Individual Land Ownership, you can’t just wander anywhere willy nilly anymore to forage for food. Now if you go hunting on somebody else’s Territory, it starts a little War if the Tribes can’t come to some agreement here on how to share the resources. Still, it is a relatively level playing field as everyone has basically the same weaponry and nobody’s population is that significantly larger than anyone else’s. As a whole, the HS population is still more or less in Homeostasis with what the Earth provides because they compete with each other and nobody is taking more than what is naturally provided in the various ecosystems around the planet.

This Homeostasis comes to an end with two related Inventions, Metallurgy and Agriculture. Folks who are now basically limited to a given area who discover how to grow food crops in an intensive manner on that patch of land begin to Grow in Population Size. The Metallurgy they are using to make Farming Implements and Tools also works well for creating new Hunting Weapons, which become weapons of War also.

As they grow in size, these new Nations become further Stratified in terms of Haves and Have Nots, with the number of Haves beginning to Shrink while the number of Have Nots begins to grow. In fact many of the Have Nots of this period are Explicit Slaves of course.

These newly expanding countries develop a Military Class as well, and because of greater Numbers and Better Weaponry begin to expand and roll over any of the H-Gs surrounding them. These people are either assimilated into the growing system or they are exterminated.

By the end of the Ag Era, just about all the H-Gs are gone, except in the most remote and inaccessible locations not conducive to Agriculture. In place of many H-G Tribes, there are now relatively few large Nation-States pursuing the Ag Paradigm, again all in competition with each other. Now when Wars break out, they are pretty BIG affairs, though still pretty Regional on a global level. The Limits to Growth of this paradigm comes more or less in the late Middle Ages, and between the Plagues and the Wars, 500M or so population is where it is stuck for a while.

Two things change with the Enlightenment. First there is the discovery of the New World with a HUGE new resource base to exploit, and second is discovery of Thermodynamic principles that allow for the exploitation of a new energy source, Fossil Fuels. This begins with Coal and the Steam Engine, but progresses pretty rapidly by Cvilization standards to Oil and the Internal Combustion Engine.

The former Ag Nations which get to this stuff first now have an even BIGGER advantage over non-Industrial nations than Ag societies had over H-Gs. With these new Weapons of War such as Steam Powered Gunboats, it was relatively simple for Matthew Perry to motor over to Japan, shell Nagasaki and Edo for a few days and get the Feudal Lords of Japan to capitulate, and “join the party” so to speak. They actually had no choice in this, it was either join up or be exterminated.

As we progressed through this era, the Population expanded VASTLY as the bottom of the Infographic shows, and the number of Have Nots in the global society vastly Increased, while the number of Haves began shrinking, now to the point where even here in the Have Nation of the FSoA, there are WAY more Have Nots then Haves.

In order to manage this ever expanding system, what was at the beginning a fairly Rudimentary system of Money used for Trade began to grow itself in Size and Complexity. Let’s look at a couple of basic Infographics to see how the Industrial Economy begins to shape itself.

In the beginning, the Economic World of Homo Sapiens is just one big unit of Resources and People. From the POV of Homo Sapiens, all the rest of the creatures on the Earth are just Resources to exploit, be they animals or plants. Agriculture first and Industrialization later dichotomizes this into the People on the one side, the Resources on the other. Industry is the process of taking People and Resources together and creating new products people WANT (rather than really need), and in the process creating a lot of Waste they don’t want and don’t need either.

To bring us back round to present day and the collapse of the Peripheral Currencies of Emerging Markets, you have to get a clear idea of how the financial system organized itself up over time to distribute out “money”, centralize “capital” and make essentially the entire world dependent on its continuing functionality to prevent/delay the collapse of the Industrial system that essentially exploited the resource wealth of the Earth until it was effectively gone.

At left here is a VERY basic diagram of the main Financial Players in the game, some of whom are actual Living People, others which are just abstract concepts or conglomerations of people, so People are at the top of the chart.

People create the Banks, the Money, the Corporations, the Nations and the Derivatives that come out of all this Creative Organization. You might think Money precedes Banks in Creation, but it really doesn’t. Original Banks were storage warehouses for grain, money came after that as a Token to represent credit that allowed you to have access to that grain.

Nations eventually emerged here to be the guarantors, while banks took on the role of issuing the credit. Corporations evolved in the Industrial era as supra-National entities basically controlled by a small portion of the population, the Haves in the first diagram here above. Same folks in control of these Corporations as in control of the Banking System, so for the most part Corporations have had access to Unlimited Credit, while the amount of credit the average J6P could access at any time was extremely limited.

Nation-States also had access to nearly as much Unlimited Credit as Corps did, at least up until recently anyhow. Reason for this is that the Political Leadership of any country could offer up as Collateral all the Resources that country contained, along with Labor Force of that country. Countries of all flavors and locations were over time all subsumed into the same centrally controlled Credit system, which took a couple of World Wars in the Industrial Era to consolidate, though the process has been ongoing since the Fall of the Roman Empire and that Banking system.

Again quite simplified above you will find the current organization as it evolved, with the main markets derived from this system. In it, you see only ONE Central Bank, whereas there are many of them, in fact almost every individual Nation-State has its own CB long as they still issue their own currency and are not part of a currency union like the (gag, spit, puke) Euro. However, despite the fact they have their own CBs and Currencies, all are still tied into the same system, which the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland coordinates. They have been doing this since the end of WWII, originally under the 1st Bretton-Woods agreements, but morphing over time in various ways since to keep the system running.

The main “reserve” currency the BIS uses to do all their accounting is the DOLLAR, so regardless of whether any other country participating in Global Trade have their own CB and their own currency. All these currencies have traded with a generally accepted “range” for the past 30 years or so, with some currency arbitrage in the FOREX market through the period. Interest rates go up and down, currencies get traded back and forth all dependent on which way the people in charge direct the investment capital, through the 3 major markets you see at the bottom of the diagram, the Equity (Stock) Market, the Commodity Market and the Bond Market. Who “Invests” in these markets?

The mythology is there are millions of Small Investors who buy into each of these markets, but it is not that way at all. “Investors” are really mainly the largest TBTF Banks, which you find at the top of the diagram. Actually this also includes other institutional investors like Hedge Funds, Sovereign Wealth Funds and Pension Funds, but these days it is mainly the biggest of the TBTF Banks doing “investment”. AKA, Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Deutche Bank et al. Where do they get their money to Invest in the various flavors of Dogshit available on these markets today? From Depositor Money? Hell no. Depositors don’t have the $Trillions$ necessary these days to levitate markets. They get the money by Borrowing from the Central Banks. Why can they borrow $Billions$ every day while you have trouble getting a Mortgage or Car Loan? Because they have “collateral”, which basically is just paper they bought previously, with you guessed it, loans from the CBs. LOL. This is called “leveraging”. It goes along with other methods of multiplying the money you have to play with, Fractional Reserve is another, Rehypothecation still another. This all adds up to a HUGE Tower of Debt instruments everybody holds, which in theory represent something, but in fact nowadays represent nothing, or very little anyhow relative to the actual size of the tower.

Now to the question at hand, why do we see the Peripheral Currencies hitting the wall here first, and why is it mainly the Emerging Markets that are collapsing first? The reason is who got to be the “Lenders” in the Growth period versus who got to be the borrowers of the Reserve Currency of the Dollar.

The Lenders all came from the place where Industrialization developed first, Germany, England and the FSoA. They got the Ponzi started, and as we all know, the first people in on a Ponzi get really rich, while everyone else gets Hosed. In fact the Federal Reserve here in the FSoA is owned by the Private Cartel of Banks from these countries, including the Bank of Rothschild, JP Morgan Chase and of course Goldman-Sachs. So they have always been able to borrow basically as much as they like to expand the Ponzi, charge a higher rate of interest to everyone they loan money to (all the late entry countries), and collect on the spread over the last Century. A FABULOUS RACKET! In the words of Alfonse Capone

During the Expansionary period of this game, the Credit flowed Free and EZ outward to every dipshit Nation-State under the Sun. Everybody wanted the “Cargo” of Industrialization, and to buy that Cargo, you had to have the Credit issued by the people who were selling the shit.

From Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs & Steel”

Voiceover: There have been people living in New Guinea for at least 40,000 years – much longer than on the continents of North and South America. They’re among the most culturally diverse and adaptable people in the world. So why are they so much poorer than modern Americans? The question was put to Diamond bluntly by a man called Yali, whom he met on a beach more than 30 years ago.

Yali Voiceover: Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

Jared Diamond: Yali’s question really threw me. It seemed so simple and obvious, and I thought it must have a simple and obvious answer, but when he asked me, I had no idea what that answer was.

Yali Voiceover: Why you white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

Wealth in the Industrial Era demanded access to the Credit necessary to buy Industrial Goods and build Industrial Infrastructure like Power Plants and roads suitable for moving the Heavy Equipment of Industry over. The credit was issued on the Resource base of the WORLD, including the Labor Force of Homo Sapiens in any given neighborhood. Even though the Bankers issuing the credit did not “own” these resources (at least at the beginning), they acquired the ownership of them by two means.

The first and most obvious means was by WAR, or just Intimidation by virtue of superior Firepower. In the case of Japan, Cmdr. Matthew Perry brought his Steam Powered Gunships to Japan, which had been closed to Western Culture from the beginning of the Enlightment during the Feudal period of the Edo era. We covered this progression a while back here on the Diner in the article Mr. Peabody Visits Japan.

Essentially, anybody without the firepower of Industrialization had a Hobson’s Choice. The ONLY realistic choice if you wanted to LIVE was to buy in to the model, borrow the money and live the Industrial Meme. Anyone who did not buy into this was Exterminated. In the case of the Potlatch civilizations of the Pacific Northwest, their whole meme of Economic Distribution through Gifting was made ILLEGAL by the folks with the Guns & Steel.

Potlatch ban

Main article: The Potlatch Ban (Canada)

Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an amendment to the Indian Act^[17] and the United States in the late 19th century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it “a worse than useless custom” that was seen as wasteful, unproductive, and contrary to civilized values.^[18]

The potlatch was seen as a key target in assimilation policies and agendas. Missionary William Duncan wrote in 1875 that the potlatch was “by far the most formidable of all obstacles in the way of Indians becoming Christians, or even civilized.”^[19] Thus in 1884, the Indian Act was revised to include clauses banning the Potlatch and making it illegal to practice. Section 3 of the Act read,

Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the “Potlatch” or the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas” is guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and, any Indian or other person who encourages, either directly or indirectly, an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, or who shall assist in the celebration of same is guilty of a like offence, and shall be liable to the same punishment.^[20]

In 1888, the anthropologist Franz Boas described the potlatch ban as a failure:

The second reason for the discontent among the Indians is a law that was passed, some time ago, forbidding the celebrations of festivals. The so-called potlatch of all these tribes hinders the single families from accumulating wealth. It is the great desire of every chief and even of every man to collect a large amount of property, and then to give a great potlatch, a feast in which all is distributed among his friends, and, if possible, among the neighboring tribes. These feasts are so closely connected with the religious ideas of the natives, and regulate their mode of life to such an extent, that the Christian tribes near Victoria have not given them up. Every present received at a potlatch has to be returned at another potlatch, and a man who would not give his feast in due time would be considered as not paying his debts. Therefore the law is not a good one, and can not be enforced without causing general discontent. Besides, the Government is unable to enforce it. The settlements are so numerous, and the Indian agencies so large, that there is nobody to prevent the Indians doing whatsoever they like.^[21]

Eventually the potlatch law, as it became known, was amended to be more inclusive and address technicalities that had led to dismissals of prosecutions by the court. Legislation included guests who participated in the ceremony. The indigenous people were too large to police and the law too difficult to enforce. Duncan Campbell Scott convinced Parliament to change the offence from criminal to summary, which meant “the agents, as justice of the peace, could try a case, convict, and sentence”.^[22] Even so, except in a few small areas, the law was generally perceived as harsh and untenable. Even the Indian agents employed to enforce the legislation considered it unnecessary to prosecute, convinced instead that the potlatch would diminish as younger, educated, and more “advanced” Indians took over from the older Indians, who clung tenaciously to the custom.^[23]

A fairly common meme you read on the Collapse Websites is that “We are All COMPLICIT” in the destruction of the Earth and the Imperialist meme simply because we participate by having Jobs inside it and Paying our Taxes, which in the end go to propping up the Military-Industrial Complex which keeps the whole show rolling. Even inside the Diner this is a powerful meme many buy into:

The Kitchen Sink / Re: Why Have We Failed?

From Surly

« on: February 14, 2014, 02:44:43 AM »

Quote from: Karpatok on February 13, 2014, 05:08:40 PM

I do not know of one single person either IRL or IVL who is not in the SLIMY WHORE BIZNESS of DENIAL, denying their own culpability and blaming others. YEAH, DE NILE can fill a BIG BIG VACUUM BAG. Karpatok

Quite correct, K. Makes me think of the concept of “original sin.”

Each one of us has benefitted from the excesses of the Age of Oil, from the Imperial Project, from the export of FSoA economic vitality. (“Low low prices everyday…”) And few of us want to consider the implications of that, or are not interested. Far easier to reach for a bag of Cheetos than to consider alternatives.

Those who are less in denial congregate virtually in blogs like this and discuss how to become less complicit, and what next steps might look like.

In a sense you can say we are complicit, but only in the sense you are complicit if somebody sticks a gun to your head and says, “Do it MY WAY, or HIT THE HIGWAY“. Anybody who did not buy the meme and use the Money and participate in this culture was rendered DEAD, or terrifically impoverished at best. Anybody born into the society either bought the meme or ended up Homeless and labelled as a “Failure”. Become a Pigman yourself, strive to GET RICH inside this culture or you are NOTHING, a less than WORTHLESS Person.

The coersion here doesn’t STOP with the Military end of forcing cultures by the Point of a Gun to Buy In, once you have bought in and taken the LOANS out necessary to ramp up your new Industrial Society full of all the Cargo your population wants (but does not really need), now you are forced by the Legal System constructed around this to buy into ideas like Property Ownership, Taxation and all the rest. Every avenue of trying to take yourself out of this meme is progressively removed. Back in the day, you had Mountain Men like Jeremiah Johnson who walked away from this culture, because at the time there still were places to go not Owned and Controlled by somebody else. Now those mountains and their Forests are owned by Weyerhauser or Ted Turner or some other Corporate Person or Pigman. The land belongs to THEM, accoridng to the LAW. Hell, even the fucking Water falling from the sky as Rain belongs to them! How are you complicit if you CANNOT ESCAPE? Even up here in the Bush of Alaska, you have the Parks Dept. Rangers who will fine you if you don’t have a “license” to hunt or fish. Long as the matrix holds its integrity, you can’t escape it, you can only try to hide inside it and plan for the day it DOES collapse, which it will, because all Ponzis always do.

To conclude here today, we often read that TPTB in charge of the Fiat money system create “Money from Nothing“, but this is not really true. The Something they created the money on was the resource base of the Earth, which they basicall were in control of here in the Industrial era by virtue of Military hegemony. Capitalism was always just a Ponzi which made the initiators of the system Richer than God by exploiting the reosurces of the earth and the rest of the Have Nots populating the planet. The problem they have now is that though they still are in power to issue credit, they have little in the way of real good resources left to issue that credit out on. In reality, these folks are as BK as everyone else, in numerical terms really a lot more BK, since what they hold as “Wealth” mainly are debt instruments that will never, can never pay off.

Peripheral Currencies are the Weakest Link in the Daisy Chain of the Ponzi. As the system implodes, the “Investors” seek to exit these economies, and when they do that those economies lose access to Credit on the FOREX market denominated in Dollars. For the food Importers (many of them), their ability to access food imports at a price their population can afford to buy becomes constrained. Once that happens, Political Turmoil in extremis follows and you work your way in progression to a Failed State. See Syria, Egypt, Greece and soon enough Spain and France too on this Bandwagon. Doesn’t matter whether they can create their own currency or not really, relative to population size they simply do not have resource upon which to issue credit anymore.

In a sort of Magical Thinking paradigm, the Chinese are buying up Gold, under the concept that when the Dollar Collapses, a Gold Backed Renminby can take its place as World Reserve Currency. Problem with this? The Chinese are in bigger resource deficit relative to population size than anybody else in gross numbers, with the possible exception of the Indians. Japanese are in worse situation per capita and by land mass, but it is a smaller population. Assuming the few still left Resource Rich countries will TAKE Chinese Gold for their resources after the Dollar collapses, the Chinese would quickly be divested of all their Gold in the basement safe of the PBoC.

Peripheral Currency Collapse is the Leading Indicator of a collapsing Monetary System overall here. However, once they collapse, the Jenga Puzzle of Derivatives will bring down the Dollar too, and really nothing is out there that can replace it, because the resources aren’t there either. Not for such a large Global Population and certainly not for this population to try and live the lifestyle of Industrial Culture that the FSoA did for these last 200 years or so. This has mostly been burned up now, and floats around the atmosphere as molecules of CO2, exacerbating a climate change and making life ever more difficult to pursue just about everywhere.

So it will get a LOT worse here before it ever gets better, if it ever does. Negotiating this period will be extremely difficult, and there is no guarantee any strategy you try to employ here will work to make it through to the Other Side. On the other hand, no guarantee there will be a complete WIPEOUT of Homo Sapiens either, so if you want to LIVE, you try to come up with the best strategies for doing that, and that is what we do on the Diner and on SUN. It is the challenge of all of history this generation and the next faces. You only have two choices here, try to Survive or Quit and Die first. For the Heliopaths here, we will try to survive, and keep Fingers Crossed that some can make it through the Zero Point. The time of the Terminator has come.

COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE

Podcast: John Sharry and the Psychology of Collapse

YOU WILL NEED TO GO TO DOOMSTEAD DINER TO HEAR THE PODCAST. I CAN’T SEEM TO IMBED IT ON THE SITE

Off the microphones of John Sharry, RE & Monsta

Aired on the Doomstead Diner on February 1, 2014

Discuss at the Podcast Table inside the Diner

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/132590086&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&visual=true

I recently ran across a great article from another of the FEASTA crew of Theoretical Physicists delving into Collapse Topics, John Sharry.

John wrote the article Hope in the Face of Disaster – Creating a sustainable, viable, future path for civilisation , which explores the psychological underpinnings and attachments we have to the Progress Meme, as well as proposing means and method to deal with the oncoming storm in a constructive paradigm.

In closing his article, John writes the following

Building a Community of support

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

In my work as a mental health professional rarely do people overcome big personal problems on their own. It is usually in the context of support from family, friends or even a professional that people turn their lives around.

While there is a myriad of future challenges facing humanity that are already beginning to impact, the future still is unpredictable and open to choice. While few people yet take the long term view and see the direction towards which we are heading, it is incumbent on those who are aware to prepare and act now. If we do survive and continue to live purposely it will be down to our personal and collective choices. While we don’t know what exact questions will be asked of us in the future, let alone begin to fully answer them, we can build resilience and a state of preparedness for whatever future challenges are to come. If we strive now to honestly face the reality of our predicament, set meaningful goals that bind us together and take constructive action, then we can build a future worth living for.

Such are the Goals and Purpose of the SUN Project also, and it is always a great experience to find others of Like Mind who see these problems and are attempting to address them constructively. I highly recommend listening to this podcast with John Sharry if you are concerned with the direction of Collapse and your own ability to deal with it and make the changes necessary for survival.

About John Sharry

John Sharry trained as a scientist, social worker and psychotherapist. He is Director of the Parents Plus Charity and a weekly columnist for The Irish Times. He is the author of ten books in counseling and mental health including three best-selling positive psychology books and seven popular self-help books for parents and families. His writing has been translated into eight languages including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. He is particularly interested in how a psychological perspective is crucial in understanding how people will respond to the current peak oil/climate change crises. His website is http://www.solutiontalk.ie. He lives in Dublin.

Alaska Springtime in January Photo Essay

Off the keyboard and camera of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on January 26, 2013

Melted Lake

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner

I picked up a new High Tech Gizmo this last week, a Compact Camera System from my favorite South Korean Appleshit Competitor, Samsung. In my last Smart Phone purchase, I ditched my Iphone for a Samsung Galaxy Mega, which is a confabulation of a Phone and Tablet called a Phablet. It’s actually big enough to web surf on and not strain your eyes, and I have a little Folding Keyboard for it also so I can actually WRITE on the thing, and not peck out TXT messages with my thumbs.

My extreme happiness with this new Smart Phone plus the fact several of us Diners are getting together down in Texas Droughtland for our first Convocation and Meeting for developing the SUN Project impelled me to looking into Upgrading my El Cheapo Sony Cybershot camera which is about 5 years old now and WAY out of date for a newer and better camera to record the Convocation proceedings. Said proceedings to include a week long Workshop Course we are all taking at Monolithic Domes, to learn how to build these sturdy Ferrocement domiciles.

I considered dropping back into Single Lens Reflex cameras like the Nikon F2 I used back in my years as Photography Editor for the Columbia Spectator. They are “DSLR” now, Digital Single Lens Reflex. The Professional models from Nikon and Canon run $3000 and Up just for the Camera Body, and this not including the Lens Kit you buy for yourself. Anybody who ever got into Photography either in the Film Era or the Digital era should know what a Rabbit Hole and Money Pit you get into when you go into this Hobby.

I’m not a Professional Photographer though, and never intend to be one at this stage of my life, though I thought about it for a while early on in my Career Jumping lifestyle. I just want a better Camera system to use for Sprucing up my Websites with HQ Pics and Vids. So after a bunch of research on what is now available, I decided on the NX300 Compact Camera System for Samsung. Besides the fact it is competitive on an image level with much more expensive DSLRs, it marries up to the Samsung Galaxy Mega Phablet through WiFi, and all in all is just a fabulous technological marvel.

This article though is not meant to be a Camera Review though, it’s about one of my first Test Uses for the camera as I get back into the world of Amateur Photography. One of the other Diners who will be attending the Convocation IS a professional photographer, and recently upgraded her system to a Canon 5D Mark III, a medium-high end DSLR. We are going to have a Friendly Competition for Image Making at the Convocation. To get ready for this Challenge, I need to Practice with the camera, since my skills are a tad RUSTY after around a Quarter Century of Atrophy.

The subject I chose today for some practice was the EXTRAORDINARILY BIZARRE weather we have been experiencing this January up here on the Last Great Frontier. The Winter started off fairly normal, but going through December unlike all the previous years I have lived here we got NO Sub-Zero days. Decent snowfall though, so it looked like a typical Winter here, snow covered roads, small mountains of Plowed Snow in Parking Lots, etc.

This all STOPPED though about a week ago now though, when the temps went ABOVE Freezing, and the snow collected thus far began to melt. And KEPT ON MELTING. Rainy days, days in the 40s, this has basically washed away now about 90% of the snow accumulated to date, in JANUARY! This sort of Snow Melt doesn’t happen here until March at the earliest usually. So with my new NX300 utilizing just the 20-50mm lens I bought it with (did not switch to the 50-200mm lens I also got for this session), I went on a Documentary Tour of the Matanuska-Susitna River Valley to show what the NEW NORMAL is like up here, with Springtime in January.

3 Stumps

Blue Trailer Trash

Bright Wires

House in the Trees

Lake House

Winter Blacktop

It is amazing how non-chalant people are about this up here. “Isn’t this odd”, they say.

I’m like, no it’s not odd if you PAID ATTENTION to the actual data that has been coming out and stopped buying the spin pitched at you by your favorite Talk Show Denier.

Folks, that Lake has never been Ice free before March for as long as I lived here. That Parking Lot is always Snow Covered with HUGE MOUNTAINS of plowed snow. There is NO WAY you could see the House in the Trees, every little branch would have snow on it. Those Stumps should be under at least a foot of packed snow.

I made some jokes about opening a Club Med up here a while back. It’s no joke. We got into the 90s last summer. I think we may make Triple Digits this year.

This climatic change is not uniform by any means. Inside the Diner, WHD reports steady Sub-Zero temperatures in his Habitat of Minnesota:

It’ll be -18F again, Monday. Might have a few days this week in a row, when the temp does not get above 0F. More snow too, than I’ve seen @ this time, in awhile. It will be curious to see about damage to my fruit trees and vines. Wind howling lately too, like it usually does in the spring and the fall. Clear skies and howling winds.

Nuts.

Nuts indeed. With Uber Cold temperatures in MN, while you are getting a Sub-Tropical Winter in AK, are you looking at Global Warming or Global Cooling? DENIERS will latch onto every story of Frigid Temps in the Mid-West as Evidence we don’t have a Global Warming trend in progress. Temps in the atmosphere in any given location do not really tell the story well of the Climate Change though. Really, “Climate Change” does not do justice to what is underway here, it is more like “Climate UPHEAVAL“.

While the temps up here in the Northern Hemisphere are doing a major Tap Dance, down in Oz in their SUMMER they are pitching out temps that are going +50C. Folks, that is 122F.

Australia Rings In The New Year With Record-Breaking Heat Wave

A heatwave that has enveloped much of Australia for the past couple weeks is reaching a breaking point, but not after first smashing temperature records.

On Thursday, parts of inland Australia reached temperatures around 50 degrees Celsius, or 122 degrees Fahrenheit, before a shifting air mass is forecast to bring weekend temperatures back to averages in the mid-30s. There were reports of temperatures as high as 54 degrees Celsius, 129 degrees Fahrenheit, in the outback on Thursday.

120+ is some fucking HOT shit, and really not even DEATH VALLEY in the FSoA gets that hot, at least not in past years. Nobody lives long in those temperatures, so if that is the long term course for the Globe, we are all TOAST for sure.

Speaking of Death Valley, what is happening in Sunny California and surrounding mountains these days? Here contributed by Agelbert on the Diner are Sattelite Photos from 2013 and 2104 showing the Snowpack in the Rockies.

Where is the runoff going to come from this summer into CA to irrigate the farmland there? Not like they normally get much rainfall in the summer there, so without the Snowpack to tide them over, water is going to be pretty thin there by around June or so, fuhgettaboutit in August.

The OTHER place they get their water from, Lake Mead which dams up the Colorado River with the Hoover Dam is not looking too good either!

When you talk Lake Mead and the Hoover Dam, you are not just talking the Water Issue, you got a POWER issue here also. Electricity from the Hoover Dam powers all those Vegas Lights on the Strip, not to mention the PUMPS that move Lake Mead water over the Rockies to the CA Lettuce Fields. Also powers numerous Plasma TVs and Internet Routers in SoCal.

There is something like 15′ left of leeway now between when the water level in Lake Mead is sufficient to drive the Turbines that generate that power, and when they begin to Cavitate. That happens when air bubbles start getting mixed in with the water, and the managers HAVE to shut them down when that point comes. The equipment will blow itself apart if left to run.

Can the Electricity from Hoover be REPLACED with Fossil Fuel energy? Maybe short term it can, but even if it can it makes the Water Bill a whole lot more than those Farmers can afford to pay, or the consumers of the lettuce can afford to pay either. They are OUTTA BIZ.

This does not of course resolve the issue of whether we have a Global Warming or Cooling event in progress, only that it is VERY obvious we have enormous climate changes underway which affect total rainfall and the ability of given water systems to replenish themselves. To resolve that question, as I see it you need to look not at the Atmospheric temps, but at the OCEAN Temps. The Ocean is a far bigger Heat Sink for energy than the Atmosphere is. It contains MOST of the Gibbs Free Energy extant in the system. It is patently OBVIOUS Ocean Heat Energy has been on a steady increase here for more than 20 years.

How much of the causation for this is Anthropogenic resultant from Fossil Fuel burning and how much is resultant from Geotectonic causes of Earthquakes and Volcanoes is an open question, but either way the Ocean contains an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more heat energy today than it did in 1990. that energy transfers into the atmosphere in the form of Cyclonic Storms, read that Sandy on the East Coast of the FSoA and Haiyan in the Phillipines.

Even IF the overall Global Temps don’t start exceeding 50C everywhere, you got a LOT of places right now that are facing extremes they never saw before, least so long as Homo Sapiens has been recording them. Much like the Stock Market, what you got here is EXTREME VOLATILITY. Very difficult to plan for any kind of Ag Growing when you do not know WTF will come from one year to the next, Drought this year, Floods the next; Hard Freeze this year, Heat Wave the next, etc.

Where to GO, what to DO in such a situation, eh? Do you simply wait it out where you ARE, and hope for the Best? I think that would be a BAD IDEA in Sunny California right now. JMHO. Not looking too good in Northern Oz either. China? Fuck the Weather, the SMOG will kill you first!

Escape gets tougher all the time here, and figuring out just how to handle what is quite obviously major change in the overall environment is none too easy a task either! More than a few folks have given up on the idea that ANYBODY can survive the combination of environmental & man made catastrophes we now face, and are convinced a NEAR TERM HUMAN EXTINCTION is in the offing. Maybe so, when you gather together all this shit in aggregate it sure does not look too good for the Away Team. As Guy McPherson puts it, Earth is the Home Team, and NATURE BATS LAST.

This may be true, but it is not our meme on the Diner. I can’t really speak for the rest of the Diners who all really have quite their own interpretation on the subject, but as for me, it is irrelevant if in the end Extinction is in the offing. For me,. between NOW and Extinction is the battle I choose to fight. Matters not whether I win or lose the battle either, so long as I Fight with HONOR. No quitting here, no Hospicing, no Kubler-Ross Acceptance of Grief either. Fight until the breath leaves your body. Never say die, never quit.

The CREDO of the Heliopath. It Ain’t OVAH till the Fat Lady Sings.

JOBS

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on January 19, 2014

Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner

The Big Newz last week on the Economic Front was the Jobs Report from the Bureau of Lies & Statistics, which now has the FSoA UE Rate down to a remarkable 6.7%! We are doing FANTASTIC! This is down from Double Digit UE Rates around 11% following the Financial Crack-Up of 2008. Happy Daze are HERE AGAIN!

From Zero Hedge

Curious why despite the huge miss in payrolls the unemployment rate tumbled from 7.0% to 6.7%? The reason is because in December the civilian labor force did what it usually does in the New Normal: it dropped from 155.3 million to 154.9 million, which means the labor participation rate just dropped to a fresh 35 year low, hitting levels not seen since 1978, at 62.8% down from 63.0%.

And the piece de resistance: Americans not in the labor force exploded higher by 535,000 to a new all time high 91.8 million.

The jobless, laborless recovery continues to steam on.

ZH of course highlights the OBVIOUS canard being pitched out here, which goes to the Denominator in the Equation, who the BLS counts as UE and Looking for Work. The UE measured rate by the BLS obviously went down tremendously as soon as Da Federal Goobermint dropped millions off from Extended UE bennies that were running 99 Weeks. Once you have used up your Bennies, you no longer are counted as looking for a job, whether you found one or not by the time the bennies ran out.

At the same time, the “Labor Participation Rate”, the percentage of the population who actually has a Job continues to drop here off the map. Are we expected to believe all these folks no longer need or want a job?

Part of the reason for this is Demographics. Overall the population is aging, and more of the Boomers Retire each year, and at least for now can collect SS and whatever Pension is due them, at least if they were not working for the City of Detroit for the last 30 years. However, we still do have Immigration going on, and we still do have homegrown young folks graduating from High School and College. The percentage of either class of people able to find “Jobs” in our current economy continues to drop here, and their hopes for the Future drop with them.

Of course this is NOTHING compared to what is ongoing in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy these days, where Youth

Unemployment is reaching into the +50% category. In a society where having a JOB to earn MONEY is essential if you expect to stay out of Prison or not live in a cardboard box on the street, I can’t think of any better recipe for Social Unrest than these kind of UE numbers.

If you are older here and go UE, even if you are not QUITE yet eligible for SS, decent chance you have some savings to live off, or maybe a paid off McMansion you can sell and live off the proceeds in a trailer park while you wait for SS to kick in. Or you can try and get SSDI a bit earlier than 62 for regular SS retirement FRNs.

So there is still some Safety Net here for Job losses, which goes a long way toward explaining why we do not yet see the kind of social unrest already ongoing in Greece and Spain. How long this can continue to play here remains an open question of course.

So, the bottom line here on all of this ongoing collapse nonsense revolves around the JOBS, which have been since the Industrial Revolution the means by which MOST people get some MONEY to then be able to buy food, pay Rent to the Rentier Class and buy energy with which to run the carz they need to get to work and participate in said Industrial Economy. Jobs disappear, the ability to participate disappears with it.

What ARE the jobs of the Industrial Economy though? Well, for a while during the early Growth Phase here in the FSoA, those jobs were Industrial Factory type work, as we provided hardware to run both WWI and WWII. We had copious sources of local Cheap Energy to run the Factories back then, and besides that after destroying much of the Infrastructure in Europe in both wars, it needed to be rebuilt, providing a lot of work for Factory workers here in the FSoA, where nothing got Bombed.

During the Post WWII period also, the FSoA Industrialists began the largest Public Works project in the History of Mankind, the Eisenhower Interstate. The reason was not to develop Commerce, although that came out of it as a means to Finance the project, it came from the realization by the Military arm of the Military-Industrial Complex that in order to move their Tanks and Hardware around this vast continent, they needed ROADS upon which to roll that hardware.

As a Young Lieutenant in the Army back in 1919, Dwight D Eisenhower had to move a Convoy across the old “Lincoln Highway”, which was really a Hodgepodge of paved and dirt roads, and the equipment they had got bogged down all the time. Fuel stops were vitually nonexistent, so they had to have their own Fuel trucks travelling with them to stock up at the few fuel depots that existed at the time in the more majore motros connected toa Rail line. It took WEEKS to make it across the country.

From the Illinois Dept. of Transportation website:

In late June 2006, a caravan of vehicles organized by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) will travel across the United States from San Francisco, California to Washington, D. C. to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Interstate Highway System.

The AASHTO Anniversary Caravan of 2006 will follow Interstate 80 much of the way. It will be retracing, in reverse, the approximate route of a famous previous expedition, the Transcontinental Army Motor Convoy, which followed the Lincoln Highway across the country from Washington to San Francisco in 1919. PHOTO (ABOVE): Soldiers pushing a disabled truck during the 1919 Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy, Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 86-19-190

The remainder of this section will describe the 1919 Army Convoy; report on its three-day trip across Illinois and relate what the 1919 Army Convoy meant for the future of American Roads.

ORIGINS AND PURPOSES OF THE 1919 ARMY CONVOY

World War I (1914-1918) was the first large scale military conflict that employed vehicles powered by the relatively new internal combustion engine. Airplanes, trucks, motorcars, and tanks were used on both sides. However, they lacked the reliability, flexibility, and capacity for moving large masses of troops or equipment over long distances on inferior European roads. The vast majority of WWI military transportation on land was done by horses and railroad trains; nevertheless, by the end of the war, most military leaders saw the potential for increased use of motorized troops and equipment in military campaigns of the future.

The end of the war also inspired the leaders of the Good Roads Movement to resume their public relations (PR) campaign to convince the public to demand better roads from state and local governments. The PR campaign had been put on hold during the 1917-1918 period while America was engaged in WWI. Early in 1919, Lincoln Highway Association leader Harry Ostermann had persuaded the War Department to conduct a transcontinental motor convoy trip from the East Coast to San Francisco on the marked route of the Lincoln Highway.

The purpose of the convoy was two fold: 1) it was to be a training exercise and 2) a test of the feasibility of the long distance movement of military men and supplies by auto and truck.

From the Good Roads Movement’s viewpoint, the convoy was meant to produce positive PR by demonstrating that long distance motor travel was possible. It was also meant to heighten awareness of existing poor roads that comprised much of the Lincoln Highway and other roads in the Unites States. Return to Top

AN EPIC JOURNEY FULL OF CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Amid much hoopla, speeches and fanfare, a 76-vehicle combined “public-private” convoy, including 56 military vehicles, 209 officers and enlisted men, and dozens of private citizens took off from the White House on July 7, 1919. (LH/MAIN STREET, p. 83).

Later that evening, the convoy was joined by two, last minute volunteer Army officers. They were Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major Sereno Brett, who were to serve as observers for the Army Tank Corps. PHOTO: Major Sereno Brett, Harvey Firestone, Jr., and Lt. Colonel Dwight Eisenhower at 1919 Army Convoy stopover at the Firestone Homestead, Columbania, Ohio, July 13, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 70-520-3.

The convoy was to operate as if the country was at war and that an Asiatic enemy had destroyed railroad lines, bridges, and tunnels. They were also to act as if they would be traveling through enemy territory and thus, had to be self-contained and self-sustaining over the 3,250-mile route. Maintaining the illusion of being at war or being truly self-sustaining proved to be very difficult, as was the trip itself.

Among some of the military personnel, there was even doubt whether or not the convoy could actually make it across the continent. The vehicles were untested over long distances. Many sections of the Lincoln Highway were unimproved dirt roads. Finally, few military personnel; especially enlisted men, had much experience with motor vehicle driving or maintenance. Eisenhower later wrote that the trek was a genuine adventure. “We were not sure it could be accomplished at all. Nothing of the sort had ever been attempted.”

At first, in the East from Washington through Indiana, the roads were generally good but mechanical problems with the various vehicles and logistical problems slowed the convoy’s progress. Military discipline among the men also was “conspicuous by its absence,” according to one observer. About the familiarity of the men with operating trucks, Eisenhower wrote:

All drivers had claimed lengthy experience in driving trucks; some of them, it turned out, had never handled anything more advanced than a Model T. Most colored the air with expression in starting and stopping that indicated a longer association with teams of horses than with internal combustion engines. (EISENHOWER REPORT)

As the convoy (also referred to as the “train” by some) headed into Illinois and the West, road conditions along the Lincoln Highway presented serious challenges that often delayed and sometimes halted the convoy. The Highway ran on dirt roads through most of Illinois, but the weather was dry, so it was possible to cross the state in a few days. Of the roads between Illinois and California, Eisenhower, in his post-trip report wrote:

The dirt roads of Iowa are well graded and are good in dry weather; but would be impossible in wet weather. In Nebraska, the first real sand was encountered, and two days were lost in western part of this state due to bad, sandy roads. Wyoming roads west of Cheyenne are poor dirt ones, with weak culverts and bridges. In one day, 14 of these were counted, broken through by the train. The desert roads in the southwest portion of this state are very poor. In western Utah, on the Salt Lake Desert, the road becomes almost impossible to heavy vehicles. From Orr’s Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits and holes. This stretch was not improved in any way, and consisted only of a track across the desert. At many points on the road water is twenty miles distant, and parts of the road are ninety miles from the nearest railroad. (EISENHOWER REPORT)

In fact, one of the biggest problems was the poor state of the bridges along the Lincoln Highway. PHOTO: Army Truck testing the holding power of one of many small bridges crossed during the Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 81-17-25.

Advance notice of the convoy spread and its arrival in towns along the Lincoln Highway were occasions for celebrations and plenty of speeches imploring listeners to demand more public funding for “Good Roads.” The convoy passed through 350 communities, and it was estimated that more than 3,000,000 people witnessed it along the route. Millions more followed the trek in newspapers and early motion picture “newsreels.” PHOTO: 1919 Army Transcontinental Motor Convoy on Review, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1919. Eisenhower Library Audiovisual Department, photo 81-17-55.

The convoy did make it. Battered, but unbowed, the caravan arrived at the gates of Lincoln Park in San Francisco. However, it had taken until September 6, 1919 for it to reach its destination, a grueling sixty-two (62) days!

In November 1919, Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower wrote a seven-page report relaying the observations he made during the Army Convoy to the Chief of the Army’s Motor Transport Corps (M.T.C.). He summarized the results as follows:

The truck train was well received at all points along the route. It seemed that there was a great deal of sentiment for the improving of highways, and, from the standpoint of promoting this sentiment, the trip was an undoubted success. As stated before in this paper, it is believed that the M. T. C. should pay more attention to disciplinary drills for officers and men, and that all should be intelligent, snappy soldiers before giving them the responsibility of operating trucks. Extended trips by trucks through the middle western part of the United States are impracticable until roads are improved, and then only a light truck should be used on long hauls. Through the eastern part of the United States, the truck can be efficiently used in the Military Service, especially in problems involving a haul of approximately 100 miles, which could be negotiated by light trucks in one day. (EISENHOWER REPORT.)

Return to Top

THE 1919 ARMY MOTOR CONVOY IN ILLINOIS

The 1919 Army Transcontinental Army Convoy crossed into Illinois on the afternoon of Saturday, July 19, 1919. It stopped the next day for a Sunday rest period in Chicago Heights. The trip was resumed on Monday July 21, 1919, and the convoy camped over that night in DeKalb. On Tuesday July 22, 1919, the convoy left DeKalb and crossed over the Mississippi River Bridge at Fulton, Illinois and entered into Iowa that evening.

During the two full days it spent on the road in Illinois, the convoy covered about 172 miles in a little over 21 hours on the road. It was fairly lucky with the weather and thus the roads, but as the following account from the convoy’s daily log reveals, it had its share of problems with the vehicles, drivers, and equipment in its journey across the Land of Lincoln.

(Read the official Army account of the convoy’s journey thru Illinois).

So basically from the 1950s right up until around 2008 when the Sub-Prime Mortgage Bubble popped, as the Industrial Jobs began to leave the country in the 1970s to go to Cheaper Labor Markets in places like Mexico, India and China, fairly decently paid work in the Construction Industry took their place. Many jobs even for highly paid well educated folks like Civil Engineers, Architects, Electrical Engineers, Plumbers et al, as every new Mall and every new Suburban Subdivision needed to be Wired Up and Plumbed to keep the Sanitation Decent. As the communities sprouted like mushrooms across the once Pristine Wilderness of the FSoA, Civil Service Goobermint workers in every field from Police Work to Sanitation workers to Teachers were necessary. Where did the MONEY come from to PAY all these people for these new JOBS in these new communities?

As with ALL money since the beginning of the Industrial Era (and really long before that, btu expanding exponentially through this period), the MONEY came from the Issuance of New Credit done by the folks who have controlled this since the beginning of the Colonial Era at the LATEST, the TBTF Banks and the small number of people who control them, often referred to here on the pages of the Diner as the “Illuminati”. In 1692 the Bank of England was Chartered, and despite a real lack of Precious Metals in England at that time, these folks issued CREDIT on what basically was all the resources of the New World they were set to exploit. They did not HAVE the “money” to issue out, they CREATED the money to issue out. Long as everyone under their Political Control HAD to use this money (“Legal Tender”) they could LOAN it to others, who then owed them Interest. Anyone on the Inside of this Scheme never really could go Broke, as they could always issue themselves newer and bigger Loans to further buy out the Resources, and the Flow Begins of this money through the economy. EVERYTGHING comes to depend on this flow of money, and constant INCREASE in the money supply otherwise the interest being charged cannot be paid up on. whenever a Contraction or even just a slowdown occurs, Depressions ensue, Deleveraging occurs and most of the population gets hung out to dry. this was the narrative pretty much from 1700 right through to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Throughout the period of the post-Revolutionary War here in the FSoA, Credit was issued by Industrialists in Europe to first off exploit the Coal Resources here and ship them back to Europe to power their Factories, and then to further build out Industrial Infrastructure here. The Railroads were the essential component of this, because without them there was no moving the Coal from the mines of West Virginia to the Ports on the East Coast. So the Jobs of those days came in the form of Coal Mining and Railroad construction, and as the railroads expanded across the continent, new communities based on this new type of Industrial living popped up like Buboes across the landscape.

Still, it was basically an Agrarian Paradigm, with most people in the country engaged in local Agriculture, right up until the Great Depression. Reason for this is that it really was not until the 1920′s or so that the first ICE Tractors became available, and Ag was still very Human Labor intensive through the 1800s. Even going into the Great Depression in the 1930s, most estimates I have read put 90% of the population here living and working locally in the Ag paradigm.

For those who did not Own Land, up until the Civil War you had explicit Slavery for the imported African Labor force, so I don’t think you can really call what they did as a “Job”. During the Reconstruction period, you had Sharecroppers, and not sure this form of exploiting labor can be called a Job either.

Where what we think of now as Jobs being paid with Money emerged here was first in the Coal Mines and along the Railroad Tracks, work which was uniformly low paid and very dangerous also. Workers who performed these jobs were recruited from places like China and Ireland, where conditions for their populations were so bad at the time that just the CHANCE to come over here and work in one of these jobs was a step up, though for many it proved a disappointment for sure as they died in dangerous working conditions, and often had wages so low surviving on what you could buy from the Company Store was pretty difficult

The upshot of this period as the Factories began to pop up as well was a workforce that became increasingly Organized, with Labor making it’s first Battles here against the Capitalist class in control of Credit Creation, money, and by this time virtually all the worthwhile Property across the country.

In fact this battle started in Europe where the whole Industrial paradigm began, and Jobs (or lack of them) and ridiculously low pay and bad working conditions developed alternative ideas to the Capital Exploitation model. Specifically, Karl Marx and Friederich Engels developed the Communist model, which the Bolsheviks in Russia tried to implement, becoming increasingly bastardized over time. In fact that model was probably corrupt right from the get go, as Trotsky and Lenin likely got most of their funding for that Revolution from Industrialists in Germany and England.

Over here, as the Great Depression took hold, similar Movements towards Communism and Socialism began to gain traction, the Wobblies were a growing force, and everything possible was done to keep that movement from gaining traction. Labor Union was pitted against Labor Union, Union Bosses were paid off, the Pinkertons were brought in to disrupt Organization and physically threaten anyone organizing, and overall the Capitalist class was successful in destroying the Labor Movement in the FSoA as we moved into and past the Great Depression.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international industrial union that was formed in 1905. The origin of the nickname “Wobblies” is uncertain.^[3]

The IWW promotes the concept of “One Big Union“, contends that all workers should be united as a social class and that capitalism and wage labor should be abolished.^[4] They are known for the Wobbly Shop model of workplace democracy, in which workers elect their managers^[5] and other forms of grassroots democracy (self-management) are implemented. IWW membership does not require that one work in a represented workplace,^[6] nor does it exclude membership in another labor union.^[7]

In the 1910s and early ’20s, the IWW achieved many of their short-term goals, particularly in the American west, and cut across traditional guild and union lines to organize workers in a variety of trades and industries. At their peak in 1923, IWW membership has been estimated at about 40,000.^[8] However, the extremely high rate of IWW membership turnover during this era (estimated at 133% per decade) makes it difficult to state membership totals with any certainty, as workers tended to join the IWW in large numbers for relatively short periods (e.g., during labor strikes and periods of generalized economic distress).^[9]

Nonetheless, membership declined dramatically in the 1920s due to several factors. There were conflicts with other labor groups, particularly the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which regarded the IWW as too radical while the IWW regarded the AFL as too staid and conservative.^[8] Membership also declined in the wake of government crackdowns on radical, anarchist and socialist groups during the First Red Scare after WWI. The most decisive factor in the decline in IWW membership and influence, however, was a 1924 schism due to internal conflict, from which the IWW never fully recovered.^[8]^[10]

Compromises were made however, and the New Deal of Franklin Deleanor Roosevelt incorporated numerous salves to buy off the Working Class, primary among them the creation of the Social Security system. Unions also still retained decent power in the post WWII period as the Automotive Industry ramped up in the FSoA, and for a short while the Working Class Heros of Industrialization did OK here, from say 1950 to maybe 1970 or so, though you did have to usually have “Connections” to get inside any of the powerful Trade Unions of the Era.

Over time of course the Unions and their ability to negotiate a better wage for their workers has been systematically diminished, and on a Media level the whole IDEA of Unions and Collective bargaining has been subject to non-stop Bernays style propagandizing against, to the point through the 90s-00s that even the Blue Collar workers such collectives work best for were convinced they were bad. Go to any Kneejerk Conservatard Website like the one Mike “Mish” Shedlock runs on Global Economic Analysis, and you will find non-stop BLAME being placed on Unions as the Cause of all our problems. See folks, if we just got rid of those nasty Teacher’s Unions and Auto Unions and all those “Big” Pensions they negotiated over the years, we would have PROSPERITY again! LOL.

Prosperity for WHO? Certainly not Prosperity for the Pensioners who have their pensions ripped out from under them, that is for sure. Certainly not Prosperity for the next Generation of Workers either, who in order to keep our products “competitive” on the Global Market need to drop their Wages down to whatever it is the Chinese of Mexicans or Egyptians are getting these days, like $2/day there. the folks who PROSPER from reneging on Pensions are the Rentier Class, aka the Illuminati. See, they are the “Secured Bondholders”. gotta pay them off before you pay the pension of anyone who worked for the City of Detroit for the last 30 years. As the economic system which Industrialists used to build out their system falls apart here, they hang out to dry everyone who ever worked in the system in ANY capacity, from an Industrial Factory Worker to a Coal Miner to the Police Force of Detroit, who for near 100 years protected the “Property” these folks claimed to own, thoroughly polluted and then abandoned.

Same Bizness occurring over in China now, just at a vastly Accelerated Pace as first the Hot Money drops in there to “Create Jobs” in Industry, profit is sucked out on the back of cheap labor, the resource landscape of the country is destroyed and then when no more Profit can be pulled from this mess, they “Unwind the Carry Trade”, Newzpeak for the Rentier Class packing their bags and Private Jets with whatever they can and GTFO of Dodge, leaving the rest of the Chinese Population to die in the stinking sewer they made of that land mass.

Today, as we speak, this whole paradigm is coming to a close, for numerous reasons.

First off, there really is no NEW place to go to either exploit Resources or Exploit Labor to gain “Profit” for the individual or corporation that has not already been thoroughly sucked dry. Though there is still some fossil fuel energy left in the ground to extract, the energy cost for pulling it up comes ever closer each day to the cost the consumer of this energy can afford to pay. Without continuing expansion of Credit, there is no ‘money” flow to the end consumer, and while the Central Banks provide endless Quantitative Easing FREE CREDIT a ZIRP to their member TBTF Banks, said Banks do not pass this money on in the form of new loans to anybody further than one tier below their line. Do you think a lot of Individuals line up to buy a Facepalm IPO? Who are the “Investors” in Facepalm, and where do they get the money to invest in that piece of shit Social Media White Elephant? Faceplam has NEVER turned a Profit since the day Mark Suckerbug and the Winkletwins dreamed it up. Regardless, “investors” subscribed to the IPO to the tune of like $100B, least that is around where the Market Cap is here I think. Where did they GET $100B to “invest” in Facepalm? They BORROWED it from the Federal Reserve, rehypothecating worthless MBS as collateral to invest here. This is the circle jerk of money creation, and folks on the inside get fabulously wealthy off of it, but everybody else gets screwed to beat the band here. Constant investment in ultimately non-productive and worthless enterprise that simply burns energy faster all the time, until there is nothing left to burn, which we are not at yet but getting closer to all the time. Ongoing here really since the very first Railroad Tracks were laid here in the FSoA in the early 1800s.

So, in the final analysis, this is where all the “JOBS” came from. Money created as Debt to exploit the resources of the New World, accessing a fabulous wealth of stored energy, first from Coal, then following that from Oil. Every last “Job” that has been created through the era all comes from the downhill flow of this energy as it is burned, and with less and less available to burn all the time, there are fewere and fewer Jobs to be had that depend on the burning of this energy. Politicos calls for a “Return to Growth” are a chimera, there is no growth, really there has not been for 30 years here or so. The “growth” you see is Numerical Smoke & Mirrors, pretty arbitrary numbers overall that get bigger all the time, while the population at large gets poorer all the time. The FSoA population has been getting steadily poorer under this paradigm, but not until now has it really been evident, masked well by Financialism and control over the Global Reserve Currency of the Dollar.

Besides the fact there is no new place to GO to exploit resource and labor, the result of 200 years of this shit is that we are now Neck Deep in our own sewage, with far too many people on the planet who have opportunity for truly productive things to do with their lives and who are pretty much 100% Dependent on the system continuing onward for their own survival. Willfully trying to exit the system while it continues to function is close to impossible in most places, really you have to go way out into the bush to even try something like this, and few people are prepared to do that these days.

Those of us who are engaged in building the SUN Project see all of these things quite clearly. There are no easy answers, no simple ways to exit, and a “Crash on Demand” by a large percentage of the population walking away from Industrialization simultaneously is unlikely to occur as a willfull thing, though it may happen organically quite rapidly if the current systems fail rapidly in cascade fashion.

For those of us involved in SUN, we seek to redefine the ideas of Jobs, Work & Money. Jobs as we have known them through the Industrial Era are already going the way of the Dinosaur, and as Bruce Springstein write in “My Hometown”, they ain’t ever coming back.

We don’t NEED no Stinkin’ JOBs, and we don’t NEED the Debt Money pitched out here by the Illuminati for the last 200 years of Industrialization either. Like the “Assets” this money created, it is all going quite Worthless now. What we NEED is to work together, to build our communities, to work for the common good of our Species and the Planet we live on. We are rapidly running short on time here to make such changes in anything but the most Painful Way conceivable, and Heliopaths seek to avoid such a nasty endgame, if not for everyone, at least for those who see what is coming and wish to do the best they can to avoid it with us.

Perhaps you think this is all useless, it is too late already and the End is Written in Stone. If so, I wish you well and I will see you in the Great Beyond when we all get there. I personally am not concerned with whether the End is Written in Stone or not, because that does not materially affect the way I approach this End Game. Maybe I will go down, maybe my friends will go down too. However, if that is how it plays out, we will GO DOWN SWINGING.

IT AIN’T OVAH TILL THE FAT LADY SINGS!

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE

Blood in the Water

Off the keyboard of RE

Published on the Doomstead Diner on January 13, 2013

Discuss this article at the Doom Psychology Table inside the Diner

Chatting on the Internet has been a main source of entertainment for me going on I think about a Quarter Century now. Not precisely sure the year I first hosted an AOL Chat Room. I do have Yahoo Groups still up on the net from the mid-late 90s though, so it is at least 15-20 years. I long ago closed most of them to new posting, they are just archives, a history of my years as an Internet Board Moderator/Discussion Host.

Whatever the topic it is that your Blog/Forum is concerned with, many of the same types of Personalities always show up, and the debates and arguments that ensue also all have similar and Topic Independent forms.

You have your Intellectual Debates between people concerned with a subject; you have Napalm Contests that ensue when posters seriously disagree and can’t keep to topic but rather start attacking each other; you have Religious and Spiritually oriented people who no matter WHAT the topic feel it impacts on their Belief System, you have Ideologues on a particular political or philosphical agenda; you have One Line Comedians and you have Innocents & Clueless people. Categories often overlap of course.

The topics of Collapse and DOOM of course bring out all these types, even more than typically contentious topics like Religion or Politics by themselves. Fairly obviously, if you start talking about Near Term Human Extinction or even just a Population Bottleneck that might knock down Human Population by 90% or more WITHIN THE LIFETIMES of the readers, this is a tad bit upsetting for most people and not something they WANT to believe at all. So initial reaction from the Uninitiated is almost always a Denial response.

It gets a bit worse though when you run into folks who HAVE considered these issues to one extent or another, and have WILLFULLY decided they will argue against the concepts at all cost. They wanna PROVE that everything you and all your Compadres in the Collapse Blogosphere believe is FALSE, you don’t know WTF you are talking about because you are not an EXPERT, and all Doom Blogging amounts to is a bunch of Chicken Littles calling for a Sky Falling event, while the Sky still hangs up above our heads quite nicely, Thank You. Here on the Diner, we have such a Denier who goes by the screen name of MKing, and I often refer to as Socrates because of his tendency to make Socratic style arguments where he never actually answers a direct question, but instead just poses you another one to consider.

Depending on the level of expertiese of the person engaging in such discussion and dependent on how natively smart they are and how PERSISTENT, you can end up in some VERY long and ultimately unsatisfying debates where the same old arguments are recycled all the time. As Host, you end up getting caught up in them almost no matter what, because even if you have been over the particular subject involved 100X or more, you still have to address these “New” concerns brought up by a new and enthusiastic poster who has his head screwed on completely BACKWARDS! LOL

We had such a poster on the Diner recently, a fellow who used the Nom-de-Plume Impermanence, or “Imp” as I took to referring to him after a little while. He had an agenda to place EVIL on top of Groups, and GOOD on the Individual. He was not concerned with the specifics of Collapse as it is playing itself out, and really no matter how questioned or challenged would not address those issues. Rather, every line of questioning simply ran back round to whether anybody can know anything, including Imp who claimed to Know Nothing. Except in Knowing Nothing, he was always claiming to know nothing better than anybody else did. LOL.

Imp ALSO made the claim that anyone can win any argument so long as they know how thinking works. How exactly Imp knew how thinking works when he claimed to KNOW NOTHING is a mystery as yet unsolved of course. LOL.

A couple of important Truths surfaced out of this episode of Days of Our Trolls here on the Diner. I thought I might highlight them.

Truth #1

You Can’t Win a debate on the Internet if you Quit.

Doesn’t matter how smart you are, how well you understand the nature of thinking or any of the points you might have made during the course of the debate. Once you resign, it’s like toppling over your King on the Chessboard. You quit, you’re gone, you’re done and your opponent gets to continue on writing his spin as he sees fit, unobstructed.

Truth #2

The Individual cannot stand up to the Group

If you oppose the Group Think on a website, it takes a lot of fortitude to last any length of time at all. You get hammered on by more people all the time, and unless you gain at least a few allies, the Sharks will smell Blood in the Water and circle in for the Kill. I was only able to last on TBP as long as I did because of years of practice with Internet Napalm before that and Depleted Uranium Body Armor layered over Kevlar BVDs covering Rhinocerous thick skin. Imp thinks he was “attacked” here? hahahahahahahaha. He’s got no idea what a REAL Shark Attack from Jimbos band of Shit Throwing Monkeys was like back in the Good Old Days when Smokey was pitching out the Scatology and Homophobia.

Even with a really thick skin though, you can’t last forever battling the Group Think on a website. The Battles Escalate, and eventually the Admin will pull the plug on the Individual, not the Group. It is true even here, since we have the Dungeon. If an Individual keeps causing havoc on the board, he’s going to get sequestered to where he cannot do too much harm. We don’t ban or censor anyone here, but persistent Trolls will get their posting pretty well buried in the depths of the SMF file structure.

The analogues to both Truth #1 and Truth #2 IRL are first that if you expect to survive, you can’t do it as an Individual. Second, you better find or create a Group of like minded people to work together with before TSHTF. I spent a good couple of years collecting up a few individuals with similar mind sets to my own (though of course almost nobody agrees with the Orkin Man thing. lol), and only after that did I set up the Diner with Peter and the other 12 Founders. I NEVER could have made this Blog & Forum what it is on my own, it took a Group to do that.

Imp of course will take this all as validation of his notion that Groups are Evil, squashing out Individual thinking. The thing is here, nothing gets accomplished with Individuals with different mind sets and different goals bickering all the time. You have to settle on some common principles that all agree on before you can start to work in synergy.

Here on the Diner, a few of the Common Principles I can identify quickly are:

1- You can’t have Infinite Growth in a Finite World
2- Per Capita Energy is becoming more scarce and expensive
3- We do have serious Climatic Issues, regardless of what the underlying cause is
4- Human Population is in serious Overshoot and will crash, just on what timeline we don’t know
5- Nuclear Energy is an existential threat to life on the planet, and needs to be eliminated
6- Our Financial system is a sham run by a Greedy and self-serving Plutocracy

If you are an Individual who questions any one of these Core Group Principles, it is likely you will get hammered on by the Group. If you question more than one of them, it’s GUARANTEED you will be hammered. If you further go into obfuscation and ad hom attacks on the other members of the Group, the Sharks will circle in tighter around you and there will be Blood in the Water. It won’t be the Blood of the Sharks either. It will be the Blood of the Web Surfer dumb enough to paddle his Laptop into Shark Waters on the Doomstead Diner. :icon_mrgreen:

Diner Sharks Feeding Frenzy on Cornucopians

Despite the above graphic, I don’t want to dissuade anyone who has a Philosophical or Religious spin on Life and/or on the Collapse we face different from the Diner Group Think from Posting Up with their thoughts. I like hearing from everybody. I also don’t want people with contrary or unpopular ideas to avoid the Diner, because having a wide variety of perspectives makes for more interesting conversations overall.

Nevertheless, the Regular Diners all basically agree on the Core Principles outlined above, so if you disagree with them you are pretty certain to be questioned and expected to provide evidence or at least a decent argument for why your POV is correct. If you ignore the counter arguments which are made and simply keep repeating your beliefs like a Mantra, this is like Chum in the Water for Diner Sharks. The water will start to Boil and limbs will start disappearing.

On the other hand, if you happen to AGREE with the Core Principles, the Diner is a great place to hang out with your Compadres and figure out precisely what you are going to do in response to the sorry shit state of the world we are stuck living in at the moment. You probably can’t change the world, but you do have control over how you respond to the problems that are before us now, and quite certain to get a good deal worse moving into the future.

Bemoaning it all on the Internet is one response which does have a cathartic effect and it isn’t all bad to engage in this activity. For one thing, it raises awareness in more people that we actually HAVE a problem. Far more people are aware of these things now than when I first dropped into the Collapse Blogosphere in 2008. However, this doesn’t really do very much to help resolve issues you face now or may face in the near future with respect to Money, your Food Security, your Living Arrangements or dealing with the rapidly expanding and encroaching Police State. Working out strategies to deal with these problems is what we do now with the SUN Project. Hopefully we can make things slightly less than godawful bad in our own neck of the woods, and help others do the same where they are. We already have Affiliates all over the FSoA and in Oz and Europe too!

Better than sitting on your ass texting your buddies in the SUV and waiting to go the way of the Dinosaur anyhow.