Don’t know if this esteemed board is familiar with Dmitry Orlov, but he is the guy who came onto the fringe scene about 15 years ago, and his claim to fame was an analysis of the 5 stages of collapse, as it took place in the USSR. In his earlier work, he defined these as:
- Financial collapse
- Commercial collapse
- Political collapse
- Social collapse
- Cultural collapse
If you care to peruse his earlier work, you can find it here:
https://www.countercurrents.org/orlov131108.htm
Looking at where we are in Australia, we are on our way through all 5 stages, to a degree, the question remains what will fail first. I do tend to agree that financial collapse will accelerate the rest, unless we get to political collapse first, and then who knows.
He just penned an interesting, from my perspective, article, about his view of where the collective West is headed, from the point of view of energy. Compliments of the Saker, it is free.
Old Way, New Way
It is an overview of the last ~50 years of history regarding energy (hydrocarbons), and his thoughts on what will come next. Hope you will find it interesting.
Dmitry Orlov
https://cluborlov.wordpress.com/
I think the US is further along the path of cultural and social collapse, but as we seem to follow them we are going to have the same issues.
However Biden and the current radical left are the epitome of the “weak men create hard times” scenario and the hard times will be survived by the hard men, and trust me the Larry Fink’s and other Epstien clients are not hard men, they think they will be protected but they are the target.
This pic was taken at an official meeting between the USA and France
The Americans are fucked.
you have a knack for making me happy….sharpening my boning knife is therapeutic too
Thanks for the links Mark – they very much accord with my own opinion on where our collective future lies. I have frequently said that our Great grandchildren will be more likely going to school in a horse drawn buggy than attending class rooms on Mars. My only criticism is one of his early comments:
While this is where we are now approaching he has, imho, it backwards. The rising debt levels are a function of diminishing energy output, our Civilization aka ‘The Status Quo’ exists between a rock and a hard place, with diminishing energy returns from each additional unit of energy expended in search or resources on a finite planet, versus the need of our way of life being dependent on energy being delivered to us within a certain band.
Like the habitable zone from the Sun, the price of energy has to be within a certain band. Too ‘hot’ like Venus, and the high prices start crushing consumption in other areas of the economy, demand destruction occurs elsewhere as wants are traded for needs, civil unrest will usually follow (the Arab spring was just a for taste of what is to come).
Too ‘low’ and it will freeze over like Mar’s atmosphere and exploration will shut down, supplies will further diminish and the economy will again contract leading to civil unrest. By too low I don’t mean too low in terms of retail prices, but too low to allow oil firms to earn a reasonable economic return.
This is the rock and the hard place that our collective interests lie.
The trouble is all the easily accessible oil is gone. When Gwarda oil field (can’t be bothered to look up the correct spelling) first came on line the energy exploration/development/return equation was +36barrels of oil returned for every barrel of oil needed in energy to develop the infrastructure and extract it from the ground then refine it.
The marginal oil that is now being delivered onto the market in order to keep prices in the ‘habitable zone’ so as to maintain the ‘status quo’ only delivers between 3-6 barrels of oil for every barrel invested. The only way it can be delivered, economically onto the market, in order to avoid an economy ‘Freezing over’ like with Mars, or ‘Burning up like Venus’ by allowing prices to rise to levels that justify economic investment, is by lowering interest rates so that the return on huge amounts of capital needed to extract the oil remains economic.
Personally I have zero surprise that we effectively reached zero interest rates right around the time that we also experienced peak oil. The economic system broke in 2010 because the real interest rate needed to continue to supply oil was around 1%, which wasn’t sufficient to maintain the finance industries own margins and it has been on life support ever since.
IMHO the exponential increase in debt since then has been a desperate treading water of drowning man. The 2nd stage, Commercial collapse is in the process of occurring right now, and the rise of more extremist politics is hinting that the 3rd stage is soon to start.
While it may feel as though we have entered social and cultural collapse, I would disagree. I think we the dislocations we have experienced in those regards so far are the collision of our hostile elites own cultural proclivities combined with the same inability to realise our utter dependence on oil, crashing into the peak oil and WEF rationalists who’ve woken up to the oil issue rolling out their own policies to try and ease us into the adjustment that is coming.
The sort of social and cultural collapse that is coming will make these days seem like the good ole days.
Dmitry also makes some good comments in regards to the tricks that people will play to deceive themselves until it is too late.
There is an important saying that fell out of favour through the years, “memento mori” or ‘remember that you have to die‘.
It was said to remind people that they needed to make the most of every day, because our time is limited and we don’t want to waste it. The vast majority of people in the west now waste their lives, because we all play the mental game of avoiding thinking we will die. How many days at the end of your life would you love to claw back from the hours wasted in playing computer games or even performing mindless work.
This same mindset that prevents most of us as individuals of keeping our own deaths in our mind, is the same mindset that pervades our Gestalt social consciousness – we know the Oil will run out, but we avoid thinking of it and the consequences in the same way we avoid thinking of the inevitability of our own deaths.
‘Memento Mori’ was forgotten because it was useless. Inducing a state of anxiety and panic in oneself about the future does not provide sufficient motivation to make the changes needed to overcome it. Perhaps that’s why we are all here commenting rather than actively campaigning for the things we say matter to us.
‘Memento Mori’ is simply reminder to get on with life as opposed to wasting it on unimportant distractions.
IMHO it was a value or habit that was less about creating a sense of anxiety or panic, than simply an opportunity to reflect on your life and current pursuits. In a way it was just another cultural value to work against behavioural sinks.
Reading the second article on how Russia is a net energy exported and has now broken away from selling its underpriced energy in order to subsides the West, only makes me more angry about the situation in Australia and our foreign energy companies raping our natural gas resource base.
An interesting thread on ‘Demons’ and how rationalists and scientists actually believe they get caught up in mental traps or ways of thinking that they can only describe as ‘Demons’.
Remember these are rational atheists describing this.
https://twitter.com/MogTheUrbanite/status/1547711152402010112
When I read it I immediately thought of my examples of ‘Egregore’s’ and collective social entities ergo ‘Demons’ and ‘Angles’, or ‘God’ in terms of society in its entirety.
The most interesting part of all of this is that this thread was triggered by someone who worked in Artificial Intelligence and was describing working at a scientific institute called “Leverage Research” which supports early stage scientific research ie AI:
https://medium.com/@zoecurzi/my-experience-with-leverage-research-17e96a8e540b
The author was writing about smart, rational, atheists. People with PhDs, people from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Given my own rationalist viewpoints it actually gave me a poise for concern – I don’t think I should ever start investigating AI and combining that with the trend of ‘micro-dosing’ with psychedelics.
The hottest thing to come out of the right since…. forever!
https://twitter.com/EvaVlaar/status/1538289420817801218
Her criticisms about a Hostile Elite, at the end of the discussion is 100% on the mark imho.
Note I don’t believe in a secret society. I just believe in culture, and powerful people spending their money to promote their values. The elite are never, even now, 100% dominated by one culture, but there is never-the-less a clear set of cultural values that form the majority views of the elite, which then get exercised through top down institutional enforcement.
For example, the mass importation of Islamic and African peoples, who are in general highly endogenous and culturally aggressive population groups, is imho overwhelming evidence alone that our elites are hostile to the interests of the people over which they rule.
https://journals.lww.com/md-journal/fulltext/2022/02180/the_foegen_effect__a_mechanism_by_which_facemasks.60.aspx
These findings suggest that mask use might pose a yet unknown threat to the user instead of protecting them, making mask mandates a debatable epidemiologic intervention.
The cause of this trend is explained herein using the “Foegen effect” theory; that is, deep re-inhalation of hypercondensed droplets or pure virions caught in facemasks as droplets can worsen prognosis and might be linked to long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. While the “Foegen effect” is proven in vivo in an animal model, further research is needed to fully understand it.
Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/
Whocoodanode?
Also:
Adverse Effects of COVID-19 and Face Masks: A Systematic Review
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8072811/
Adverse Effects of Prolonged Mask Use among Healthcare Professionals during COVID-19
https://clinmedjournals.org/articles/jide/journal-of-infectious-diseases-and-epidemiology-jide-6-130.php
We objectified evaluation evidenced changes in respiratory physiology of mask wearers with significant correlation of O2 drop and fatigue
Sounds like long COVID
That is a fun read, obviously Russian nationalist. I suspect he is recycling themes I first heard from doomberg some months ago. The biggest problem with his argument is that Russia cannot physically ship the same volumes of oil it could before since the eastern pipelines were already at capacity. Also, the equipment to extract and ship oil is made in the West by firms like Schlumberger. The Russians (or their intermediaries) will still need some dollars to buy at least some things from the west. That said, it would be fun to do a literature survey of theories of social collapse. Imo collapse is actually very rare. Better to think of societies that are growing or shrinking. Anglo society has been shrinking for quite some time. The only people that aren’t are Africans, Indians and Arabs, but even there the 2nd derivative has turned. I used to think the poisoned chalice of feminism was to blame, but now I think that too is a symptom. The cause is overcrowding. Living in rooms in buildings in cities is inherently stressful for animals. Living creatures want and need to be surrounded by life. We are surrounded by sterility.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a “fact sheet” yesterday “to further clarify that agricultural commodities (including fertilizer), agricultural equipment, or medicine relating to Russia are not the target of U.S. sanctions.” Titled “OFAC Food Security Fact Sheet: Russia Sanctions and Agricultural Trade,” it came in the wake of the July 13 announcement from Istanbul that negotiators from Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations had agreed on steps toward ensuring the export of agriculture products from Ukraine via the Black Sea. The Treasury said in its statement that the U.S. was also taking steps to expand the agricultural and medical authorizations to include agricultural machinery. The expansion “further reiterates that U.S. sanctions on Russia in response to its unprovoked and unjustified war against Ukraine do not stand in the way of agricultural and medical trade,” it said.
At least one politician in Moscow was not impressed with the Treasury statement, however. Deputy Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, dismissed the statement, saying that it was little more than a sign of desperation at the condition of the U.S. economy. “The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s clarification that anti-Russian sanctions don’t apply to agriculture, the energy sector, healthcare, the fight against the coronavirus pandemic and transit flights should not be taken as a sign of a thaw, or Washington’s constructive approach,” the lawmaker observed, and further stating that “nothing of the kind is likely to happen in the near future.” The exemptions from U.S. sanctions announced by the Treasury Department “are only aimed at preventing their own economy from collapsing,” Slutsky concluded.
Looks like the USA blinked first.
We’re social animals, Urban living has always resulted in behavioural sinks – there are just too many distractions there for young people who if left to their own devices will opt to pursue other ‘worthwhile pursuits’ and distractions rather than the hard work of raising a family, just like the mice:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh
It is true that there is also an economic cost in living in the city, while everything is more convenient it is also generally more expensive. In the country food is cheaper, children after initial investment provide free labour and there are fewer distractions to prevent young people in ‘settling down’.
So in the trade off of between convenience & distractions vs cost of living, the balancing equation is usually family size.
Cultural values in most religions work to counter these behavioural sinks, e.g. things like arranged marriages resulted in young people being forced to attend to the serious work of raising a family.
The Parsis were a trading clan/religion, meaning that their culture inhabited cities for hundreds of years, yet they weren’t renewed from the countryside as like the Jews they had no nation of their own.
They are also a particularly long lived population group, yet their fertility window remains much the same as everyone else’s, arranged marriages allowed their clans to persist in foreign cities for hundreds of years (they were also highly endogenous):
https://www.smh.com.au/world/indias-vanishing-people-20160729-gqgb0m.html
Basically the abandonment of one of their cultural values around arranged marriages has seen a clan that survived for a thousand years or so, vanish in the same way that the rest of the West is now vanishing.
Likewise with Jews, it is the secular Jews that are vanishing from this world. Their reproduction is on par with the Parsis. It is their charming brethern the Orthodox and more importantly the Ultra-Orthodox, who are growing at a enormous rate and will be the dominate Jewish population group in the future.
Likewise with Christianity, it is the anti-baptist Amish who along with the Mormons are the fastest growing population groups in the US. When people talk about white people in the future, they will basically be talking about Amish and Mormons – demographics is destiny.
The Bible is full of stories about God smiting the Israelites in the Old Testament whenever they turned away from his teachings (i.e. Culture). The Jewish concept of “Hell” is actually non-existence, so when you look at the Jews today and divide them between Secular and Ultra-Orthodox, the group that are indulging in secular liberal vices are the ones that won’t exist in the future.
I put it to you that the only reason the distractions of urban life appear better is because securing sufficient space for a family is hard. Distractions after a time are neither interesting nor pleasant. Analogous behaviour was seen in Calhoun’s mice. I suspect you are dead right about the necessity of arranged marriage in urban environments. How to get this back?
Thousands report unusual menstruation patterns after COVID-19 vaccination
Survey aims to document breakthrough bleeding and heavier-than-usual periods postvaccine
https://www.science.org/content/article/thousands-report-unusual-menstruation-patterns-after-covid-19-vaccination
Investigating trends in those who experience menstrual bleeding changes after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.11.21264863v2
Stand by fellas….you’re next.
There have been massive drops in live births recorded in a number of countries in 2022.
Taiwan had something like a 27% drop in live births, combined with a 25% increase in all cause mortality. China won’t need to invade the place, because in a few years it will be depopulated.
I think Holland, Germany and other Euro countries are experiencing the same effect.
Scientists are baffled of course as there is no obvious cause.
Solar flares?
https://youtu.be/pnYDc4UmUfw
Sucked in anyone that had the jabs
https://blog.canberradeclaration.org.au/2022/07/14/gay-couple-sue-ivf-clinic-for-daughter/
Pity the children.
https://blog.canberradeclaration.org.au/2022/07/12/nsw-health-manipulated-vaccine-data/
They wouldn’t, would they?
a quote from someone here responding to my claim that abs data is not a reliable reference.
Of course they are covering up the fact that the vaccines are useless, the Pfizer CEO announced ages ago that the current vaccines have little or no benefit against Omicron, the FED health minister and Mark McGowan both said 4% effective, and that was the BA.2 version, the current BA.5 version is even more vaccines evasive so I would infer that the vaccines/boosters have ZERO or less effect on the current version.
DLS and LVO (“Llewds and Bleats”) seem to be reaching the pinnacle of the career, to the once in a lifetime opportunity.
Once again the couple have made it to the most important and most influential news outlet in Aus, a front page nonetheless.
Good onya Bleato, I am excited that the fakenews.dot.au is finding your writing interesting, the hard work have paid off in the end. Llewdo did the same a few times in the last and this month which means both of you have found your spot in this world! As much as the new platform does not have a “subscribe” button, at least the comment area will be a safe place – none exists.
💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 💯 🥇 🥇 🥇 🎪 🎪 🍺 🍺 🍺 🍻 🍻 🍻 🥂 🥂 🥂 🍾 🍾 🍾 🍾 🍾
https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/interest-rates/why-sydney-and-melbourne-are-up-for-a-record-house-price-correction/news-story/fd6b4fb255cb6e1fb1504bde47fc33ff
So that’s how its done
To think that these nutcases like DLS spent 4 years in hysterics over Trump comments taken deliberately out of context. Let’s hope Putin nukes that country.