By Charles Hugh Smith
Thursday, 18 November 2010
http://carolynbaker.net/content/view/1847/1/
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great
emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional
well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it
runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling
to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me
that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant
oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that
burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status
quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power
Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global
Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China's Great Leap Forward
in the late 1950s and early 60s--in which peasants were instructed to "make
steel" by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them
to starve in countless millions--involves the artifices presented to Mao to
cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao's ire and losing their own
perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside
planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice
was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance;
the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green
abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony
bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind
the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters
of apparent abundance and "growth" along every highway in the land. The
vast majority of people--even people who should know better but who prefer
not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of
sham prosperity--accept that GDP growth means something positive is
happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a
mirror-image of this "growth" propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of "modern life" are ultimately the
result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything--the plays
on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the
endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef,
the "cheap" fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire--is all
based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every "solution" fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination.
Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those "fracc'ed" wells the industry
extols as the "solution" have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly.
There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you
care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will "entrepreneurship" re-make the distribution system to enable fueling
those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to
whom?
How about that "new discovery" of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep
water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1
billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may
take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater
drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that "endless" shale oil? How many MSM stories note that
production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S.
consumption--and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that
production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick
green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at
the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock
market.
Yet most people don't want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image
of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is "growing"
and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that
"reform" will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra
designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare "reform" will
lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy
every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we
are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very
draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say
that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda,
misinformation and misprepresentation--that in reading it they know they
are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only
know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation
and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead
of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who
knows this finds it worrisome.
Hence the rational desire to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Yet many readers tell me they meet fierce resistance from those around
them. I understand completely; I personally do not know a single person in
my circle or neighborhood who has prepared for even a few days without the
global supply chain--and I live in "earthquake country" where a massive
earthquake is not a possibility, it is a certainty; the only missing bit of
knowledge is "when."
As one correspondent put it recently, most people have more dog food on
hand than they do food for themselves.
I don't advertise my own preparations, and I pass them off as "earthquake
preparedness" as that strikes people as only slightly mad and paranoid
rather than the full-blown madness of knowing the whole system is extremely
vulnerable and precarious.
Very few people I know well have any savings to speak of either. I have
repeatedly suggested that they sell--sell their second home, sell their
office condo, sell anything and everything to reduce or eliminate their
debt, but they persist in working themselves to death to pay the mortgages
on their mini-real estate empire.
They all hope that the bubble will somehow magically reinflate, even though
the possibility of that happening with 19 million vacant dwellings, rising
interest rates and 5 million foreclosed homes in the pipeline is
essentially zero.
Readers ask me for investment advice; I cannot offer any, because I am not
qualified to do so, nor do I care to do so; the future is unknown to us
all. I can only say that I don't trust the stock market or the propaganda,
and so cash is King in my eyes, and whatever their drawbacks, gold and
silver will not go to zero, while paper assets and even real estate can
either go to near-zero or become a capital trap.
I don't have a "cure" for this MSM-Savior-State induced madness, or the
emotional burdens of knowing it is all interlocking dependencies supported
by webs of lies and fraud, and thus is it really is "different this time,"
but not in the way the shills, carnies and toadies think.
It does not have to turn out that badly; we could get by on much less. Half
the energy in the nation is squandered, as is half the food produced from
the fields. If you visit any orchard in the land post-harvest, ton after
ton of fruit lays wasted on the ground, rotting, in row after row, acre
after acre, state after state. The dumpsters are weighted down with the
food we have thrown away, just as the air conditioners are running when
nobody is even in the building. A staggering 5% of our electricity is
wasted on zombie electronics on standby. The list of waste is almost
endless.
I have carried water to a garden in 5-gallon buckets and gotten by on
handfuls of beans and corn or brown rice, and been happy doing so. Life
does not end when the exurbs no longer make sense and the Savior State
checks stop coming. Our sense of reality has become so skewed, so riven
with mirror images and marketing, that we have as a culture have lost touch
with much more than "mere" reality.
It doesn't have to end badly, but it might. Power Elites desperate to
maintain their perquisities have always found that fanning the winds of war
distracts their citizenry from their own incompetence and greed.
So what is the solution? I don't know; nobody knows. We only know our own
limitations, and what we can do, however modest it might be. We can turn
off the TV, that is easily done and extremely helpful. We can also limit
our time online, as that is just another firehose of information which
quickly overloads our sense of identity and proportion.
There are feedback loops in every system. I know 2015 will not be like
2010, but I cannot know precisely how it will be different. I know 2020
will be very different from 2010 and 2015, but I don't know exactly how
different; nobody else knows, either.
All that we can do is to realize the carefully planted screen is only thick
and abundant along the specified route, and that we owe it to ourselves to
peek through to the barren terrain beyond, and to base our decisions and
identity on that reality.
We cannot convince our loved ones, friends, family and associates; in the
odd moment, we can make a suggestion or leave a book for them to glance
through. That is all we can do; the emotional burden we feel only gets
heavier if we push too hard and create needless conflict. So all we can do
is make our own preparations as responsible individuals, as autonomous
beings seeking liberty, and act accordingly.
Prudence is a good screen. Having a bit of non-frozen food on hand is after
all merely prudent, isn't it? And so are the rest: water filters, propane
stoves, and so on. Camping equipment is good to have on hand; gardening is
worthy exercise, and a nice hobby. Eliminating fast food and packaged food
from one's diet is also merely prudent; why poision ourselves if we have
any sort of choice at all?
Voting against every incumbent who has supported the bailouts of banking
Elites, the fraudulent "reforms" and all the Savior State propaganda is
also merely prudent; why reward liars and thieves if there is any other
choice available?
Having savings is also prudent, as is eliminating debt. Limiting our
exposure to the lies, marketing and madness of Corporate-State media is
also prudent. So perhaps we can agree to be prudent, and perhaps others
will accept it all as mere prudence.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
http://carolynbaker.net/content/view/1847/1/
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great
emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional
well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it
runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling
to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me
that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant
oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that
burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status
quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power
Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global
Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China's Great Leap Forward
in the late 1950s and early 60s--in which peasants were instructed to "make
steel" by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them
to starve in countless millions--involves the artifices presented to Mao to
cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao's ire and losing their own
perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside
planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice
was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance;
the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green
abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony
bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind
the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters
of apparent abundance and "growth" along every highway in the land. The
vast majority of people--even people who should know better but who prefer
not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of
sham prosperity--accept that GDP growth means something positive is
happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a
mirror-image of this "growth" propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of "modern life" are ultimately the
result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything--the plays
on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the
endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef,
the "cheap" fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire--is all
based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every "solution" fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination.
Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those "fracc'ed" wells the industry
extols as the "solution" have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly.
There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you
care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will "entrepreneurship" re-make the distribution system to enable fueling
those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to
whom?
How about that "new discovery" of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep
water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1
billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may
take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater
drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that "endless" shale oil? How many MSM stories note that
production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S.
consumption--and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that
production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick
green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at
the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock
market.
Yet most people don't want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image
of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is "growing"
and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that
"reform" will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra
designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare "reform" will
lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy
every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we
are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very
draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say
that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda,
misinformation and misprepresentation--that in reading it they know they
are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only
know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation
and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead
of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who
knows this finds it worrisome.
Hence the rational desire to hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
Yet many readers tell me they meet fierce resistance from those around
them. I understand completely; I personally do not know a single person in
my circle or neighborhood who has prepared for even a few days without the
global supply chain--and I live in "earthquake country" where a massive
earthquake is not a possibility, it is a certainty; the only missing bit of
knowledge is "when."
As one correspondent put it recently, most people have more dog food on
hand than they do food for themselves.
I don't advertise my own preparations, and I pass them off as "earthquake
preparedness" as that strikes people as only slightly mad and paranoid
rather than the full-blown madness of knowing the whole system is extremely
vulnerable and precarious.
Very few people I know well have any savings to speak of either. I have
repeatedly suggested that they sell--sell their second home, sell their
office condo, sell anything and everything to reduce or eliminate their
debt, but they persist in working themselves to death to pay the mortgages
on their mini-real estate empire.
They all hope that the bubble will somehow magically reinflate, even though
the possibility of that happening with 19 million vacant dwellings, rising
interest rates and 5 million foreclosed homes in the pipeline is
essentially zero.
Readers ask me for investment advice; I cannot offer any, because I am not
qualified to do so, nor do I care to do so; the future is unknown to us
all. I can only say that I don't trust the stock market or the propaganda,
and so cash is King in my eyes, and whatever their drawbacks, gold and
silver will not go to zero, while paper assets and even real estate can
either go to near-zero or become a capital trap.
I don't have a "cure" for this MSM-Savior-State induced madness, or the
emotional burdens of knowing it is all interlocking dependencies supported
by webs of lies and fraud, and thus is it really is "different this time,"
but not in the way the shills, carnies and toadies think.
It does not have to turn out that badly; we could get by on much less. Half
the energy in the nation is squandered, as is half the food produced from
the fields. If you visit any orchard in the land post-harvest, ton after
ton of fruit lays wasted on the ground, rotting, in row after row, acre
after acre, state after state. The dumpsters are weighted down with the
food we have thrown away, just as the air conditioners are running when
nobody is even in the building. A staggering 5% of our electricity is
wasted on zombie electronics on standby. The list of waste is almost
endless.
I have carried water to a garden in 5-gallon buckets and gotten by on
handfuls of beans and corn or brown rice, and been happy doing so. Life
does not end when the exurbs no longer make sense and the Savior State
checks stop coming. Our sense of reality has become so skewed, so riven
with mirror images and marketing, that we have as a culture have lost touch
with much more than "mere" reality.
It doesn't have to end badly, but it might. Power Elites desperate to
maintain their perquisities have always found that fanning the winds of war
distracts their citizenry from their own incompetence and greed.
So what is the solution? I don't know; nobody knows. We only know our own
limitations, and what we can do, however modest it might be. We can turn
off the TV, that is easily done and extremely helpful. We can also limit
our time online, as that is just another firehose of information which
quickly overloads our sense of identity and proportion.
There are feedback loops in every system. I know 2015 will not be like
2010, but I cannot know precisely how it will be different. I know 2020
will be very different from 2010 and 2015, but I don't know exactly how
different; nobody else knows, either.
All that we can do is to realize the carefully planted screen is only thick
and abundant along the specified route, and that we owe it to ourselves to
peek through to the barren terrain beyond, and to base our decisions and
identity on that reality.
We cannot convince our loved ones, friends, family and associates; in the
odd moment, we can make a suggestion or leave a book for them to glance
through. That is all we can do; the emotional burden we feel only gets
heavier if we push too hard and create needless conflict. So all we can do
is make our own preparations as responsible individuals, as autonomous
beings seeking liberty, and act accordingly.
Prudence is a good screen. Having a bit of non-frozen food on hand is after
all merely prudent, isn't it? And so are the rest: water filters, propane
stoves, and so on. Camping equipment is good to have on hand; gardening is
worthy exercise, and a nice hobby. Eliminating fast food and packaged food
from one's diet is also merely prudent; why poision ourselves if we have
any sort of choice at all?
Voting against every incumbent who has supported the bailouts of banking
Elites, the fraudulent "reforms" and all the Savior State propaganda is
also merely prudent; why reward liars and thieves if there is any other
choice available?
Having savings is also prudent, as is eliminating debt. Limiting our
exposure to the lies, marketing and madness of Corporate-State media is
also prudent. So perhaps we can agree to be prudent, and perhaps others
will accept it all as mere prudence.
1 opmerking:
Wie had het toch over uitwassen?
Published on Monday, November 22, 2010 by The Daily Mail/UK
Wikileaks Set to Release New Iraq war Logs 'Seven Times Bigger Than the First'
by Daniel Bates
Wikileaks has announced it is to release a second batch of Iraq war logs which will be seven times bigger than the first.
The Twitter post from Wikileaks which promises to redefine 'global history'In a defiant posting on its official Twitter account, the website's founders said it was ‘under intense pressure' over the disclosure but vowed to press ahead anyway.
Via Common Dreams.org
anzi
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