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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Failure of...

    Rated May 15 2008 • 1 review • systems, complexity, collapse • theoildrum.com

    The Failure of Networked Systems
    by aeldric in TOD Australia & New Zealand

    Oil appears to be at or near peak capacity - exports are dropping. As for the food network - world grain reserves are at historic lows, and expected to drop a little more next year. And the environment? Climate change is clearly with us, indicating that the environment has already gone past its capacity.

    When looked at in these terms it appears that the network is already in decline. Each of these three parts of the network is at or past capacity. If a span of years is the natural time-frame for a crash in this system, then it seems quite plausible that we are watching a very broad-based crash of our energy systems - right now.

    Our actions in increasing the connections to the food and environment networks will not help, and may simply speed the crash.

    The Failure of Networked Systems
    Australia: What to do, what to do about our energy situation?





    In the first article Aeldric argues that interconnected networks engender higher levels of complexity that eventually could lead to the collapse of the entire system.

    In the second article he turns his mind to defining some "thought-starters" of possible solutions adapted to the conditions of Australia.

    The comments on these 2 articles are fascinating and in an answer to one of those comments Aeldric states the obvious "Contrary to popular opinion, the job of a democratic leader is to be elected, not to take actions with a view to the long-term good of the people. Getting elected is about appearance, not substance."

    Urgent societal decisions need to be taken at the political level but if "getting elected is about appearance and not substance" then we logically are driven to the conclusion that democracy is not the right political system for solving crises that are threatening societal collapse. Political systems based on meritocracy would assuredly be far more efficient. But when faced with cascading crises threatening such a collapse of our societies it is a little late to start thinking about changing the decision making process. In such times we can only expect doing something with the system we have... and "So we march forward SimplyHoping...."




    175 views
    The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand | The Failure of Networked Systems

  • Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk |...

    Rated Mar 03 2008 • 2 reviews • economics, collapse, complexity, change • energybulletin.net

    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk
    in Energy Bulletin by Richard Heinberg

    Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden...

    Planetary worries can be even more debilitating. What if there simply is no hope?

    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk

    The search for knowledge, in our times of word abundance, unmistakeably drives us straight to a wall of doubt that sends to us flash-back questions such as "where are the answers to the knowledge we gain about the sheer misery that we and our modern societies are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth?".

    in "Beyond hope and doom" Richard Heinberg is asking that kind of question but he is not giving us any plausible answer. Writing that "We're all in this together. Let's rely on one another's reserves of psychological strength when we need to, and provide strength for others when we can." only envisions a psychological remedy to forget about the enormity of the misery that we are inflicting upon the principle of life on earth.
    Sharon Astyk writes that "we must find a way to hallow, or at least apply meaning, to our descent".
    Hallowing the descent
    The only meaning I can see in humanity diving into its own collapse is that humanity is only a necessity for itself. The principle of life does not need humanity to sustain its own existence but humanity, at least at its operating level, needs the consciousness about itself as it relates with the whole to assure its own reproduction.

    This kind of finality in the conclusion generates another set of question: "If humanity is of no particular necessity for anything else than itself than perhaps we its conscious particles, functioning as its operating principle, have a vested interest to protect it from itself". This it seems to me constitutes the ultimate intellectual rejection of modernity and the principle of equality that it generated as an invisible strategy to maximize the expansion of economic demand so that the logic of capital could generate ever more surplus of capital.
    But then how do we stop this societal cancer?
    For Dmitry Orlov "Rather than attempting to undertake the Herculean task of mitigating the unmitigatable-attempting to stop the world and point it in a different direction-it seems far better to turn inward and work to transform yourself into someone who might stand a chance, given the world's assumed trajectory". This is the start of the answer on how to stop the societal cancer. But it is not the end of the answer! Communities and neighborhoods will inevitably address the end of the answers. Or at least they will try to do just that, for, without communities the individuals simply die.
    Review of Dmitry Orlov's Re-inventing Collapse

    I personally like the optimism of James Lovelock""There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism.""
    'Enjoy life while you can'
    James LOVELOCK's website
    We're drunk and we're at the edge of the roof.




    479 views
    Beyond hope and doom: Time for a peak oil pep talk | Energy Bulletin

  • Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

    Rated Feb 12 2008 • 1 review • economics, economy, collapse, finance • atimes.com

    Financial models head for scrap heap
    in AsiaTimes by Martin Hutchinson

    It is now clear that the credit crunch was not due simply to bull market over-optimism, but resulted very largely from the failures of a number of the financial models that have been a staple of the last generation.
    ...
    ... the subprime mortgage is simply a scam, and the market a giant Ponzi scheme that could survive only as long as more people entered into subprime mortgage contracts, keeping house prices high and mortgage brokers active.

    ...it becomes obvious that the financial system of the future will look very different from that of the recent past.
    ...
    The percentage of financeu2019s value added in the US and world economy will shrink once again, close to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s, around half those of today, and remuneration for bankers, traders and salesmen will be correspondingly more restricted.
    ...
    Eventually, perhaps not before 2030, another financial revolution, immensely profitable to its participants, will begin. It is undoubtedly the case however that the new revolution will involve products and sales methodologies far different from those of recent decades.

    Financial models head for scrap heap

    Wow!

    So much for the wealth generated these last 20 years. It has been, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a scam. But there is a huge difference between illusion and scam. If it was an illusion we can conceive that the actors in the financial game were not really responsible. If it was a scam the actors in the financial game should undoubtedly be penalized and the least that would be expected from them is to return the high incomes they generated during those years of scamming...

    But who will be the judge?




    195 views
    Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs

  • Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Fullblown Panic

    Rated Jan 21 2008 • 2 reviews • economics, collapse, finance • typepad.com

    Fullblown Panic
    in Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler

    Knees knocked last week from sea to shining sea as the shape-shifting monster of economic reality cut a swathe of destruction through the markets and financial ranks. The exact nature of this giant beast still remained largely concealed in a fog of accounting gambits, policy blusters, and reporting dodges, but a few intrepid scouts who glimpsed the behemoth up close said it looked like Godzilla with Herbert Hoover's face.
    ...
    My favorite moment was seeing Treasury Secretary Paulson and one of his fellow shaved-head deputies at a press conference rostrum frantically trying to calm the news media rabble like a couple of extraplanetary high priests from a Star Trek episode -- the batteries having run down in their laser wands, and their incantations ("liquidity! liquidity!) veering into mystifying glossolalia.

    I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. That crashing sound out there is the armature of confidence needed to support an economy based on faith that borrowed money will be paid back. It's as simple as that. (Doesn't seem so exciting now, does it?)

    Fullblown Panic

    I'm rejoicing Kunstler's language. Ah ah. But to what extend does he reflect the reality we all share? Kunstler writes that "I resort to such admitted extreme hyperbole because it may be the only language that an infotainment-drunk society can still process in the face of an epochal calamity that will transform the lush terms of everyday life as we've known it into something like a bleak surrealist landscape in the manner of Tanguy. "

    But is our reality really in so dire a circumstance?

    I have the feel that the doomsayers are as much in a bubble than their opposites the naysayers. All, it seems to me, are losing their minds in "group-think".

    There is no doubt that we are at a turning point in the history of modernity. A set of crises are converging that will multiply the intensity of their individual outcomes:
    - financial crisis of solvency (unpayable debts at the center of Western capitalism)
    - resurgent nationalism, as a consequence of financial globalization, that could end up in conflicts and wars.
    - Necrotic side-effects of modernity (climate change, loss of diversity, drinking water rarefaction, ...)
    - Peak resource crisis (energy, minerals, helium, ...)

    So what does it all mean in term of our daily lives?
    The extreme systemic complexity, resulting from the exceptional convergence of all those crisises, results in each of us being lost in what appears to be a maze without boundaries or what is also called a "singularity"... The only certainty is that changes will come fast and sweep away all that we now know. But we just can't know what will emerge out of such a maelstrom.

    Some other views:
    The Fallacy of Reversibility by Stuart Staniford
    Does Less Energy Mean More Farmers ? by Jason Bradford




    11 views
    Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Fullblown Panic

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A9akfrEjg

    Rated Jan 10 2008 • 1 review • spirituality, video, worldviews, collapse • youtube.com

    Awakening the Divine Within
    via Bruce Eisner's Vision Thing; on You Tube, by smileycoyote


    Terence McKenna, Alex Grey, and Stanislov Grof are among the people that speak here in this inspiring piece put together by Entheogen.TV. The question remains, will we climb out of barbarism and into some form of legitimate civilization or will we die and take Earth with us?

    Please use GreaseMonkey and the script video embed for displaying this video
    "Awakening the Divine Within" on You Tube
    youtube.com/watch [youtube.com/watch]


    No we will not take the earth with us.
    Fortunately we do not have such a power. But we could very well take 95% of all species on earth with us.
    We are no match for the earth it will continue its own existence without humans eventually.

    If our earth were cleared of humans then the principle of life on earth would definitely have the chance to enter into a new cycle of expansion (evolution-development).

    And then what? Would that new cycle conclude again with the suicide of its most developed specie? There is just no practical reason that I can think about for us to even think about that question.

    Let us just observe that modernity has pushed humanity on the brink of falling in the precipice of extinction.

    - A minority of sensitive people are saying that it is too late to counteract modernity that we are already in free fall and that it is only a question of time before the earth is cleared of humanity or at least of human civilization.

    - On the other extreme is the majority of the people who are blinded by the ideological powder of greed, the lust for material possessions, and individualism that modernity continually throws in their eyes. They are consuming themselves into obesity, the flesh expanded, the consciousness molten away.

    - I'm conscient that we are on the road to the brink. But the understanding that the principle of life on earth would definitely enter into a new cycle of expansion, after humanity's extinction or the collapse of its civilizations, procures me with a pause. This is what gives me the energy to observe what is unfolding without any interference of my personal wishes on my observation. I ultimately find unmeasurable pleasure observing nature, the working of societies the working of modernity, and also thinking about what life could be like if more of us had the courage to live our dreams. I never lost the hope that we eventually all could live our dreams and dream our lives... that's what powers my thinking, my painting, and my life.








    1 view
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9A9akfrEjg

  • The Archdruid Report: Lifeboat Time

    Rated Nov 29 2007 • 0 reviews • business, collapse, modernity • blogspot.com

    5 views
    The Archdruid Report: Lifeboat Time

  • The Oil Drum: Canada | The Finance Round-Up: November...

    Rated Nov 17 2007 • 2 reviews • economics, collapse, finance • theoildrum.com

    The Oil Drum's November Finance Round-Up
    in The Oil Drum by Stoneleigh

    A cascading failure of financial institutions is all too possible.

    The Oil Drum's November Finance Round-Up
    Downward Spiral of Deep Junk
    MBIA, Ambac Downgrades May Cost Market $200 Billion
    Next Phase of the Crisis: The Great Ratings Debacle
    Any Credibility Left At Fitch?
    Countrywide Pleads For No Debt Downgrades
    CDO Dominoes Are Falling
    Fingers of Instability, Part XII
    Private mortgage insurers dragged down as delinquencies rise
    Banks' balance sheets will hit fan in January
    Rule change sounds alarm on Wall Street
    What's the subprime damage to banks?
    The U.S. Credit Crunch of 2007: A Minsky Moment
    Wall Street's money machine breaks down
    "Alarmingly high" risk of systemic shock seen
    Mortgage Loan Losses Pose Risk of Systemic Shock, Peters Says
    The Super Mortgage Market Birth Story: CDOs, Mezzanine, Unrated Tranches, and a Touch of Greed
    Bill Fleckenstein: Stage is set for a stock crash
    Talk of Worst Recession Since the 1930s
    Monster Western credit crisis u2013 prelude to a depression
    Toxic export: How America's risky subprime mortgages fouled the world's markets
    British banks' value dives by u00a390bn in nine months
    Japanese banks' subprime woes widen
    Commercial Real Estate Black Hole
    Prisoners of Debt
    Have Global Stock Markets Peaked on "Peak Oil?"

    Time the rats left the ship. It's going to sink !!




    100 views
    The Oil Drum: Canada | The Finance Round-Up: November 16th 2007

  • RGE - With the Recession Becoming Inevitable the...

    Rated Nov 16 2007 • 1 review • economics, collapse, globalization, finance • rgemonitor.com

    Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown




    in RGE by Nouriel Roubini

    I now see the risk of a severe and worsening liquidity and credit crunch leading to a generalized meltdown of the financial system of a severity and magnitude like we have never observed before.

    Goldman Sachs is writing today on the risk o a contraction of credit of the staggering order of $2 trillion dollars in the next few years causing a severe credit crunch and a serious recession. ... Hopefully by now some folks at the New York Fed and at the Fed Board are starting to think about this most dangerous systemic financial crisis that could emerge in the next year and what to do to prepare for it.

    Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown
    Goldman Sees Subprime Cutting $2 Trillion in Lending


    in America's vulnerable economy

    What to add to the extremely strong words of Nouriel Roubini?

    We are slipping back to the economic fundamentals that have been lost on most of us blinded as we were by financial modeling and mathematics. Financial engineers and quants were out to create our future societal reality. At least that's what they were thinking they were doing. In that dream the production of real goods was considered an activity with only marginal returns and thus not worth preserving. So today we are awakening in a situation where the production of commodities is no longer available in the West while its entire service economy is crashing.

    What does that imply for our daily lives?
    - increasing food prices
    - increasing commodity prices
    - decreasing personal incomes
    - decreasing personal assets (homes, paper, ...)
    Simultaneously in the countries that did not prepare for after-fossil fuels the prices of energy will be crashing the economies further down.

    Those economic changes will not happen in a political vacuum. We'll assist at the strengthening of the centers of power from where will emerge a post-modern worldview that will help glue us all behind new social and political forms of societal life.

    Gardening and local exchanges are decidedly in the air of our times while grand theories are on the way out.




    84 views
    RGE - With the Recession Becoming Inevitable the Consensus Shifts Towards the Hard Landing View. And the Rising Risk of a Systemic Financial Meltdown

  • Economists View: Are we Headed for Collapse?

    Rated Nov 11 2007 • 0 reviews • economics, collapse, sustainability • typepad.com

    316 views
    Economists View: Are we Headed for Collapse?

  • The Archdruid Report: The Politics of Transition

    Rated Oct 31 2007 • 1 review • change, civilization, collapse • blogspot.com

    The Politics of Transition
    in The Archdruid report by John Michael Greer

    ... trying to force an ecotechnic society into existence in the next twenty years, say, is a recipe for failure. As I've suggested in previous posts, the form of economy and society that succeeds best under any given set of environmental conditions depends much more on those conditions, and the way they interact with the resources and technology available at the time, than on deliberate choices by human beings.
    ...
    Only when the resources available to human societies are once again limited to what the earth provides renewably will ecotechnic societies - human cultures supporting a high technology on a sustainable basis - be the most successful option.

    The Politics of Transition

    Change is a process. No society ever went from a form A in the morning to a form B in the evening. Taking the power of state through a revolutionary coup changes nothing more than some of the leaders at the top of the state machinery.

    The process of change humanity will undergo will erase the material base sustaining many of our ways of doing and conceptions about life and life in society. We will thus have to adapt to a set of facts that will erupt in our faces:
    - gradual reduction of available fossil fuels without disposing of workable alternatives.
    - climate change will leave us with deserts in presently rich agricultural lands and submerge or at least threaten large concentrations of populations and economic power bases...
    - poisoned water, air, and land will transfer their poisons into the bodies of living species that will then suffer the agony of surviving...
    - globalization is already reshaping the distribution of economic power around the world and tensions will arise, between power centers in the world economy, from their competition for dwindling resources (energy, minerals, ...). Those tensions could very well conclude into open conflict.
    - the worldview of the winning power centers will automatically displace former leading cultures and spread around the world.

    All those facts will impose themselves on all of us and the only thing we will be able to do is to watch and try to understand how we can evade their rigors. In the meantime de-industrialization will oblige us to re-invent our ways of doing and our ways of organizing ourselves in societies.




    5 views
    The Archdruid Report: The Politics of Transition