Man In The Box

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 87 Comments

Tags

Abrupt Climate Change, Aldous Huxley, Anthropocene Extinction, Atomization of Society, Chemical Pollution, Climate Tipping Points, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dr. Peter Ward, Dystopic Future, Ecocide, Global Warming, Heat Dome, Loss of Biodiversity, Micro-Plastic Pollution, Ocean Acidification, Ocean Dead Zones, Pacific NW Heatwaves, Techno-Fix, Widespread Deoxygenation of Temperate Lakes, Widespread Ocean Anoxia

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ~ Aldous Huxley

The foundation beneath our house of cards is beginning to buckle and heave. For far too long, humans have poked the sleeping monster of abrupt climate change and it’s starting to awaken. Thus far, nearly a thousand deaths in British Columbia alone are likely attributable to hyperthermia caused by a persistent heat dome that has spiked temperatures to unprecedented levels. Take note that we are seeing these unreal temperature spikes at the end of a cooler La Nina cycle. When these heat domes form during the next warmer El Nino cycle, the results will be disastrous. We have now made such mass casualty events 150 times more likely with our heat-trapping gases which have doubled the earth’s energy imbalance in just the last 15 years. Over a billion sea creatures are estimated to have cooked to death off the western shores of Canada. “Eventually, we just won’t be able to sustain these populations of filter feeders on the shoreline to be anywhere near the extent that we’re used to,” says Chris Harley, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. This will have massive effects up and down many ecological networks. Remember last year when Australia’s mega-fires killed or harmed 3 billion animals? I thought that horrific trauma would be mankind’s epiphany on climate change, but it’s clear that as long as there is a dollar to be made there will be justification for genocide and ecocide. The planet’s last remaining natural resources and biodiversity are being liquidated at breakneck speed in order to maintain the colossal enterprise of industrial civilization.

Modern society is more connected than ever digitally, but not emotionally or intimately. Too fragmented and dysfunctional to save itself, we exist not as human beings but as consumers and statistical numbers on a spreadsheet. Thus it is easy to write off the millions of deaths from industrial pollution as a cost of doing business, especially when the rules of the game are written for shareholders far removed from the damage being wrought. Our suicidal march into the abyss seems to be preordained because we have paid no heed to an endless stream of dire scientific reports and warnings that span decades. Like the collapse of the Surfside apartment building in Miami where the residents lived oblivious to warnings signs from decades ago, the collapse of industrial civilization will follow a similar response to anthropogenic climate breakdown. At this late stage, techno-optimists still cling to the belief that somehow we can adapt and thrive in an inhospitable and deteriorating post-Holocene epoch. At the same time, disinformation and propaganda continue to be spread by those who are outright denying the growing existential threat. The end result is the same, no matter which side prevails. Humans can’t even agree on what is reality, so how could they possibly organize a coherent response in time:

There is no escape from this cage modern man has constructed for himself. As lead scientist Dr. Robert Rohde at @BerkeleyEarth points out, 78% of humanity’s energy systems are powered by fossil fuels as of 2020. Oil and gas took 90 years to displace coal as the main energy source, illustrating that transitions take a very long time and ‘renewables’ remain a small fraction of total energy consumed. Scientists are becoming increasingly unnerved:

“We should be alarmed because the IPCC models are just not good enough,” Dame Julia Slingo of the @metoffice says.

“The obvious acceleration of the breakdown of our stable climate simply confirms that – when it comes to the climate emergency – we are in deep, deep s***!” says UCL’s @ProfBillMcGuire. “Many in the climate science community would agree, in private if not in public.”

“It blows my mind that we could get the temperatures that we’re observing here in the Pacific north-west, especially on the west sides of the Cascades that have that proximity to the ocean, that it could get that hot for so many days in a row,” said Nick Bond, Washington state climatologist. “I would have been willing to guess something like that in the middle of the century, in the latter part of the century.”

“The extreme nature of the record, along with others, is a cause for real concern,” says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian Hoskins. “What the climate models project for the future is what we would get if we are lucky. The models’ behaviour may be too conservative.”

As has been pointed out before, but which is still not accepted let alone understood by the vast majority, is that even if we employed techno-fixes such as Bill Gates’ Solar Radiation Management Company, it would not stop climate change’s evil twin, ocean acidification, which is threatening to collapse the entire marine ecosystem. A recent paper by marine biologists and environmental consultants has warned that human society faces extinction if nothing is done to reverse the destruction of the oceans:

Over the last 70 years since the 1950’s and the production of toxic forever chemicals and plastic, more than 50% of all marine life, including plants and animals under 1 mm in size, have been lost from the world’s oceans, and that decline continues at a rate of 1% year on year…Over the next 25 years, pH will continue to drop from pH8.04 to pH7.95, and carbonate-based life forms will simply dissolve. This will result with an estimated 80% to 90% loss of all remaining marine life when compared to the 1950’s. Becoming carbon neutral will not stop the pH from dropping to 7.95, and even in the unlikely event of the world achieving Net Zero by 2030 it will not stop the pH dropping to less than pH7.95. Coupled with the micro-plastic and toxic chemical stressors on marine life, the GOES team believe there will be a trophic cascade collapse of the entire marine ecosystem.

Adding to this warning is another recent study showing that freshwater lakes are losing oxygen at a rate 9.3 times that of the oceans:

That matters, because not only do we get much of our drinking water from lakes and use them for recreational activities, but they support an extensive variety of species. “These substantial declines in oxygen potentially threaten biodiversity, especially the more oxygen-sensitive species,”…Rose identified a second problem too: Deep water is becoming less clear because of a host of factors including erosion, algal growth, and fertilizer runoff from nearby agricultural fields and residential developments. Murkier waters make plants less likely to survive, which means less photosynthesis and less oxygen down below. And that, of course, is bad news for the lakes’ creatures. “Just like humans, every complex life form on the planet depends on oxygen,” Rose says. “In water, that’s in the dissolved form.”

There was a study a few years ago which concluded that deoxygenation of the world’s waters from a warming world is what really drove the end-Permian mass extinction. The lead author is quoted as saying:

“This study shows that we’re on that same road toward extinction, and the question is how far down it we go.”

Keep in mind that we don’t have to reach the same elevated levels of CO2 in past geologic extinction events for things to get really nasty, causing modern civilization to crumble. Remember also that the Anthropocene Extinction has multiple prongs such as chemical and plastic pollution, deforestation, and other manmade pressures on the environment that did not exist in Earth’s history. According to paleontologist Dr. Peter Ward, all major extinctions occurred when CO2 levels exceeded 1000ppm. Past extinction events took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to play out, but our current rate of change is 25,000 times faster than the last known event (Paleocene Thermal Extinction) which took a million years for CO2 to increase by 100ppm. We are on track to reach 1000ppm within a century, but we’ll never get there of our own volition because our civilization will be toast long before then; however, once tipping points in the climate system are breached, positive feedback loops will have been set in motion that will propel CO2 levels upward beyond our control. For instance, the Amazon is now emitting more carbon than it is absorbing. In an interview four years ago, Dr Ward gave this warning:

“…we really are going to have unintended consequences and much more rapid heating than even the models say — for the simple reason that the [IPCC] models are highly conservative, too conservative.”

You may be asking yourself when humans will finally wise up and end this madness. Henri L Vichier-Guerre, a reader of this blog, recently posted a quote from a very good book entitled Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change by Clive Hamilton in 2010:

…even with the most optimistic set of assumptions – the ending of deforestation, a halving of emissions associated with food production, global emissions peaking in 2020 and then falling by 3 per cent a year for a few decades – we have no chance of preventing emissions rising well above a number of critical tipping points that will spark uncontrollable climate change. The Earth’s climate would enter a chaotic era lasting thousands of years before natural processes eventually establish some sort of equilibrium. Whether human beings would still be a force on the planet, or even survive, is a moot point. One thing seems certain: there will be far fewer of us.

As Henri L Vichier-Guerre points out, none of those optimistic things have happened in the intervening years. On the contrary, the ecological destruction has accelerated and the chances of anyone at all surviving grows more remote with each passing year. Henri goes on to quote the following on why no one in any significant seat of power is talking about our impending doom:

Not everyone believes we should be completely forthright with the general public about the depths of our crisis, including many of those in our Government.

Because it’s far too late to do anything to mitigate the crisis.

Far too late to avoid a global environmental, ecological and economic catastrophe.

This may go some way to explaining why the general public is still not being told the truth by Governments around the world.

It may go some way to explaining why many of the super-rich have already set up lavish underground ‘doomsday bunkers’ where they and their families can bug out when the shit hits the fan.

We have plenty of bread and circus distractions to keep us preoccupied until the very end. Television did not get its name ‘The Boob Tube’ for nothing. Now we have the infinite scroll of websites to hypnotize and control the masses. Click that ‘Like’ button. Sophisticated social media algorithms feed you what you want to see and hear 24/7. Cognitive biases are reinforced and facts no longer matter in a world suffering from severe truth decay. Aldous Huxley’s vision of a world driven by absolute consumerism that sacrifices human values and controls the masses with a non-stop supply of diversions via mindless entertainment and sensorial stimulation has become a dystopic reality. Just as in his book, it’s all happening in broad daylight with the tacit acceptance of everyone as we watch the world burn.

The Technological Sublime

08 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 153 Comments

Tags

"The Relive Box", 6th Mass Extinction, Capitalism, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Dystopic Future, Environmental Collapse, Gross Inequality, Inverted Totalitarianism, Luis Suarez-Villa, Passenger Pigeon, Peak Oil, Richard Heinberg, Richard Wolff, T. C. Boyle, Tasmanian Aborigines, Techno-Optimists, Technocapitalism, Technocapitalism: A Critical Perspective on Technological Innovation and Corporatism, Technophelia

“Life is tragic and absurd and none of it has any purpose at all. Science has killed religion, there’s no hope for the future with seven billion of us on the planet, and the only thing you can do is to laugh in the face of it all.”
~ TC Boyle

This past Thursday night I went to a reading by author T.C. Boyle at Northern Arizona University’s Cline Library. Outside the entrance of the auditorium were a couple of tables lined with signed copies of his numerous novels and collections of short stories and manned by a few young people, perhaps college students, taking people’s money. I had already bought a copy of T.C. Boyle Stories at the local bookstore before coming and read a few of the short stories before the auditorium doors opened. I seldom go to such events, but what had first caught my eye were the titles of some of his books, one of which is A friend of the Earth whose premise is rather dystopic.

While waiting in line for the event, I opened up my book and read “The Extinction Tales” from the author’s first volume of short stories. The title of this particular short story states exactly what it’s about, taking the reader across continents and centuries from the massacre of the passenger pigeon to the genocide of the aboriginal Tasmanians. A couple of modern-day vignettes serve as the bookends to this vast sweep of history, at the beginning the hunting skills of a lighthouse caretaker’s pet cat snuff out the remaining population of the island’s unique bird species and at the end a man is haunted by the death of his father whose funeral he neglected to attend.

The doors opened and perhaps 100 to 200 people filled the seats. After a few fawning introductions by a couple of NAU faculty members, Tom Coraghessan Boyle took the lectern. Tall and lanky with a goatee, wearing red sneakers, and dressed in black with the glowing cat eyes of a printed t-shirt peaking through his opened sports jacket, he appeared more hipster than a sixty-something tenured English professor, but spoke as eloquently and articulately as one would expect.

He read two stories, but the second one resonated with me the most. “The Relive Box” is an allegorical tale of a middle-aged single father who becomes obsessed with the latest hi-tech escapism device which mentally transports people back to any specified time in their life by reading their memories. He’s stuck reliving various moments of his past while his present life falls apart. The ‘here and now’ simply becomes lifeless space and time to be filled by the ‘relive box’.

The parallels with today’s addiction to computers, video games, iPhones, and social media are obvious; our inseparable relationship with technology has made us virtual cyborgs. Our enslavement to technology extends to a societal level with the wide-held assumption that geoengineering and adaptive technologies will evolve in time to spare us from the worst of a collapsing environment, allowing business-as-usual to continue no matter how dire current scientific reports and future projections may be. Unarmed by a blind faith in technology, industrial civilization barrels headlong into a world growing more violent and unstable by the day. Technocapitalists live by the sword of technology and will die by it as well.

In the hands of corporate capitalists, our socio-economic system brings us terminator seeds from Monsanto, predatory banking instead of public banking, the military industrial complex’s war for profit instead of national defense, viagra instead of antibiotics, a government for the ultra wealthy and not the majority, corporate rule with Citizens United instead of representative democracy, and so on.

In the words of David Simon, “There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.”

Technology is no different in capitalism’s overriding dependency on the successful accumulation of capital:

The system within which institutions, cultures, and people operate determines its policies, beliefs, and behaviors. Those operating within a capitalist system conform to the dictates of corporations. Capitalism cannot be reformed and its resiliency to stay afloat during environmental collapse is remarkable:

Nonetheless, in the final analysis, our entire way of life based on fossil fuels and infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is untenable…

“A small minority — people who are at the margins of the system and who are thus able to observe it as if from outside, who are not tied into any of the major influence groups, and who have learned to seek out alternative sources of information and think critically — will gradually come to the conclusion that the entire system of industrial civilization is inherently unsustainable.”
~ Richard Heinberg, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World

A “post-carbon world” may very well not include people, but building an alternative system demands that we believe a post-collapse world does include survivors.

Telling Stories

20 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by Brutus in Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Peak Oil

≈ 47 Comments

Tags

Age of Television, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Cultural Stories, Decline of print-based media, Digital Media, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Garden of Eden, Illiteracy, Inverted Totalitarianism, Qur'an, Tao Te Ching, The Bible, The Matrix, The Medieval Church, The Spiral Staircase, The Terminator

One of the many recurring themes and ideas that appear at The Spiral Staircase is that the essential form taken by consciousness is story or narrative. Story enables us to orient ourselves in the world and make it somewhat intelligible. It should not be overlooked that it is we who tell ourselves stories, narrating life as we go via the inner voice no less than attending to the great stories that inform culture. The Bible is one such story (or collection of stories), though its message is interpreted with a scandalously high degree of controversy. (I’m especially intrigued by Paula Hay’s thesis over at Mythodrome that the story of The Fall is really about the loss of animism, not a literal expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The Tao Te Ching and the Qur’an are similar, one might even say, competing stories from other world cultures.) Story has taken on many forms throughout history, beginning with oral tradition. Setting epics in song and/or verse made them memorable, since fixed written forms came rather late in history (conceived in terms of tens of thousands of years). The appearance of books eroded oral tradition gradually, and the transition of the book into an everyday object after the invention of the printing press eventually helped undermine the authority of the Medieval Church, which housed libraries and trained clerics in the philosophical, ecclesiastical, and scientific (as it was then understood) interpretation of texts. Story continued its development in the Romantic novel and serial fiction, which attracted a mass audience. Today, however, with literacy in decline, cinema and television are the dominant forms of story.

Many categories, types, and genres of story have evolved in fiction. Considering that story arcs typically progress from calm to conflict to resolution, the nature of conflict and the roles we are asked to assume through identification with characters (often archetypal) are a subtly effective vehicle for learning and mind control. Those whose minds have been most deeply and successfully infiltrated are often the same who argue vociferously in defense of a given story, no matter the evidence, with arguments playing out in political spheres and mass media alike. In addition to lighter fare such as RomComs and coming-of-age stories, both of which define not-yet-fully-formed characters through their solidifying relationships, we get hero/antihero/superhero, war, and dystopian tales, where characters tend to be chiseled in place, mostly unchanging as action and events around them take center stage. It is significant that in such tales of conflict, antagonists typically appear from outside: political opponents, foreigners and terrorists, aliens (from space), and faceless, nameless threats such as infectious disease that one might poetically regard as destiny or fate. They threaten to invade, transform, and destroy existing society, which must be defended at all cost even though, ironically, no one believes on a moment’s contemplation it’s really worth saving. Exceptionally, the antagonist is one of us, but an aberrant, outlying example of us, such as a domestic terrorist or serial killer. And while plenty of jokes and memes float around in public that we are often our own worst enemies, becoming the monsters we aim to defeat, stories that identify our full, true threat to ourselves and the rest of creation precisely because of who we are and how we now live are relatively few.

In light of the story of industrial collapse, probably the biggest, baddest story of all time but which is only told and understood in fleeting glimpses, it occurred to me that at least two shows found in cinema and TV have gotten their basic stories mostly correct: The Matrix (predominantly the first film) and The Terminator (the TV show to a greater degree than the movie franchise). In both, a very few possess the truth: knowledge of our enslavement (actual or prospective) to machines of our own invention. Characters in the matrix may feel a sense of unease, of the projected reality being somehow off, but only a few take the notorious red pill and face reality in all its abject despair while most prefer the blue pill (or more accurately, no pill) and the blissful ignorance of illusion. Traveling back and forth between realities (one known to be quite false), the ultrachic glamor and superhero antics of the false reality are far, far more appealing than the dull, cold, grey reality without makeup, costumes, and enhanced fighting skills. Everyone behaves in the false reality with cool, almost emotionless confidence, whereas in the other reality everyone is strained to the breaking point by continuous stress at the threat of annihilation. In Terminator world, time travel enables a few to come back from the future, in the process spilling the beans about what happens after the Singularity, namely, that machines go on a rampage to kill humanity. The dominant emotion of the few initiates is again stress, which manifests as bunker mentality and constant battle readiness. Casualties are not limited to frayed nerves and strained civility, though; plenty of innocent bystanders die alongside those fighting to survive or forestall the future.

Those are only stories, reflections of our preoccupations and diversions from the truth available to witness without needing a red pill. But reality is nonetheless a bitter pill to swallow, so few who become aware of the option to square up to it vs. ignore it really want the truth. I judge that most are still blissfully unaware an option exists, though evidence and supporting stories are everywhere to be found. For those of us unable to pretend or unknow what we now know, the appearance of stress, paranoia, self-abnegation, infighting, gallows humor, and nihilism run parallel to character traits in the Matrix and Terminator worlds. Through story, reconfigured as entertainment, we may indeed be working through some of our psychological issues. And we experience some of the same coming together and tearing apart that inevitably accompany the great events of history. But unlike the childish teaser in this CBS News story that the apocalypse has a date, the machinations of history, like death and extinction, are not strictly events but processes. The process we initiated unwittingly but then ignored is beginning its final crescendo. Stories we tell ourselves conventionally end with triumphal resolution, flatly ignoring the destruction left in their wake. I warn: do not look for triumph in the story of industrial collapse except in those tiny, anonymous moments of grace where suffering ends.

Extinction is Profitable, in the Short Term

25 Saturday Jan 2014

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Empire, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 53 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Ice Melt, Benjamin Franklin, Capitalism, Climate Change, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporatocracy, Derrick Jensen, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Empire, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Financial Elite, Free Market Ideologues, Greenwashing, Inverted Totalitarianism, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, Mass Die Off, Peak Oil, Peak Water, Pink Floyd - Money, Privatization, Runaway Climate Change, The Elite 1%, Venus Syndrome, Wall Street Fraud, War for Profit

“Hey, my name’s Luke. The year is 2060 and I live in what was once called America. As you can see, the ‘developed world’ never was able to kick its fossil fuel habit. They just kept turning to dirtier sources and more extreme processes to burn the stuff, like the liquefaction and gasification of coal. The entire planet became a sacrifice zone for the sake of keeping mega cities lit up and the machinery humming, but ultimately it was death by a thousand cuts. Entropy was the victor. GHG’s continued to rise, warm the planet, and wreak havoc on the biosphere. Cancer and industrial disease spread to every corner of the globe. Weather patterns were drastically altered until the world’s food production was forced to move indoors. Large-scale cloning of animals became common practice in order to feed the several hundred million surviving people. War, drought, floods, fresh water scarcity, and a rash of pandemics crashed the world’s population from a high of 8 billion. The agricultural bread baskets of the world became wastelands of dust and weeds. International cooperation failed and the world’s existing powers scrambled for the last remaining resources. There are none who buy into the propaganda of a “better world” any longer because the stark evidence of what we have done to the planet cannot possibly be hidden from view. There is no utopian sanctuary for anyone to escape to, no matter how many gold coins one has managed hoard. Despite this realization and even after all the geoengineering mishaps, people still cling to the belief of salvation through technology. Everyone lives in fortified bunkers to escape the hot, drying winds that sometimes carry poisonous and toxic clouds. When we do venture out, gas masks are always worn as well as long clothing to protect from the thinning ozone layer. Industrial smoke stacks still belch plumes into the air to keep the underground cities running.”

“When above ground, I’ll spend hours walking through the wreckage of industrial civilization, the skeletons of its skyscrapers blotting out the sun like the mythical Redwood trees once did along the west coast. The occasional sound of a steel beam crashing to the ground or a glass window shattering breaks the ghostly silence. These deserted cities are infested with rats the size of small dogs, and the ray of my flashlight is reflected in their staring eyes. The endless and self-defeating rat race of humans has now been replaced by the scurrying, scavenging, and fighting of real rats. I find it amazing that my ancestors spent their entire lives living and working inside these little office cubicles. That was a time when Earth was still green and you could hear the birds chirping and singing outside your window. I’ve got a digital recording of various holographic scenes depicting bygone days of nature that I project inside the confines of my subterranean home, but I’d give my right arm to experience the real thing. To think that people were once surrounded by nature all the time amazes me. Its true value had never really been calculated. Rather, money seems to have been what people were most preoccupied with back then. On one of my excursions I came across a dwelling whose crumbling walls were packed with stacks of moldy paper money. Whoever lived there must have worked an entire lifetime to eke out a savings of that size, stuffing it into every wall cavity like it was insulation. Many thought humans would go extinct long before money would ever cease to exist. I guess they were wrong.”

“They say the people of this country went mad, obsessed with money as it overtook their every thought, decision, and activity. One of America’s forefathers once said, ‘He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.‘ All things were framed within the context of money. Environmental damage was discussed in terms of financial setbacks to the economy. Political leaders made decisions based, first and foremost, on the financial interests of those powerful few who put them in office. Choices on matters involving the well-being of humanity were made solely in the interests of corporations and stockholders. Even as the overwhelming evidence mounted that mankind’s place on earth was becoming evermore tenuous, the money worshippers continued to find ways to profit from calamity and mayhem. Preserving the Earth simply was not profitable, so they let it die. The Arctic melted, so they raided its open waters. The land became parched, so they invested in water rights. CO2 levels skyrocketed, so they put their money into carbon credits. Our continued existence became a crap shoot in the marketplace. The vultures of capitalism were able to profit from the collapse; thusly, such nightmarish and dystopian scenarios as botched geoengineering schemes, a Venus syndrome on earth, and ultimately human extinction were allowed to become sober realities….”

‘No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.’
~ Derrick Jensen

Last Man on Earth

20 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Peak Oil, Pollution

≈ 61 Comments

Tags

Albert Einstein, Arnold J. Toynbee, Capitalism, Climate Change, Clyde Kluckhohn, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Consumerism, Corporate State, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Economic Collapse, Economic Growth, Extinction of Man, Generational Amnesia, Mass Die Off, Nuclear War, Planetary Tipping Points, Post-apocalyptic Future, Radioactive Waste, Survivalism, Techno-Optimists, unwashed public

An achieved goal of capitalist industrial civilization was the systematic reduction of nature to a simple component of the economy. Landscapes of rivers, lakes, forests, and meadows were replaced by the concrete, steel, and asphalt of cityscapes. The build-up of toxic wastes and byproducts of industrial civilization were seen merely as external problems to be solved via engineering and technology. In the grand narrative of material progress, industrial man put himself at the center of the universe, the lead actor and hero who would always survive and triumph. He saw no problem with the complete subjugation of the wilderness, taking more from the land than was given back, and reducing biodiversity to a shell of its former self in the name of economic growth. The dominant mindset was summed up thusly…

“…nature is a malignant force with useful aspects that must be harnessed, and useless, harmful ones that must be shorn of their power. They spend their energy adapting nature to their purposes, instead of themselves to her demands. They destroy pests of crops and men, they build dykes and great dams to avert floods, and they level hills in one spot and pile them up in another. Their premise is that nature will destroy them unless they prevent it…” ~ Clyde Kluckhohn

In the collective consciousness of industrial civilization, man was exempt from falling victim to the 6th mass extinction. The future narrative of people in the modern age never included:

…that they would be among the last humans to walk the Earth.
…that their children would not live long enough to grow old.
…that all cultural, artistic, and scientific achievements of the human species would soon be forgotten in time, no longer practiced and appreciated.

Cocooned away from the elements as they were, few city dwellers noticed the creeping deterioration of the planet’s biosphere. Their artificial world, filled with the digital screens of computers, televisions, electronic billboards, and sundry other micro-computer devices, kept the public preoccupied with a constant stream of infotainment, celebrity gossip, sports, and political spectacles. The popular line of thought was that the natural world was too resilient to collapse from man’s activities; periodic efforts of environmental remediation would be all that was needed to keep business-as-usual afloat. Generational amnesia cast a false sense of security over the unwashed masses. Rivers and streams, once teeming with fish and aquatic life, were now laden with toxins, heavy metals, and plastics. Moose and bison no longer roamed the fragmented wilderness; the remaining few were set aside for bioengineering experiments in a last-ditch effort to save them. The whole web of life with all its keystone species from microbes and insects to large terrestrial and aquatic mammals was unravelling. Pests, viruses, and pathogens ran rampant in the new disorder of the planet. Scientists talked of tipping points, but no one really knew when such red lines in biospheric stability would be crossed or if they had already been breached. Like a runaway freight train, industrial civilization had indeed passed many tipping points long ago. Few thought there would be such an abrupt downward spiral, seemingly without warning. The first law of thermodynamics was being realized on a system-wide scale.

Modern man was thought to have been infinitely adaptive and clever, but the linear-thinking that dominated the culture was riddled with too many blind-spots to prevent its inevitable downfall. As long as the same economic system and mode of living persisted, no amount of new technology would solve the root problems. Since the mid 1970’s, the industrialized world had been living beyond the total carrying capacity of the Earth for decades and even created a day to recognize the transgression which would arrive a few days earlier each year. Various reports of imminent catastrophe were published, but to no avail. Everyone had their mental crutch to fool themselves into believing that the day of reckoning would never come. Some, like the fanatical zealots of religion, rejoiced that the end was upon us while others were paralyzed with fear and despair. The all-pervasive mainstream cult of money worship, consumption, and economic growth gave rise to other doomsday cults who heralded the end of time.

Mother nature took no prisoners; there was no escaping her ironclad laws. Mass starvation, war, and pestilence rapidly whittled the human population down to small pockets of survivors, but then even those few post-apocalyptic tribes soon declined and disappeared until the day arrived that only one human walked the Earth. One lone human survivor out of the billions that once were.

He survived the pandemic that wiped out roughly three-quarters of the global population. He survived the nuclear meltdown and craziness of the food wars and nuclear terrorism. And thus far he survived climate chaos by constantly moving. MRE’s were mass-produced for the general public and stored in most cities when the agricultural system started to show signs of imminent collapse. Even after all these years, the last human still found these warehouses of preserved food to be an invaluable source of sustenance, supplementing his diet with the occasional cockroach, rat, or wild pig.

How did the last man on Earth spend his time when not scavenging for food, water, and other essentials? He was on a search to find other humans of course. How could he have known that he was the sole survivor? Without electricity, there no longer existed any sort of global communication system. The one solar-powered/hand crank shortwave radio he had in his backpack had yet to pick up any signals, but he would religiously take it out every night to scan the frequencies for an hour or two. To break the deathly silence of the world, he would occasionally play the assorted music files that were on his wind-up mp3 player. He especially loved their sound inside the expansive corridors of old libraries he visited during his trek across the continent. With his life always in jeopardy, he found that a good book was the best form of escapism; compromising his health and safety with mind/mood-altering drugs was not an option in a world devoid of hospitals and medicine. And sex? Well, you’ll have to use your imagination for that. He certainly did. Such solitude, a prison cell of solitary confinement spanning the entire planet, would have driven most to madness and suicide, but he handled the loneliness day by day and with stoicism.

In his early years, he experienced a taste of working at a 9-5 job, driving a car and flying on jumbo jets, but he didn’t miss any of it really. He had been one of those who had read extensively about the unsustainability of the global economy and about the nature of ecological overshoot and collapse, and he had prepared for it. He held no illusions of a new civilization being reborn out of the ashes of capitalist industrial civilization. Capitalism, he knew, held too tight of a grip on modern man, and the psychological barriers of the masses prevented them from seeing the end of everything concerning the human experience …forever. As the weeks, months, and years passed by and he grew older, he began to reconcile with the idea that he was very likely the last person left alive. No need to leave any more messages on roof tops, in vacant parking lots, or over the empty airwaves. No one was listening. No one was coming. There really was no prospect of growing old gracefully in this new reality. He had yet to find some small pocket of unpolluted land that did not register on his Geiger counter. So he made a pact with himself and the pistol he carried that when his health and strength no longer allowed him to eke out an existence, he would not be alive when the wild dogs came for him.

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

~ Arnold J. Toynbee

Rules of the Game for Our Dystopian World

28 Saturday Sep 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Empire, Environmental Degradation

≈ 67 Comments

Tags

Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corporate State, Corporatocracy, Deep Green Resistance, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Fascist Dystopia, Financial Elite, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Nature Bats Last, Security and Surveillance State, Social Unrest, Sonderkommando, The Elite 1%, Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

Author: ulvfugl

“A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don’t know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn’t be worth reading.” ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, We.

——————————–

Everything is going to go.

The End.

Let’s look back, where it started.

The Beginning…

The Sumerians, formerly hunters and gatherers, began settling in villages in the fertile valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the period from 8000 to 7500 B.C.

According to the theory of Denise Schmandt-Besserat, this is how writing began:

Archaeological studies of the period show evidence of grain cultivation in fields surrounding villages, the construction of communal silos for storing grain, and a rapid increase in population. In such a setting, individual farmers needed a reliable way to keep track of their goods, especially the amount of grain stored in shared facilities.

It seems they did it by maintaining stocks of baked-clay tokens—one token for each item, different shapes for different types of items. A marble-sized clay sphere stood for a bushel of grain, a cylinder for an animal, an egg-shaped token for a jar of oil. There were as many tokens, or counters, of a certain shape as there were of that item in the farmer’s store.

Thus, tokens could be lined up in front of accountants, who doubtless organized them according to types of goods and transactions. They could even be arranged in visual patterns to make estimation and counting easier.

This simple system of data storage persisted practically unchanged for almost 4,000 years, spreading over a large geographic area. Eventually, the growth of villages into cities and the increasing complexity of human activities, especially in southern Mesopotamia, forced a shift to a more versatile means of record keeping. This shift was marked by the appearance of elaborate tokens alongside the well-established system of simple counters. Though similar in size, material, and color and fabricated in much the same way as their plainer cousins, the new tokens bore surface markings and showed a greater variety of shapes.

The elaborate tokens were apparently used for manufactured products—the output of Sumerian workshops. Incised cones and rhomboids probably represented loaves of bread and vessels of beer. Disks and parabolic tokens marked with lines signified different types of fibers, cloths, and finished garments. Incised cylinders and rectangles stood for ropes and mats. Other tokens seem to have represented luxury goods, including perfumes and various kinds of metalwork.

The advent of complex tokens coincided with the emergence of powerful central governments and the construction of monuments and great temples, beginning around 3350 B.C. Art from that period shows the rise of a governing elite and the pooling of community resources for celebrating large festivals. The token system, extended to cover goods and services, played a key role in managing massive building projects and orchestrating large public events.

Temple excavations reveal that the Sumerians often kept sets of tokens in clay globes, or envelopes. Temple clerks marked the envelopes by pressing tokens into the soft clay before sealing and baking them, making visible the number and shape of tokens enclosed. Excavated specimens show circular imprints left by spheres and wedge-shaped imprints left by cones.

Once sealed in their clay cocoons, the tokens were hidden from view. It didn’t take long for busy bureaucrats to realize that once the clay envelopes were marked, it was no longer necessary to keep the tokens. In fact, the marks by themselves, impressed on a clay tablet, were sufficient.

Complex tokens couldn’t be stored in clay envelopes as conveniently as simple counters because they often left indecipherable impressions. Instead, perforations allowed such tokens to be strung together, with special clay tags apparently identifying the accounts. In this case, the shortcut that the bureaucrats discovered was to inscribe the incised pattern found on the surface of a complex token directly onto a clay tablet. For example, they could replace an incised ovoid token with a neatly drawn oval with a slash across it.

The result was a practical, convenient data storage system. A small set of clay tablets with neatly aligned signs was much easier to handle than an equivalent collection of loose tokens, and using a stylus for marking clay tablets was a lot faster than making an impression of every token.

Around 3100 B.C., someone had the bright idea that instead of representing, say, 33 jars of oil by repeating the symbol for one jar 33 times, it would be simpler to precede the symbol for a jar of oil by numerals—special signs expressing numbers. Moreover, the same signs could be used to represent the same quantity of any item.

The signs chosen for this new role were the symbols for the two basic measures of grain. The impressed wedge (cone) came to stand for 1 and the impressed circle (sphere) for 10.

In this way, the token system evolved into a kind of shorthand in which signs representing standard measures of grain, impressed on a clay tablet, came to represent not grain or any other specific commodity, but the concept of pure quantity. It was a revolution in both accounting and human communication. For the first time, there was a reckoning system applicable to any and every item under the sun.

Thus, “writing resulted not only from new bureaucratic demands but from the invention of abstract counting,” argued Schmandt-Besserat in How Writing Came About. “The most important evidence uncovered is that counting was not, as formerly assumed, subservient to writing; on the contrary, writing emerged from counting.”

Clay tokens became obsolete by 3000 B.C., replaced by pictographic tablets that could represent not only “how many” but also “what, where, when, and how.” With the introduction of a new type of stylus, pictographic writing developed into cuneiform notation. The resulting record-keeping system proved so efficient and convenient that it was used in the Near East for the next 3,000 years.

“The tokens were mundane counters dealing with foods and other basic commodities of everyday life, but they played a major role in the societies that adopted them,” concluded Schmandt-Besserat. “They were used to manage goods, and they affected the economy; they were an instrument of power, and they created new social patterns; they were employed for data manipulation, and they changed a mode of thought.

So once there was writing, there could be written stories, and one of the earliest we have is the glorious Epic of Gilgamesh. My favourite part is where Enkidu – who I see as representing the wild hunter gatherers and pastoralists who remain connected to wildlife and nature – is tempted by a prostitute to go to the bright neon lights of the city – the ‘lure of civilisation’ so to speak – the streets paved with gold, sex and drugs and rock & roll, something which must have happened to uncountable numbers of people over the millennia and which continues to this day as rural folk move into urban life in search of money and the buzz of ‘modern life’…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

So then we have all of the world’s literature, one of the wonders of our species, the legacy of millions of minds and imaginations.

What would we be without that?

Fast forward several thousand years, of stories and cities and risings and vanishings of entire civilisations, to circa 1920 when we get a clear glimpse of something that joins the first city states of Sumeria to our own time today, using writing and the newly invented format of the dystopian novel.

‘’In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance…’’

Here we can already see the outlines of the NSA and Edward Snowden, as we look back past 9/11, past the Stazi, through 1984 and Brave New World, through the flames of the burning Reichstag the Sonderkommando arranging the corpses into neat piles to make smoke signals warning the coming generations – “Die now or, in four months time, you will know what makes time so precious.”

Nobody paid attention to Zamyatin; nobody paid attention to the smoke signals.

Enkidu always falls for temptation because he does not know any better, until it is too late…

The streets are never paved with gold, only blood, bones, tears and torment.

In a country constructed of glass, under complete surveillance and devoid of individuality, D-503 discovers he has a soul and is now in danger.

http://libcom.org/library/we-yevgeny-zamyatin

First there were a few hundred on the internet who discussed this and what to do.

It has grown to a few thousands, and now it grows faster and faster and soon, I suppose, millions.

And nobody knows what to do.

I was one of the first to face this matter head on without flinching.

This is the most amazing time in all of human history.

We have evolved since about a million or 2 million years or a couple of hundred thousand years depending upon how you define a human being exactly. And then we made the first cities about 6000 years ago and agriculture and civilisation and technology and writing and now we reach our peak, and destroy everything and become extinct and cause a mass extinction event of most of life on Earth.

That’s how I see it.

And just for a brief moment, we have all these things, computers, etc, and access to all this information. And we peer out into the Universe and try to understand why we are here and what’s going on…

And then we all vanish.

Every day I review this picture because every day people are questioning, and I am trying to reply.

Most people are unable to comprehend that this civilisation will collapse, with billions of people condemned to die prematurely, because it is too horrible to face. But it is absolutely inevitable, only a question of when, and exactly how it takes place.

It might be any time in the next 100 years which seems long and vague for humans, but is an instant in geological time, a millisecond, a nanosecond.

And then I think, going by previous mass extinction events, it takes about 10 million years for life to recover. But whatever it is, it will be nothing like us.

So the problem is, how does one live when one has this knowledge?

This terrible, TERRIBLE knowledge. Hahahaha, enough to make a strong man weep. Seriously. It is such a difficult matter each person has to solve for themselves and, if they have children, their predicament is made much worse.

But I think, live in the moment, striving to be as happy as you are able to be, because each moment is very precious and never returns.

And now, I think we come to write our last stories as our era draws to a close.

The Epic of Human Demise…

Everything is going to go.

So, if I did have children, anyone under thirty, say.

What could I possibly advise? This is very hard because I don’t want the responsibility and I don’t know what will happen, but I get a lot of emails from people who feel bad, and I feel obliged to reply and I feel obliged to say SOMETHING, and I can’t be dishonest or evasive…

So….

You don’t need much of anything.

Cut possessions and consumption to essentials.

Stay fit and healthy, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

Get a network of others who share same views. Be loyal and supportive.

Everyone is monitored, so develop in-group language, opaque to outsiders.

http://gawker.com/the-nsa-created-intricate-maps-of-the-social-connection-1417840544

You know what I mean. Do as much off-line as possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=us&

Share what needs to be shared, need to know, otherwise keep stuff to yourself, especially stuff that matters. One good person you can trust is the most valuable asset you can have, the more the better.

Most people can’t keep secrets. The more they want to, the more they feel compelled to tell someone.

Regard all MSM info with suspicion, as propaganda; nowadays it’s often downright lies.

Distribute important and interesting information as widely as possible.

Don’t be naive. Don’t be anybody’s fool; be your own best friend who you can trust.

It’s going to get much, much worse, so expect that you’ll be shocked. Don’t get knocked off-balance; roll with the punches, bounce back.

Learn stuff all the time, something new every day. There’s a technique to this, make it fun. Go over what you learned yesterday. Get a sense of pride and accomplishment.

Build self-esteem. Learn about ecology, nature, wildlife, the land, the past, what happened. Learn critical thinking. Don’t let anything slide by unnoticed…

Permaculture is good to learn, so is Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Aikido, even basic gardening, cooking, food preservation. One of the saddest thing with so many old people, like me, haha, who have skills – I have knowledge of hand tools used in woodwork and chairmaking with a direct line going back to their invention in Egypt 6000 years ago – is that all this is lost as we die off with no young people who are interested to hand it on to. It’s not just one generation’s knowledge. It’s taken centuries to learn this stuff… Nobody wants to know. Sigh.

Know your enemy.

Who are they?

Well, as far as I am concerned, they are these people. Not necessarily the individual names with the faces and addresses attached, but the whole idea that is acceptable and alright to behave in this way. The whole idea that it is acceptable and alright to live and conduct yourself and your affairs in this way:

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/09/radical-embrace-breaking-the-cycle-of-an-unfertile-demise/#comment-95686

http://guymcpherson.com/2013/09/radical-embrace-breaking-the-cycle-of-an-unfertile-demise/#comment-95700

WikiLeaks released 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors.

TIL the wealthiest 20% of the world’s population receives 76.6% of the world’s income, the poorest 20% of the world’s population receives just 1.5% of the world’s income.

We look back a couple of hundred years at the way certain people were behaving and we are shocked and disgusted, and yet we have the same kinds of people behaving in the same kinds of ways, in fact even WORSE, if you check out the actual damage they do.

These people are insane. They have always been with us, since the first cities of Sumeria, these accumulators of wealth and power, whose lust for money is never sated.

But what good will it do them when they inhabit a dead planet? Because that is what is happening and they are to blame, their greed, ignorance and stupidity is the direct cause of this oncoming catastrophe. Everything has to be turned into money, and what good will money be, when Earth is like Mars? Because that’s what is happening….

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/22/the-terrible-plutocratic-plan/

You’re going to have to mix with the enemy, to survive, but you don’t have to become them, or support them, or fraternise with them. Just disguise yourself and shapeshift your way through to get whatever you need. Ostracise anyone who is supporting The Machine.

Some people think that what matters is people and social reform and justice and that sort of thing. I’m not against those things, just that I don’t think they matter anymore, at least not to me personally. I think the only thing that matters is saving the other species for as long as possible and stopping the killing Machine as much as possible. Pretty much the Deep Green Resistance agenda.

But if you disagree, who cares? I don’t have time to debate and argue over crap. I’d rather see some action, someone fighting to save some fucking butterflies or something, than complaining about the bankers. Sooner or later, all those bankers, anyone who even looks like a banker, are going to be ripped limb from limb by hordes of enraged starving folk with machetes. They’ll deserve it. But that’s not my agenda.

It’s time to get apocalyptic, or get out-of-the-way.

http://www.alternet.org/activism/get-apocalyptic-case-new-radical?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

I mean, we all know everything is going to shit. We all know that’s extremely depressing. We all know it makes you feel suicidal. Okay. That bits done. Sorted. Leave it behind.

Like an old jacket you used to wear. Familiar but worn out.

If you’re into suicide, do it. There’s too many of us. Otherwise, get a grip. Don’t go the way that they are currently on NBL, of endless ‘counselling’, because IMHO that’s another disaster. It’s for the people who enjoy self-indulgence and self-pity and the people who exploit them by selling their books. The only person who can sort yourself out is you, and you do it! Right here, right now.

The way I see it, the Roman Catholics had Confession, which was a means for their power pyramid to gather intelligence, much like the NSA and GCHQ are doing now.

People could ‘sin’ and then be absolved and go away and ‘sin’ again, and that became an habitual lifestyle. Remember, the Inquisition was the equivalent of the CIA and lasted for 400 years.

Then Freud and Jung came along and Heaven and Hell were replaced by The Unconscious. Instead of Confession, people lay on the couch and talked about their childhood and their dreams. Same deal really. The equivalent of the Inquisition was perhaps Bedlam, the lunatic asylum.

Basically, all the pyramid power structures that are not fighting to SAVE the biosphere – are there any that are ?? – are the enemy. That doesn’t leave many powerful allies.

It does leave billions of ordinary, rather powerless people who know they don’t like what’s happening. If I was Che Guevara, I’d say it was a perfect time for revolution. The only problem is that a social reform doesn’t fix an ecological crisis caused by exceeding the carrying capacity.

These people are plain evil. They have done nothing good for anybody ever, in their entire history. How does humanity rid itself of such a monstrosity that has caused death suffering and misery for millions and millions of innocent people ?

The problem is power. If the greatest power is corrupt and evil, then who or what will hold it to account for its actions? How can it be removed? How do you prevent it being replaced by something even worse? Only the mass of the people can do this, and they have to understand the problem. Usually they don’t, or they are betrayed by leaders. Any leader who cannot be corrupted will be assassinated.

And now we have the New Age, and all kinds of therapies and therapists and counsellors who’ll take your cash for a book and dvd and a private consultation if you can afford it. It’s just a new priesthood for a new religion, and NTE is a whole new business opportunity for a whole new industry to arise, and some people will spend the whole of the rest of their lives ‘coming to terms with’ whatever it is…

Well, I am a warrior, and that’s not my way of dealing with this. If you get damaged and hurt, you heal yourself as well and effectively and efficiently as you can. I know, because I’ve been through a lot of stuff and been battered all to hell. Be as kind and gentle to yourself as you can possibly be. But there’s no need to rely on someone who doesn’t know any better than you do. How can they, if they have not been through what you have been through, and are doing what they do to make money? There’s a danger in that.

People who are addicted to booze or video games or who are obese or who expect to be told what to do, whole sectors of society – well, what will happen to them? Zombie food?

The old, the children and babies, the pregnant mothers, the weak and disabled, people who rely upon medication for survival, the gentle and tender-hearted ones – what happens?

We know what happens, because it has happened before. We can look back at history and see what happened when societies collapsed. It’s not a new thing. Inform yourself.

Next comes next. We’re going to die anyway. So how are we going to live while we are alive? That’s the bit that matters.

I think Enkidu has to get out of the rotting poisonous city, escape, get back to what he was… find himself again… his soul, his power, his way of being.

Forgive the male tense. There must be a female version of Enkidu, but I have failed to find one. Suggestions in the comments, perhaps.

“It is said there are flowers that bloom only once in a hundred years. Why should there not be some that bloom once in a thousand, in ten thousand years? Perhaps we never know about them simply because this “once in a thousand years” has come today.”
~ Yevgeny Zamyatin.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/7121/description/From_Counting_to_Writing

Satire Can’t Keep Up With Reality

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Corporate State, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Bioengineering, Chemical Pollution, Dystopic Future, Eco-Apocalypse, EPA, Genetically Modified Organism, Glyphosate, GMO, Monsanto, Roundup Herbicide, Scott Erickson, The Diary of Amy: the 14-Year-Old Girl Who Saved the Earth, Toxic Environment

The following blog entry is a guest post by award-winning satirical writer Scott Erickson. When I was initially contacted by Scott I was a bit wary until I read more about him and his writings at his website. He’s definitely ‘collapse-aware’ and is my kind of people. In a world where dystopic fiction has in many ways already become reality, we find ourselves to be a captive audience of the real world post-apocalyptic story playing out before our very eyes. Life is increasingly becoming stranger than fiction…

SATIRE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH REALITY

How long until Monsanto proposes genetic engineering of the human race?

By Scott Erickson

The hardest part about writing satire is trying to write things that are more absurd than what real life comes up with. I’ve heard this from a lot of comedy writers lately. There’s this idea that satire is dead because real life has become a satire of itself.

Here’s an example: Could anybody have invented the character of Sarah Palin? The vice presidential debate with her versus Joe Biden was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in my life.

Someday she’s going to be elected President. Which reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. It’s a pretty good satire about where we’re heading. Or have we already arrived?

The rest of this post is about a more personal example.

I just published a satirical novel about environmental destruction: The Diary of Amy, the 14-Year-Old Girl Who Saved the Earth.

In the novel, our young protagonist Amy Johnson-Martinez encounters the evil corporation GloboChem. A spill of the agricultural chemical “GrowMagic” has led to a hospital full of sick babies.

Amy does some research into what “GrowMagic” is, and she is shocked – SHOCKED! – to discover that “GrowMagic” is actually ONE OF THE MOST POISONOUS AGRICULTURAL CHEMICALS EVER MADE. This is what she finds on the GloboChem website:

Our main product is HappySeeds™ which grow 73% of the world’s vegetables and grains. Most of those seeds are Magic-Ready HappySeeds™ that are genetically engineered to accompany GrowMagic™ “agricultural helper.” As happy farmers around the world say, “I need the miraculous GrowMagic™ to keep my Magic-Ready HappySeeds™ happy!” And since Magic-Ready HappySeeds™ are genetically designed to grow plants that don’t produce seed, farmers around the world are happy to come back and buy more HappySeeds™ year after year – which keeps GloboChem shareholders happy! GloboChem: Spreading happiness wherever it touches.

If you guessed that “GloboChem” is a thinly-disguised “Monsanto,” and that “GrowMagic™” is a thinly disguised “Roundup,” then good for you! You win 10 points and advance to the semi-finals.

Later in the story, things take a darker turn. Since weeds have evolved into super weeds that are increasingly resistant to agricultural chemicals, bolder measures are necessary. Thus, GloboChem’s spokesperson announces a radical new proposal:

Ladies and Gentlemen, some people would suggest that GloboChem has gone too far. I put it to you that we haven’t gone far enough. I am proud to announce that GloboChem has developed an innovative new product that will absolutely end all problems with human exposure to agricultural chemicals.

Our new product is a highly-advanced version of our famous ‘HappySeed’ technology. As you surely know, ‘Magic-Ready HappySeeds’ are genetically engineered to go with our ‘GrowMagic’ agricultural helper. I am proud to announce GloboChem’s brand-new product, which we call ‘HappyHuman.’ It will make human beings – people like you and me – able to withstand the ‘GrowMagic’ that brings us the clean and inexpensive food you serve to your loved ones. ‘HappyHuman’ will be available in capsule form – just one dose per month is all you’ll need to stay healthy and prosperous.

Each capsule contains specially-engineered radioactive isotopes that go throughout the body, miraculously altering the genetic code to change the cell chemistry in each and every cell. Then, our bodies can withstand the ‘GrowMagic’ that brings us attractive pest-free food at a reasonable price. In other words, it will make us able to withstand ‘GrowMagic’ 100 percent naturally!

I know what you’re all thinking. You’re thinking, ‘What about our household pets, our fuzzy kittens and puppies?’ I’m pleased to assure you that GloboChem will offer our supplement in a pet-friendly form, because GloboChem cares about your pets. In fact, we love them more than you do.

Funny stuff, huh? Well, maybe less funny after the recent announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency. Since weeds have evolved into super weeds that are increasingly resistant to agricultural chemicals, the EPA has decided to allow larger traces of the herbicide glyphosate in farm-grown foods (http://rt.com/usa/monsanto-glyphosate-roundup-epa-483 http://truthstreammedia.com/epa-to-raise-allowable-glyphosate-levels-in-food-crops-3000)

Yes, glyphosate is the key ingredient in the company’s GrowMagic™ label of herbicides. Sorry, I meant to write Roundup label of herbicides.

Don’t worry, though – the acceptable level of glyphosate is only rising a little bit. The EPA is increasing limits on allowable glyphosate in food crops from 200 ppm to 6,000 ppm. That’s not much – only 3,000%.

Yes, scientists have linked glyphosate to cancerous diseases.

Yes, a study by The Cornucopia Institute concluded that glyphosate “exerted proliferative effects in human hormone-dependent breast cancer.”

Yes, another study concluded that “glyphosate enhances the damaging effects of other food borne chemical residues and environmental toxins.”

According to GloboChem – sorry, I meant to write Monsanto – the public is okay with this. A two-month open comment period that began May 1st drew little public resistance. Yes, the comment period was only announced on a 3×5 card posted in the company’s break room, but if you really wanted to see it then you should have looked harder.

Later in The Diary of Amy, the story eventually takes an even darker turn. The public has so far resisted GloboChem’s plan to genetically alter the human race. But now the agricultural chemicals are not stopping the super weeds, despite applying them far above the recommended concentrations. And the economy is in a tailspin due to a sudden oil shortage. We have to act fast! Fortunately, GloboChem comes to the rescue:

Recently GloboChem, Inc. has received some “less than fully satisfied” feedback on our agricultural products. We are pleased to respond to this feedback and offer what appears to be the only viable solution.

Apparently our GrowMagic™ agricultural helper is becoming less effective over time, even by using heavier applications.

Some have claimed all along that this would happen, and that we have lied about it. That is true. But even though we lied once, that doesn’t mean we’re lying to you this time. Since we told the truth about our lying, that should make you trust us now.

But rather than engage in a useless discussion about “who said what when,” we must forge ahead, like the courageous nation that we are. America has never turned its back on a challenge, and these tough economic times mean we must not turn our back like never before.

We recently announced our new HappyHuman™ product and sought to receive congressional approval to market it. But public reception was less-than-positive and the congressional bill stalled in committee.

We believe that now is the time to pass the bill and rush HappyHuman™ to the American public. Only by genetically engineering a human race able to withstand our products can we preserve our American way of life.

We must increase the “magic” within GrowMagic™ to a level high enough to kill every form of life that has not been genetically modified to resist it. There is no other option.

We have consulted with economic experts that we paid, and confirmed the following: Either we go forward with HappyHuman™, or food prices will increase by one thousand percent and the United States agricultural system will collapse and we will all die.

In other words, the only way to sustain human life is to modify ourselves to resist killing the rest of it.

This was much funnier to me when I wrote it. Now, not so much.

I’m just wondering how long it is before I see such a press release in real life, or before I see such a plan being proposed by a GloboChem spokesperson. Sorry, I meant to write Monsanto spokesperson.

Scott Erickson
scott-erickson-writer@outlook.com

The Diary of Amy, the 14-Year-Old Girl Who Saved the Earth
http://www.amazon.com/Diary-14-Year-Old-Girl-Saved-Earth/dp/0989831108

The Grim Future Seen From Current Headlines

13 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Pollution

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Addiction to Fossil Fuels, Arctic Sea Ice Melt, Climate Change Feedback Loops, Climate Chaos, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dystopic Future, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Collapse, Extinction of Man, Global Famine, Mangled Jet Stream, Mass Die Off, Methane Time Bomb, Technophiliacs

As the recent news stories below illustrate, extreme weather is on the rise and has been scientifically linked to human-induced climate change. I find it amazing than in the midst of the beginning stages of collapse of industrial civilization, many will attribute the disintegrating environment to natural phenomenon, biblical and other religious prophecy, or the lizard illuminati. I suppose the real reason behind America’s hi-tech surveillance panopticon is to keep the hungry and destitute masses from overrunning the walled compounds of the elite when climate change and peak net energy really kick into gear. These days the number of headlines pointing to environmental collapse are overwhelming; choosing one is like shooting fish in a barrel. The population of Atlantic Puffin bird, called the ‘marine canary in the coal mine‘, has reportedly been “losing body weight and dying of starvation, possibly because of shifting fish populations as ocean temperatures rise.” The Arctic, an essential temperature regulator for the planet, is melting fast and releasing a carbon time bomb:

Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon – an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils. In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable topsoils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.

But, as scientists are learning, permafrost – and its stored carbon – may not be as permanent as its name implies. And that has them concerned.

“Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures – as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years,” Miller said. “As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”

Current climate models do not adequately account for the impact of climate change on permafrost and how its degradation may affect regional and global climate…

…“The Arctic is warming dramatically – two to three times faster than mid-latitude regions – yet we lack sustained observations and accurate climate models to know with confidence how the balance of carbon among living things will respond to climate change and related phenomena in the 21st century,” said Miller. “Changes in climate may trigger transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes, potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require adaptations by people and ecosystems.”…

Adaptation will likely not be possible by humans, and as far as our sprawling steal and concrete cities are concerned – they’re toast.

…“Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we’ve measured have been large, and we’re seeing very different patterns from what models suggest,” Miller said. “We saw large, regional-scale episodic bursts of higher-than-normal carbon dioxide and methane in interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels. That’s similar to what you might find in a large city.”…

The next headline sums up the climate policy of all governments – a joke. Business-as-usual will continue until it ain’t so usual anymore. Insurance costs will skyrocket and the wrath of nature will roll back all the transient wealth humans have built up atop the backs of our fossil fuel slaves. Externalized costs will be paid back in the wreckage of a civilization which thought of itself as superior to and separate from the natural world.

Reading the inklings of future trouble that the next three headlines portend, you’ll see global famine on the horizon:

We’re seeing more severe storms,” Vilsack said. “We’re facing more invasive species. More intense forest fire threatens communities each year. NOAA reported that 2012 was the second most intense year in our history for extreme weather events — droughts, flooding, hurricanes, severe storms, and devastating wildfire. NOAA also advised that last year was the warmest on record for the continental United States.”

He made it clear we can’t dismiss these changes as an aberration.

“The latest science tells us that the threat of a changing climate is new and different from anything we’ve ever tackled,” Vilsack said.

A historic multi-billion dollar flood disaster has killed at least eighteen people in Central Europe after record flooding unprecedented since the Middle Ages hit major rivers in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia over the past two weeks. The Danube River in Passau, Germany hit the highest level since 1501, and the Saale River in Halle, Germany was the highest in its 400-year period of record. Numerous cities recorded their highest flood waters in more than a century, although in some locations the great flood of 2002 was higher. The Danube is expected to crest in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest on June 10 at the highest flood level on record, 35 cm higher than the record set in 2006. The flooding was caused by torrential rains that fell on already wet soils. In a 2-day period from May 30 – June 1, portions of Austria received the amount of rain that normally falls in two-and-half months: 150 to 200 mm (5.9 to 7.9″), with isolated regions experiencing 250 mm (9.8″). This two-day rain event had a greater than 1-in-100 year recurrence interval, according to the Austrian Meteorological Agency, ZAMG…

…The primary cause of the torrential rains over Central Europe during late May and early June was large loop in the jet stream that developed over Europe and got stuck in place…

…If it seems like getting two 1-in-100 to 1-in-500 year floods in eleven years is a bit suspicious–well, it is. Those recurrence intervals are based on weather statistics from Earth’s former climate. We are now in a new climate regime with more heat and moisture in the atmosphere, combined with altered jet stream patterns, which makes major flooding disasters more likely in certain parts of the world, like Central Europe. As I discussed in a March 2013 post, “Are atmospheric flow patterns favorable for summer extreme weather increasing?”, research published this year by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in German found that extreme summertime jet stream patterns had become twice as common during 2001 – 2012 compared to the previous 22 years. One of these extreme patterns occurred in August 2002, during Central Europe’s last 1-in-100 to 1-in-500 year flood. When the jet stream goes into one of these extreme configurations, it freezes in its tracks for weeks, resulting in an extended period of extreme heat or flooding, depending upon where the high-amplitude part of the jet stream lies. The scientists found that because human-caused global warming is causing the Arctic to heat up more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the planet, a unique resonance pattern capable of causing this behavior was resulting.According to German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, “Planetary wave [jet stream] amplitudes have been very high in the last few weeks; we think this plays a role in the current German flooding event.

The biggest lie ever told is that we will be able to adapt to or mitigate a planet-wide shift in weather patterns, temperatures, and sea level rise on such a short time-scale as to be instantaneous in geologic records. Our fall – a tragicomedy of hubris, self-delusion, greed – will be more precipitous than our rise.

Staring Into the Abyss

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by xraymike79 in Capitalism, Climate Change, Consumerism, Corporate State, Ecological Overshoot, Environmental Degradation, Inequality, Neo-Colonialism, Pollution, Wall Street Fraud

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Canfield Ocean, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Dystopic Future, Extinction of Man, Inverted Totalitarianism, Mass Die Off, Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Technophiliacs, The Anthropocene Age, The Great Cleansing

I’ll admit, I don’t really read far into any of the scientific analyses. They all point the same direction: massive discontinuity and unpredictability, what some describe as nonlinear. Armed as I am with only a modest science education, the most basic fact still able to be grokked by the masses is that we live on a water world, where oceans are both the base of the food chain and the creator/regulator of the air we land-based creature breathe. The oceans need not die in their totality before withdrawal of their support functions kills us, yet we behave as if it’s all expendable. We can’t even admit such basic biological mechanisms, so the oceans are simultaneously overharvested and used as dump sites for everything. Real smart, like the rest of collective mistakes.”

~ Brutus

Hello fellow collapsitarians, train wreck rubberneckers, concerned citizens, and everyone in between. My time for respite from the horrors of capitalist industrial civilization has arrived wherein I let this site sit fallow for a couple of weeks. When I rail against capitalism, this doesn’t by default make me a proponent of communism or any other ‘ism’. Globalized capitalism is what has conquered the world and it happens to be the current ‘ism’ destroying the biosphere with the industrial efficiency and speed of a Nazi gas chamber. The time to have created another ‘ism’ which may have saved humans from omnicide has long since passed. We are hurdling towards the end of the Anthropocene and into a period I call ‘The Great Cleansing’, whereby Mother Nature scrubs the Earth of all the hubristic artifacts and baggage of modern man. Of course there will quite a bit of noxious material that she’ll have to deal with and absorb such as radioactive waste, plastics, and CO2, but what is a few million years of remediation when compared to the Earth’s age of nearly 5 billion years with perhaps another 7.5 billion to go until consumed by the Sun. Despite all the insults and neglect that she has suffered at our hands, she will probably allow a small tribe of humans to survive the bottleneck. It would be a shame for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to have no beneficiaries, would it not?

What was our major downfall? I think we put too much faith in technology. Indeed we have used our big brains to solve many seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but we’ve put our technological cleverness on a pedestal at the expense of everything else. Technology has become the God of the 21st Century, the saviour for all of industrial civilization’s increasingly complex and insoluble problems. Granted, it has allowed man to search the stars and decode the DNA of life, but in the process it has clouded our memory of where we’ve come from, the womb from whence we were born. We’re just temporary visitors here with no preeminent right to rule the world above all other living things, and it looks increasingly like we have overstayed our welcome. While Homo sapiens are busy arguing about who or what is responsible for their current predicament, Mother Nature is slowly ramping up her fury. Geophysical forces on a planetary scale have been unleashed; they can no longer be contained by the scientific computations and laboratory tinkerings of mankind. The die has been cast and our fate sealed. No geo-engineering scheme or whiz-bang techno fix can contain her. As the Arctic melts away, followed by the Greenland ice sheet, and then the West Antarctic, our coastal cities will succumb to the sea. Jet streams and hydrologic cycles will transfigure themselves. Our once hospitable and stable seasons for agriculture will become erratic, the water sparse, and the land barren. The great oceanic currents will stall and break down, creating the anoxic and purple-hued waters of a ‘Canfield Ocean‘. As Paul said, the human race is “living in some kind of fantasy land, a land in which truth is avoided”, but a handful of us have peered into the abyss of the unfolding eco-apocalypse, and the stark reality of mankind’s own extinction has been seared into our brains.

How do we go on from here? …one day at a time. What once was important has become trivial. This would include all of the trappings and illusions of mainstream culture. Functioning in this “fantasy world” and going through the motions seems otherworldly and fake. We feel like blurting our what we know to those around us, but we can’t. There’s a straitjacket awaiting us at the nearest insane asylum. No one believes what the cold hard facts and trends have told us after we discarded the rose-tinted glasses society demands everyone wear. And why should they? It’s a traumatic experience to the psyche. Everything about the world you have been taught, all the myths of eternal progress and man’s place in the universe, comes crashing down in a thousand pieces.

So the question remains of how to live in a world of illusions and fakery. Gravitate towards that which is real. Shut off your TV and walk outside to breath in the summer air and run your fingers along the bark of an ancient tree, hike into the wilderness and watch the stars at night, spend one-on-one time with those close to you. They don’t need to know what you know; most will refuse to believe the facts even when meticulously laid out before their eyes. Leave them in their comfort zone, at least for a little while longer or until they become curious. A citizen of modern industrial civilization who confronts the horrific future awaiting their unsustainable way-of-living is like a drug abuser trying to deal with his self-destructive addiction. Both are under the spell of a very powerful force that does not let go until death. They are prisoners, mentally and physically. To talk about this dark subject, the collapse of industrial civilization and mankind’s impending extinction, join a group of like-minded people. Such clubs seem to be growing these days.

It’s a bit odd talking into the ether of the internet to people I will never meet or hear the voices of, but such a venue is really the only place a dissident voice can be heard in today’s atomized and one-dimensional society. For the reasons discussed above, I cannot speak of these disturbing topics to anyone else. This is my only outlet.

Collapse of Industrial Civilization

~ Finding the Truth behind the American Hologram

Tag Archives: Dystopic Future

Man In The Box

The Technological Sublime

Telling Stories

Extinction is Profitable, in the Short Term

Last Man on Earth

~ Arnold J. Toynbee

Satire Can’t Keep Up With Reality

SATIRE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH REALITY

The Grim Future Seen From Current Headlines

Staring Into the Abyss

~ Brutus

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~ Arnold J. Toynbee

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SATIRE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH REALITY

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~ Brutus

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