As regular readers know by now, I’m a lifelong educator. In fact, the most common insult hurled my way by anonymous online commentators is “lifelong academic.”

Ouch. That hurts.

In the hallowed halls, ego is everything. Indeed, it’s difficult for me to imagine a profession that selects, to a greater extent than academia, for a huge ego. Shepherding a single refereed journal article through the process of publication builds more callus tissue than swinging a pick and shovel for two years. Multiply by dozens of articles, hundreds of public presentations, and a handful of books, and you can begin to understand why the average academic has an ego slightly larger than hell and half of Asia.

Thirty months into a new life devoid of regular interaction with inmates and honors students, I’m having the sort of identity crisis described by Dmitry Orlov in his excellent book, Reinventing Collapse. According to Orlov, middle-aged men — specifically those aged 45 to 55, nicely bracketing the age I departed the ivory tower (49) and my current age (51) — experienced the highest rate of mortality as the Soviet Union collapsed. The two most common causes: suicide and suicide by alcohol. I doubt I’ll go either route, but it’s easy to understand why Family Providers would experience suicidal depression when their ability to provide for their families slips away like a cat-burglar in the dead of night.

The issue of identity (i.e., ego) is far worse in the United States than the situation described by Orlov in the Soviet Union. As becomes apparent this time of year, when casual conversation is on the menu during every seasonal festivity, our identities are completely bundled with how we earn money. What do you think people mean when they ask, “What do you do?” In every case with which I’m familiar, they are inquiring how I earn money.

Knowing where the entire enterprise of generating cash is headed, I tell people I’m a sharecropper and organic gardener. Oh, and by the way, that right hand of mine, the one you just shook, milked two goats this morning. Then I ask people what they love.

I can suck the air out of room — any room, regardless of size or number of people present — in a matter of seconds.

I’m a sharecropper, organic gardener, and milker of goats, as well as a democrat, a republican, a liberal, a conservative, a radical, an idealist, a pragmatist, a teacher, a mentor, a scientist, a writer, a skeptic, a scholar, a cheese-maker, a son, a brother, a husband, a lover, and a human animal. I’m comfortable with my beliefs and personal philosophy. I’ve thought deeply about my tiny place in this enormous universe, and I’ve come to value humility over hubris. And still I’m having an identity crisis. A crisis of confidence. An ego-crushing moment. The longer the industrial economy lasts, the more my identify is pummeled, along with my hope for the living planet. Every day under the rule of Athena drives me further into despair. It’s as if my ego were a proxy for the planetary rate of extinction.

Considering the effort I’ve put into defining myself and my place in the universe, I can only imagine the difficulty ahead for the typical American drone. He values his imperial role and fails to recognize the empire for what it is. He gets his news from the television and affiliated media outlets and fails to recognize that form of propaganda for what it is. His sense of entitlement is exceeded only by his ignorance of the role nature plays in his survival. And yet, he’s ahead of me.

After all, unlike the American drone, I’m clueless about what to do. I’ve invested heavily in a reasonably sane set of living arrangements, only to have nature call me further down her path. I’m attempting to serve as a witness, and occasionally a warrior, as the living planet tries to survive the insults of industry. I’m trying to show another — hence, contrarian — way, for a world gone mad. And in return, I’m unappreciated as never before in memory (including even my final decade at the university as viewed through the lens of my dean and department head).

I recognize the necessity of total revolution, but I don’t yet see it. The wisdom of activist spiritual teacher Vimala Thakar surfaces in my mind: “In a time when the survival of the human race is in question, to continue with the status quo is to cooperate with insanity, to contribute to chaos. When darkness engulfs the spirit of the people, it is urgent for concerned people to awaken, to rise to revolution.”

Obviously, Thakar was an optimist. I love her inclusive approach. And although darkness has engulfed the spirit of the people, I fail to see the awakening at a scale relevant to the task at hand. Impatience grows within me.

With the exception of plunging into the wild or continuing to serve as an unappreciated model immersed in agrarian anarchy, my options are limited. I’m too old to die young, and it’s very late to start anew. Returning to the civilized life of an educator has limited appeal and prospects that are even more limited, considering the general perspective on my sanity (or lack thereof). And then there’s the moral imperative I feel, well expressed by social reformer and statesman Frederick Douglass: “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

Where does this lead? In my case, to utter confusion. As was recently pointed out to me by somebody a little older than me, and a lot a wiser, “in the end it doesn’t matter who you’re with if you can’t unlock the contents of your own skull.”

Which takes us right back to me and my self-indulgence. What to do, in the limited time left at my disposal? The temporal limitations come in two forms: (1) I’m too old to die young (and also too poor to start anew) and (2) the industrial era is nearing its end. Without fuel at the filling stations and water coming out the taps, paid positions at small, selective, liberal-arts colleges will be hard to come by (and meaningless). The day is coming far sooner than most people think. With luck, the forthcoming Lehman-on-steroids moment will make the decision on my behalf, and soon. If this latter statement reveals my cowardice, then it also indicates the extreme nature of my indecision.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath and, stunningly, Energy Bulletin.

The first video clip describes my personal journey in the usual, self-indulgent manner, and the program allowed no time for subsequent questions. The second clip humorously describes the efforts we’ve made at the mud hut, and the formal presentation is followed by my answers to a few softly spoken questions.

Also on 13 November 2011, during a break from the conference, I was interviewed by KMO along with Kurt Cobb and Henry Warwick. The resulting audio file is posted at KMO’s C-REALM radio.

Finally, my monthly essay for Transition Voice was published a few days ago: Is terminating the industrial economy a moral act? The latter essay is permalinked at Counter Currents.

Also, as I’ve indicated many times, there are a couple general approaches one can pursue along the path of climate change and simultaneous collapses of the industrial economy and the living planet. You can hit the road, or you can mitigate in place. Either way, you’ll need to secure clean water and healthy food, maintain body temperature, and create and maintain a decent human community.

I recommend a life of travel for most people, although I’ve taken a different route for personal reasons. Either way, an adventure-filled life awaits. On the road, you’ll need quick wits, good interpersonal skills, and astonishing amounts of creativity, compassion, and courage. Ditto for mitigating in place. In this post, I’ll address the primary concerns associated with mitigating in place, with a particular focus on me and the mud hut (my favorite subject and my favorite location, respectively).

If you’re staying put, I suggest you pay attention to the 3 Rs of the future. No, not the educational ones from years gone by. And it’s far too late for the three Rs targeting reduced consumption in a nation build on consumption, two of which we have ignored because there is no financial profit in reducing and reusing. Recycling — the only one of these three relevant actions fascist Amerika promotes — is like an apology after a punch in the face (credit Mike Sliwa). We punch the planet in the face with every cultural act, and then we apologize by sorting plastic and aluminum into separate bins.

The three Rs of interest in this post are relocalization, resilience, and redundancy. We’re headed for a severely constrained future with respect to transport of materials and humans. The days of the 12,000-mile supply chain are nearly behind us. Forget about cheap plastic crap from China, expensive watches from Switzerland, and decent hand tools from the Sears Roebuck catalog: We’re going to have to make do with what we’ve got in the very local area. Before the supply chain breaks, we should work toward building a resilient set of living arrangements steeped in redundancy. After the supply chain breaks, it’ll be a little late to start digging a well and learning how to grow food.

Here at the mud hut, we pay serious attention to multiple sources of water (two solar pumps, hand pump, rainwater harvesting from two rooftops, and the nearby river), food (wildcrafting, orchard, gardens, goats for milk and cheese, eggs from ducks and chickens, and in the future, hunting relatively large-bodied animals), body temperature (well-insulated, passive-solar house, multiple awnings, proper clothing, and abundant water and firewood), and human community (abundance in this category exceeds my patience to explain again, but search the archives for a few hints). I’ve no doubt we’re missing some things that will ease our lives in our post-carbon future. Some of these items will remain unknown, even to us, until it’s too late. I’m already missing a few things, even before the impending big crash leads to “lights out.” (As Dmitry Orlov uncharacteristically suggests, the day draws near. As “Tyler Durden” characteristically suggests, the day is near enough to be seen by a blind man.) And as I’ve mentioned a few hundred times, skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions, along with wholesale destruction of the living planet, will seal our fate as a species unless we crash this luxury ship, and soon.

I know you’ve read this one before, but I’d love to have a solar ice-maker to cool our drinks and our bodies. But if the industrial economy reaches its overdue end within a few weeks, I won’t. And I suspect we’ll muddle through, until we don’t. I’d love to have more time to convince my human community to climb aboard the collapse train. But if the industrial economy reaches its overdue end within a few weeks, I won’t. And I suspect we’ll muddle through, until we don’t. I’d love to make a few more trips to discuss the dire nature of our predicaments with people who are aware and interested. But if the industrial economy reaches its overdue end within a few weeks, I won’t. And I suspect I’ll muddle through, although I’ll miss trips tentatively scheduled to Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, New England, and various places nearer the mud hut.

Closer to home, and closer to my heart, I’d love to have time for my parents — and the thousands of other winter immigrants descending on this area — to make the return trip to their northern homes. But if the industrial economy reaches its overdue end within a few weeks, or even within a few months, they won’t. And I have no idea how we’ll muddle through.

All things being equal, I’d rather have the solar ice-maker in a community fully on-board with collapse. All things being equal, I’d rather make a multitude of excursions to exotic places. All things being equal, I’d rather my parents experience collapse in their own home. But all things are not equal and, more than all these things, I’d rather have a planet marked by much more abundance and far fewer extinctions than we’re currently witnessing.

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I’m scheduled to speak at several events during the coming week or so; (1) On Wednesday, 9 November at 7:00 p.m., I’ll address the Atlanta Beyond Oil Monthly Meetup, 657 Rosalia Street SE, Atlanta, Georgia; on (2) Saturday, 12 November and Sunday, 13 November I’ll deliver two, 18-minute presentations at the International Conference on Sustainability, Transition & Culture Change in Bellaire, Michigan, and (3) on Tuesday, 15 November at 6:30 p.m. at 5885 M 115 Frankfort Hwy, I’ll speak about developing a durable set of living arrangements in Benzonia, Michigan (sponsored by Grow Benzie). I hope to meet you at one (or more) of these events.
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This post is permalinked at the Refreshment Center and Island Breath.

I’ve embedded one of the thirteen presentations I delivered over a span of eight days. It’s my final presentation, excluding Q&A (which might come later), which partially explains my on-and-off incoherence (the remainder is inexplicable, as usual).

The presentation includes a half-hearted pitch of my final book. The book is available, a couple months earlier than anticipated, and can be found at this link as well as the usual online outlets. If all goes according to plan, I’ll receive a few copies later today. The book has already been reviewed by Sandy Krolick, the kulturCritic and Cameron Conaway, the poet. Krolick’s review was picked up by Transition Voice, and Conaway’s review was run by Examiner.

I’m trying to produce video from my presentation at a Harvest Gathering Festival with a barn as venue. I may post it at a later date, if all goes according to plan. It includes no slides, and the material differs considerably from the one above.

Reaction was mixed, as usual. Some people, such as this college student, found my messages unbelievable. Others quibbled with the timing of the sources I presented (I carefully avoided pushing my own predictions). Standing ovations were rare — even though I begged for them — but in the end several people understood the importance of collapse if we are to extend our run as a species.

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Huge thanks to Shelley Youngman, who facilitated, organized, chauffeured, and hosted. A kindred spirit, Shelley was kind enough to make many of the arrangements and also to spend large blocks of time with me. Voluntarily, no less.

Thanks, too, to my many new friends and hosts (in the order I met them): Mike Draney and Vicki Medland (University of Wisconsin-Green Bay), Steve DeGoosh and Brooke Isham (Northern Michigan University), Sarah Redmond and Dan Redmond (Alger Community Transition), Shelley Youngman and Frank Youngman (Transition Cadillac), and Kimberly Sager and Aaron Wissner (Local Future).

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This post is permalinked at Plan B Economics and Survival Acres.

My July essay at Transition Voice summarizes collapse-related information.

I am featured in this article from 14 July by editor Erik Curren at Transition Voice.

I am featured in this article from 4 August at The Good Men Project.

Finally, I will be speaking in the upper midwestern U.S. next month. Details are still in development, and will be posted in this space. For now, the schedule includes the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (ca. 12-13 September), Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan (14-15 September), Munising, Michigan (16 September), and in and around Cadillac, Michigan (17 September through … unknown). I’d love to see you at any of these events, so please let me know if you’ll be there and available to meet.

Or, more specifically, compost. The kitchen compost in the composting container was little decomposed after more than a year. The 10% or so in the middle was beautiful, but the rest was too dry. I’ve been at this a few years now, and it seems I should know more than I do about practical matters. Such as how to make compost with a mixture of kitchen scraps, chicken manure, and horse manure. How to mix it. How to store it. How to turn it into dark, nutrient-rich, crumbly compost until the neighbors ooh and ah.

On the other hand, I just made a deal with one of the neighbors. We’ll trade our inadvertent roosters — a side-effect of incubating eggs to produce “replacement” laying hens — for horse manure. Formerly, we didn’t get shit for our roosters. Now, it seems, we will get shit for our roosters. Clearly, our skills at bartering are improving, even if we don’t know compost.

While I’m on that particular topic, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share this line, which I observed on an unknown contact’s Facebook wall: “The shit is no longer hitting the fan. The fan is covered in shit. Now the shit is hitting the shit.”

There are many other unknowns, too, about our future. Although American Empire has been declining for more than a decade, we cannot yet confirm the accuracy of dozens of pundits predicting completion of the ongoing decline within 17 months (and by the time we can confirm the predictions, there’ll be nobody to brag to). My own take, consistent with the old cliché: Better safe than sorry. I doubt it’s wise to abandon the empire and start growing a garden the day before economic collapse visits you. And, while I’m trotting out adages, the time to dig a well is not when you’re thirsty.

Another thought came to my ears, courtesy of Mike’s brain and mouth, as we were digging that garden bed: What a salesman! We spent the first couple million years of the human experience as happy campers, living close to the land and avoiding human-population overshoot. Then one heckuva merchant sold us civilization. Instead of spending most of our personal time playing and otherwise doing many things, suddenly we were spending essentially all our time doing one thing. Is there any question the transition from hunter-gatherers to farming was the worst idea ever? And yet, here we are. And we make a bad decision worse, here in the land of Big Ag, when we turn the lion’s share of our corn into ethanol. As I’ve pointed out several times before, we are willingly choosing our means of death: starvation, in a traffic jam.

This bizarre set of choices, and the strong sense of entitlement underlying them, point to the United States as the last place I want to be standing within the next few years (and now, for that matter). Here in the United States of Advertising, we’re “all in” on a set of living arrangements based on environmental disaster and headed for economic disaster. We base our entire industrial economy on oil and the wars that provide it. Although I’ve often expressed my personal preference for a country characterized by agrarian anarchy largely devoid of fossil fuels, such as Belize, almost anywhere beyond the borders of the U.S. will prove superior to this country in the months and years ahead.

Compelled by marital and familial ties, I’m mitigating in place for environmental disaster, including climate change, as well as completion of the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy. As it turns out, the lessons we learn should prove valuable to the few other people interested in making other arrangements: If we can make it work here, in the harshest of desert environs, you should be able to transition just about anywhere. Perhaps you’ll join me in avoiding the life of “should” by living a life true to yourself. In so doing, you’ll avoid the first regret of the near-dead, living a life others expect.

Even if I don’t know shit — and the mountain of evidence grows daily — at least my death comes regret-free. Maybe it’s merely another case of blissful ignorance. Apparently, I wouldn’t know.

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This essay is permalinked at End of Empire News.

As a result of runaway fossil-fuel consumption, the amount of carbon released to the atmosphere is still going up, even as the industrial economy is buried in a depression. We haven’t observed below-average temperatures on this planet for 25 years. Even high oil prices can’t keep a bad country down.

The response of the government and its sponsors at the Federal Reserve Bank remains unchanged: print money. Quantitative Easing (QE, i.e., printing money) has been a complete failure. But because Ben Bernanke has adopted levitating the stock markets as the Federal Reserve Bank’s prime directive, I’ve no doubt we’ll see QE 3, QE 4, and so on, right through to QE infinity until the U.S. dollar joins every other fiat currency in the dustbin of history. Alan Greenspan warned about the worthless paper certain to result from the ongoing Ponzi scheme, back in 2005.

The debt problem is as bad as they say. And probably worse than anybody is saying. Reducing U.S. debt causes the stock markets to fall profoundly. Increasing U.S. debt makes a dire predicament worse, but a missed payment on U.S. debt leads directly to junk status for the dollar, so Benny and the Inkjets will continue to print until the dollar is dead.

What are the options, after all? We’re on a train going over a cliff, and the cabin smells of natural gas. We can ride out the train wreck or jump out, sans parachutes. The banksters in charge have posed a third option: light a match. As economist Mish says, “Expect chaos.”

Every additional brick in the wall of civilization, placed there by the fascists in charge, has two profound consequences. First, each brick enriches the financially wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, even as economic collapse looms. Second, every brick further destroys the remnants of the living planet. Let’s kick Barack Obama — the American Gorbachev — out of the way so we can tear down this wall.

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This essay is permalinked at Kick It Over and Plan B Economics.

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Update: Please note the new CLASSIFIED ad under the tab, above

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is what systemic collapse looks like. We’re awash in tell-tale interactions between climate change, “natural” disasters, and the industrial economy. Fire and flood are both on the rise. We used to be able to exert a modicum of control over both phenomena, back when climate chaos wasn’t exploding and the industrial economy wasn’t imploding.

On the other hand, we used to contain nuclear power within nuclear power plants, too. Well, except the occasional Hiroshima and Chernobyl.

And we used to busy ourselves with the quaint concept of one war at a time. Now we’re committed to Iraq and Afghanistan for the duration of the industrial age. Tack on a few more oil-rich, Muslim countries — say, Pakistan, Libya, and Yemen — and a reasonably intelligent person might conclude an increasingly desperate United States is beginning to lose its global hegemonic grip.

Phenomena that formerly captured our attention every few decades now appear weekly. The new normal is a mad scramble to steer clear of nature’s wrath while ratcheting up resource wars to stay one step ahead of complete socioeconomic collapse. Amidst the chaos, long-time political insiders warn of civil unrest.

Meanwhile, 300 million self-absorbed Americans watch the feel-good “news” to see which models of beer and automobile are being pimped by which of their favorite celebrities. It seems the personal game of “who’s screwing whom” is more important to the typical television-addicted American than the international, imperial game of “who’s screwing whom.” Oblivious to the carnage of industry and the lunacy of our lives, we keep praying the stock markets go up while bickering about who’s to blame for our economic misfortune.

There is another, better way to live. But we can’t be bothered. Please pass the guacamole, and don’t tell me how it got here. After all, extinction is for lesser species.

Until it’s not.

A model for a better way of living is demonstrated by a pair of former teachers: Mike Sliwa and Karen Sliwa, who wrote an essay in this space late last year, have boldly walked away from empire. They’ve joined us for a few months at the mud hut, where they are learning new skills. Among other things, in the first two weeks they’ve extended the water-delivery system (hence, learned some plumbing), added to the drip-irrigation system, expanded the orchard, done some carpentry and generally fix-er-up tasks, milked and walked the goats, and spent many an hour in the garden. I encourage you to visit their blog as they pursue World-Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.

The Sliwas abandoned city life on moral grounds. Others will take a pragmatic approach to transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward climate chaos. In either case, my latest essay at Transition Voice provides a summary and charts a course. It’s been picked up and re-posted several other places. Perhaps it’s worth a look and a comment, on the original site or this one.

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This essay is permalinked at Counter Currents and Island Breath.

It’s too late for a fast collapse of the industrial economy. According to every significant index, the U.S. hit its economic peak in 2000. We’ve been in the midst of an economic recession since 2000. We’ve been mired in an economic depression since 2008, when the industrial age came within an eyelash of reaching its overdue terminus.

Even Ben Bernanke admitted as much, years after the meltdown on Wall Street. When all the banks fail — or even a significant proportion of them — we’ll suddenly lose access to the fiat currency that allows the current set of living arrangements to persist. I strongly suspect the high price of oil had a lot to do with the near meltdown in 2008, a notion consistent with oil price spikes preceding every economic recession since 1972.

When the next spike in the price of oil hits us, we’ll see another huge downturn for the industrial economy. According to more than 70 pundits, it’ll be the one that puts western civilization in the abattoir. This would be no surprise, given the fragility of the industrial economy and its near-termination back in 2008, when it was on much stronger footing than now. Oil priced at $140 barrel is almost certainly coming this year, and that should do the trick, much to the astonishment of those who believe the industrial economy is unaffected by spikes in the price of oil, or that its long-time decline can turn into a collapse.

Even Bank of America has joined the rising tide of voices calling for the price of crude to exceed $140/bbl within the next three months. And no wonder, with OPEC raising expectations of world demand after Saudi Arabia and OPEC have peaked.

As I’ve pointed out many times, and as Japan is making clear right now, economic growth is all about oil consumption. We’re falling off the oil-supply cliff this year, according to many sources, including the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration and the Joint Operating Environment of the U.S. military.

I don’t know the terminology for a sudden stop of the industrial economy. I don’t think terms such as hyperinflation and deflation apply, and economists rarely use the phrase, “industrial economy crushed by Godzilla.” As with any leap off a skyscraper, it’s not the fall that’s fatal: It’s the sudden stop at the bottom.

The rapid collapse of AIG back in September 2008 is a harbinger of an equally rapid failure of the Fed, hence our entire monetary system. The only difference is that this time there will be nobody to bail out the ultimate backstopper and, as a result, we will observe the long overdue termination of a failed experiment.

Here’s one analogy: We’re in an aerial tram, suspended a few thousand feet above the valley floor by a sturdy, steel, 2-inch-diameter cable. But the cable is comprised of thousands of tightly wrapped strands, all of which are hundreds of years old and half of which have already broken. The remaining strands are breaking at an increasingly rapid pace as the pressure builds. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has been holding this sucker together with duct tape and baling wire, but King Ben is fresh out of both items.

I find it a bit odd — no doubt because of bias inherent in my life as a scientist — that artists have a better understanding of reality than do scientists. Matchbox Twenty provides one example (thanks to Mike Sliwa for the tip).

And while we’re on the topic of rearranging the deck chairs as the Titanic takes on water, the international community is rightly aghast at North Korea for spending a fortune on its military when its populace is suffering. Nearly one quarter of North Korea’s population is either starving or at risk of starvation, according to a recent UN report, yet its government pours money into missile and nuclear programs. Such behavior seems to be the height of irrationality, especially when you consider they stole the model for this behavior from the U.S.

I realize you and I had little to do with the dire straits in which we are immersed (i.e., we didn’t fuck it up). But we’ll be paying a high price.

No matter how many times I point out the acceleration of this ongoing slow decline, people take issue. I suspect it’s the primary reason Energy Bulletin and similar websites do not carry my essays. It can’t happen here. This time is different. There’ll be plenty of warning. And so on. In response to the insanity of the herd’s groupthink, I turn to Nietzsche for solace: “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

The seemingly rapid collapse of the former Soviet Union — the latest superpower to hit bottom, never to recover — actually took a few years to transpire. The collapse was faster than the ongoing collapse of the current system, but I have the distinct impression Obama is a conniving version of Gorbachev. A few informed people saw the Soviet collapse coming and sounded the klaxons, but government officials did not post warning signs on the nightly news. Quibbling over minor differences between socialist news delivered by and for the Politburo and fascist news delivered by and for the Corporatocracy seems irrelevant at this point. As Oliver Stone points out, Barack Obama could take a lesson from Mikhail Gorbachev about how to dismantle a dysfunctional empire that has long overstayed its welcome.

Warning shots have been plentiful. The masses have completely ignored these many shots. The next shot likely will be terminal for the industrial economy.

The decline of the U.S. industrial economy has been a slow-motion, ongoing process, albeit with several steps down along the way. If we’re lucky, the next step leads right off a skyscraper, thus leading to a sudden stop at the sidewalk below. Obviously, this is the only legitimate remaining opportunity to prevent the near-term extinction of the many species we drive to extinction every day, as well as our own species. And, of course, it will allow us to see the end of Twain’s limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

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This essay is permalinked at Island Breath and Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly.

Already, the crushing of the consumer sector is under say even as the road to madness is paved with King Ben’s $100 bills. To his credit, Bernanke finally admitted that nearly every bank in the country almost failed shortly after the price of oil peaked in mid-2008. He failed to mention, however, that such an outcome surely would have terminated western civilization within a month. Imagine Bambi representing the industrial economy.

Meanwhile, Ben and the boys at the Federal Reserve Bank keep launching new ships in the never-ending fleet of Quantitative Easing. QE II was intercepted by Wall Street on its way to Main Street, so QE III is on the way, undoubtedly destined for the same fate. Like a high-speed, head-on collision, QE III will have quite an impact, but only on those immediately involved. The rest of us will be rubber-necking and wondering what happened as we drive by.

Coincident with the death of the U.S. dollar, the industrial economy is perched on the brink of catastrophic collapse. Or, as I’ve written before, the Great Recession never left us and collapse of the industrial economy is already under way. Most people have simply not realized it yet because they haven’t been told by the media or the completely impotent federal government. Many signs point to 2012 as the year the ongoing collapse of the industrial economy reaches its overdue end, although I’m not yet giving up on 2011. In short, it’s game over for the industrial economy, and soon.

If you prefers charts to texts, try this set for an abbreviated version of the story. In other words, the Keynesian experiment has nearly run its course, so it’s time to get serious about feeding yourself and your community in the near future.

If you think revolution is restricted to other countries, take a look at the gap between the haves and the have-nots around the world. Inequality is far worse in the U.S. than Egypt, Tunisia, or Yemen (in chart form, the story is here): The American picture is truly ugly. Ongoing events in Middle Eastern countries, driven by economic factors, are the canaries in the coal mine of global economic collapse, as intimated by Dmitry Orlov and further explained by noted trends forecaster Gerald Celente. And if you think we wouldn’t use force on our own, then you haven’t checked with the troopers in Wisconsin.

Even as Middle Eastern puppets for the U.S. are falling like dominoes, despite continued U.S. support, it becomes increasingly clear Obama will be the president who asks the last mercenary to turn out the lights on American Empire. Collapse is proceeding apace, and even Congressional Representative Ron Paul admits the federal government is in the process of complete failure.

Crude oil underlies the entire industrial mess and CNBC admits we need those dictators puppets to keep the oil flowing to the U.S. as the major domestic source of oil in the U.S. continues to falter and past-peak, free-falling Saudi Arabia clings by a thin thread (as recognized by Foreign Policy). When the kingdom falls, it could well take the U.S. dollar with it, and quickly. And contrary to statements from our politicians, “we’re not worried about the rivers of blood — we’re worried about the rivers of oil” coming out of the Middle East. As we’ve been since the 1970s.

If you think we can pay our way out of this predicament, it’s time to pony up. If you pay taxes, you and your family owe more than $1 million en route to saving our monetary system. Small wonder, then, that Tim Geithner foresees imminent default on U.S. debt. Before we get there, Timmy is blackmailing Congress, claiming that failure to raise the debt limit leads to default. But Timmy knows default is right around the corner, either way.

Jeff Rubin explains why oil-price shocks induce recession, and also why there is a lag between the shock and the economic pain. Rubin and an ever-larger choir are joined by Jim Rogers and financier and author Stephen Leeb in the expanding club forecasting oil priced at $150 per barrel in the near term (and Global Research has joined the party, too). That’s what happens when the giant oil fields run dry.

Lest you run out and buy oil futures, bear in mind the other potential outcome to this globalized world: China’s economic bubble could burst in short order. When it does, only one bubble remains: the human population bubble on Earth.