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.

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.

My monthly essay for Transition Voice, barely modified from an earlier essay in this space, was posted here today.

Everybody thinks about his or her purpose in life. I figure going into their twenties most people think that purpose is pretty significant. However, getting out of their twenties — and I’ll be there soon — I think most people are at least beginning to accept that their purpose might have to be slightly more modest than they had hoped. With only a hint of despair, we all have to accept that we aren’t superheroes. That smirk we once wore, knowing any second would be the moment we would spring in to action and show the world how powerful we really are, is starting to fade. Everybody knows that feeling. It’s why we have anti-depressants, and religion, and booze, and the swimsuit edition, and suicides. It is why we have health-food stores and designer clothes and flat-screen televisions and all that bullshit. It is why we have self-help books.

I hate self-help books. When I was 21 I was dating a woman, although I was convinced she was a goddess. She was super hot and she seemed to have this whole Life thing figured out and it blew me away. She moved through the world with ease and I guess I figured if I latched on to her maybe I could figure out how to do the same. Predictably, because of how attached I got to her, she dumped me. When she did it, she gave me a copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Everybody is always trying to convert everybody else to their own way of thinking. She was no exception. For a couple years I was pretty hooked on his writing. Thank god I got over that phase. The Alchemist is 150 or so pages of self-empowerment and spirituality for the masses. It is also a huge stinking load of bullshit. Along with all Coehlo’s other books, which have inspired millions, it is essentially a guide on the use of magical thinking to enrich our lives and wash away that deep-seated feeling of disappointment we all felt when we realized that the world really is this shitty and next year’s iPod is not going to fix that.

Chicks especially dig Coelho’s books. Paulo undoubtedly pulls an astonishing amount of ass for a guy is age, so I’m not going to say he wasn’t well-justified in writing it, but the message is still totally off the mark. The truth is that magical thinking is why we all hate ourselves in the first place.

The magical idea that something can come from nothing is central to our culture. It is how we got here and why we are probably all going to be gone soon. It is completely unnecessary and it has us all completely disoriented. The instructions on how to be good at being human are already programmed into our DNA, but we never learned how to read them because we didn’t have to. We’re like fat stupid babies that grow old and die, never having been weaned. We are just domesticated cattle, we know it, and deep down (or not) we hate it.

To keep people from catching on, we have to be fed a continuous stream of lies forever, and Paulo Coelho came up with a really popular one. But, like all lies, it’s still a lie. I bought his lie for a while, until I came across a different author who preferred to tell the truth. His name was Edward Abbey.

Hallelujah! I cannot describe the burden lifted from my shoulders. The reason I was no good at that whole spirituality thing was because it was really just bullshit all along! The woman who amazed me all those years ago was in fact not enlightened, just overloaded with privilege. The anger I was trying so hard to get rid of, via my mountain of books on various schools of spiritual thought, was not bad karma or proof of my soul being too immature to let God’s love flow into my heart. It was a sign that I was still sane. My DNA was fighting back. Some part of me was still an honest to goodness Homo sapiens. A living breathing eating shitting fucking animal trapped in a cage and not happy about it.

Good news: Getting out won’t be too hard. The bars on our cages look like televisions and soft blankets, so all I have to do is give them to somebody who wants to stay trapped. Then I’m just going to slip away into the night and let the fun begin. Destination unknown, I’ll experience the wilds of the world in the Jeep I put together from spare parts. When we run out of gas, I’ll get along some other way.

I thought long and hard about saving the living world, but I decided otherwise. I just can’t. For starters, nobody wants to let go of the lie. It is easier for them to think they’re not at fault because a car has a hybrid engine and because a house only has high-efficiency light bulbs. It would be a lot more work for them to accept that fixing the world is not the same thing as damaging it a little bit less. I don’t think I can change somebody’s mind when they think recycling their beer cans is going to save us and the living planet.

Instead of trying to change people, I am just going to fuck with their minds. Because I can. Because I am good at it. Because I only have one life to live and it sounds like fun. I’m not taking the moral high ground here. I am not an extremist or a radical or even remotely interested in explaining my view of the world to anybody, unless the circumstances are such that it might get me laid. I am just done with the lies. Done with the cage. Done being cattle on this big rotten industrial farm. I am going to break shit and run away laughing into the night. I wish I thought I could do enough damage to kick the civilized humans out of my desert but I don’t think I have enough hands. I do think I can do enough damage to really piss them off though, which I guess is all I can ask for. We’re all going to die sometime. I am going to do it with a big shit-eating grin on my face.

I’m driving away from empire, and having fun along the way. That’s plenty of purpose for one life.

I was shooting video of this presentation, but my camera failed 15 minutes in. So we’re stuck with multiple audio files and the slides in the usual awkward format. And whereas the audio files are adequate during the presentation, the only microphone in the room was near me, so the question part of the Q & A is poor.

You get the original slides this time, along with the audio file. Plagiarize to your heart’s content. Share widely. Spread the news. But please keep your complaints about the quality of these materials to yourself, unless you have suggestions for improvement.

I was speaking in the capital of the state built, economically at least, by oil. As I was speaking, I could see the Capitol, which convened the following day to deal with the state’s $27 billion deficit. Gee, I’d have never seen that coming.

My presentation was greeted with the usual mix of profound denial and fatalistic acceptance. The very few anarchists in attendance could hardly compete with the majority, who could see absolutely nothing amiss with the industrial economy, western civilization, or American Empire.

Powerpoint

Introduction from Gayle Borst, Design~Build~Live

Presentation part 1

Presentation part 2

Presentation part 3

Presentation part 4

Presentation part 5

Presentation part 6

Presentation part 7

Q & A part 1

Q & A part 2

Q & A part 3

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Special thanks to Ken McKenzie-Grant from Shades of Green Radio for the considerable effort behind the audio files and to Gayle Borst for hosting (and all the associated work).

On to that card: It was filled with proud stories of the kids in the U.S. Army, and it closed with, “We pray for peace.” I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Never mind that the writer almost certainly is fooling herself. If her prayers are answered, that’ll put the battle-ready kids out of their jobs. And, since war comprises the foundation for our entire industrial economy, the empire almost surely would sink to the bottom of the already stinking swamp within weeks of an outbreak of peace. Praying for peace makes as much sense as supporting the troops, and both cases of wishful thinking are clothed in lies.

I can only imagine how many people I’ll offend with this essay. And yet, I can’t seem to stop myself. Any decent social critic points out the lunacy of societal taboos. I’m not suggesting I’m a decent social critic. But I can no longer ignore this most annoying of taboos.

Support the troops. It’s the rallying cry of an entire nation. It’s the slogan pasted on half the bumpers in the country.

Supporting the troops is pledging your support for the empire. Supporting the troops supports the occupation of sovereign nations because might makes right. Supporting the troops supports wanton murder of women and children throughout the world. And men, too. Supporting the troops supports obedience at home and oppression abroad. Supporting the troops throws away every ideal on which this country allegedly is founded. Supporting the troops supports the ongoing destruction of the living planet in the name of economic growth. Supporting the troops therefore hastens our extinction in exchange for a few dollars. Supporting the troops means caving in to Woodrow Wilson’s neo-liberal agenda, albeit cloaked as contemporary neo-conservatism (cf. hope and change). Supporting the troops trumpets power as freedom and fascism as democracy.

Image: en.wikipedia.org

Perhaps most importantly, supporting the troops means giving up on resistance. Resistance is all we have, and all we’ve ever had. We say we’re mad as hell and we claim we’re not going to take it any more. But, sadly, we gave up on resistance of any kind years ago. After all, we might get in trouble. We might be incarcerated for protesting without a permit.

When jets from the nearby military base scream over the university campus, conversation stops, indoors or out. We pause awkwardly, stopped in mid-conversation. After the jets pass, in formation, an excuse often is articulated by the person with whom I’m visiting: “It’s the sound of freedom.”

My response never varies: “Sounds like oppression to me.”

The ensuing silence is more awkward than the scream of the jet engines.

It’s as if America’s cultural revolution never happened. It’s as if we never questioned the dominant paradigm in an empire run amok, as if we never experienced Woodstock and the Summer of Love, bra-burning hippies and war-torn teenagers, Rosa Parks and the Cuyahoga River. We’re right back in the 1950s, swimming in culture’s main stream instead of questioning, resisting, and protesting.

In a Tucson coffee shop last week I saw a woman, apparently in her early twenties, dressed in a short skirt, an apron, and high heels. Had she been behind the counter, she would have been the perfect symbol of the 1950s, a refugee from two generations gone by. We’ve moved from the unquestioning automatons of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the firebrands of a radical counter-cultural worldview and back again. A generational sea change swept us from post-war “liberators” drunk on early 1950s propaganda to revolutionaries willing to take risks in defense of late 1960s ideals. The revolution gained steam through the 1970s, but lost its way when the U.S. industrial economy hit the speed bump of domestic peak oil. The Carter Doctrine — the world’s oil belongs to us — coupled with Ronald Reagan’s soothing pack of lies, was the perfect match to our middle-aged comfort, so we abandoned the noble ideals of earlier days for another dose of palliative propaganda. Three decades later, we’ve swallowed so much Soma we wouldn’t couldn’t find a hint of revolution in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

In short, the pillars of social justice and environmental protection rose from the cesspool of ignorance to become shining lights for an entire generation. And then we let them fall back into the swamp. The very notion that others matter — much less that those others are worth fighting for — has been relegated to the dustbin of history.

The problem with being a martyr: You have to die for the cause. And along the way, you’ll probably be jailed and tortured. But there’s a fate far worse than being a martyr, in the minds of America’s youth. There’s the thought you’ll be viewed as an anti-American freak, out of touch with Lady Gaga and Dancing With The Stars. A fate worse than death: Your Facebook page will be removed, thus “disappearing” you.

A line from Eugene Debs, five-time candidate of the Socialist party for U.S. president, comes to mind: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” He was serious. So am I. That I am not taken seriously in these most serious of days pulverizes my ego. That Debs is not taken seriously these days shatters my heart.

When I visit with college-age people these days, they have no idea what I mean, and they believe Debs and I are misguided jokers. Completely immersed in a culture of make believe, mind-fucked from birth by the corporations running the media, the thought of resistance is, quite simply, beyond the pale. Resistance? Against what? And why? Isn’t resistance a form of terrorism?

Every revolution has failed. And if that’s not sufficient reason to launch a revolution, I don’t know what is. The revolution is dead: Viva la revolution!

If any one of those troops we claim to support attempts to bring transparency and reform to this country, we instantly turn on him and support his torture by — you guessed it — the troops. And who’s the commander in chief of these troops? That’s right, the man who promised transparency and reform, but who now seeks to crush the very people trying to bring it to us.

If obliterating transparency means criminalizing journalism, we can live with that. Those journalists are probably terrorists anyway. Or worse, liberals. The First Amendment was shredded by Obama’s predecessor, and how it’s being turned to ash. The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are bobbing along the same waves as social justice and environmental protection, sold down the river by a nation addicted to growth for the sake of growth (the ideology of a cancer cell).

It seems very little matters to the typical American beyond economic growth. And for that, most importantly, we need an uninterrupted supply of crude oil. All wars are resource wars, and even our involvement in the last “Good War” was about oil, notwithstanding revisionist history about our compassion regarding Hitler’s final solution. Crude oil’s near-term annual decline rate of 10% means many troops will be needed to secure the lifeblood of the industrial economy. After all, world demand hasn’t peaked yet, although world supply has. If we’re to continue running ruining the world, we’ll need plenty of troops. And they’ll need your support.

You keep supporting the troops, and trying to convince yourself you’re fighting terrorism in the process. If doubt creeps in, turn on the television. Listen to the news anchors and the politicians, the characters and the commercials. Immerse yourself in the ultimate hallucination. Keep lapping up the self-censored “news,” confident the future will bring even more self-indulgent hedonism than the recent past.

And if somebody tries to tell you the hegemony of the U.S. dollar is threatened, thereby causing the price of oil to skyrocket, you just ignore the uncomfortable news, just as the mainstream media have ignored it. That kind of thing can’t happen here. It’s never happened, so it can’t happen (Francis Bacon’s Idol of the Den). If some misinformed fool attempts to point out the consequences of consumerism, shrug him off as a terrorist. And if somebody tries to confuse your happy holidays by telling you the good news about economic collapse, you tell him you’ll be praying for peace. That’ll make it all okay.

Whether it’s systematic dinosaur bureaucracy fueled by greed and ignorant arrogance or a lineage of agenda steeped in cowardly filth is not my concern. It’s broken. It doesn’t work, for me or you. For those at the top of the power pyramid, it’s all going perfectly well. For those who buy the nonsense spewed by the mainstream media and the corporations backing them, progress is proceeding according to plan.

Take a big bite of the bullshit sandwich at your own risk.

The generally narcissistic, self-absorbed, zombie-like, attitude we see among most individuals in our communities are bearing the expectedly rotten fruits of a self-devouring television culture addicted to dietary poisons, dependent on nation-states, big Pharma, and big Ag, hence denied any semblance of a real education. If that’s the point, then the system is working nicely.

And work it must, for the veil of perpetuated bullshit is so thin that the slightest winds of knowledge will tear it apart like a whale breaching the surface to exhale stagnant toxins and inhale the oxygen of truth. Yet, in “working,” the system leaves its architects totally devoid of empathy, so morally bankrupt that there is not one single metaphorical place to which I could allocate a place for their existence, other than the toy attic.

This status quo has brought us to a point at which, in order for it to be maintained, I must accept innocent people being slaughtered so I can drive my car. Entire countries must be raped of their dignity. Resources must be utterly destroyed so I can eat “inexpensive” food. Entire populations must be brutally enslaved — for me — so I can have cheap clothes and economic “goods” forced down my throat. And we buy it because from birth we are assaulted by mass marketing. The PR tyrants are no better than the bastards they “deal” with. Perhaps we’re right there with them.

Meanwhile, the laws of industrialized humans battle the laws of nature. The living planet convulses, as do the tyrants battling each other for nature’s bounty. They fight to keep delusional power over nature, not appreciating the irony of nature’s gifts: Immersed in Plato’s cave, we are governed by the false economic prophets du jour as they grasp at the shadows of fictional profit. The bright fires of reality intensify behind them.

No sane person would accept these false prophets. But the price for recognizing your own sanity is the cruel hand dealt you as the ones you care about, those you love, are so entangled in the web of denial that they simply can’t shake free. Shackled by lead boots, so brow beaten by the system’s dogmatic tricks, they have insufficient self-confidence to act against the imperial system and its masters.

Thus are we torn. The frustration becomes unbearable as our loved ones and friends fade from us. We see them trapped on the merry-go round of unwitting pain and destruction even as we stand begging, screaming, crying from the sidelines of hope, all the while knowing that they see us as crazy ideological fools. Tis cruel. Take heart, fellow freedom fighters: The system is so far out of kilter with respect to history, evolution, and sanity that our species can and must shed the diseased elitist power brokers from our gene pool.

This is cerebral evolution? Am I meant to accept that this system is simply the way it is, and should be? I think not, so I have no choice.

I have no choice but to take note that the choices we were given were never choices at all. Sitting in the school of life and eager for the answers, we sat down to exams filled with questions that could only be answered with lies that were deemed truths. And of course the main objective was to force a complete, surreal disconnect between reality and an unsustainable, unnatural system.

Indeed you did achieve this system, Dr. Kissinger and crew. But now we’re going back to nature and you can stick your Bernays mall where the sun don’t shine. The dirty tricks of politics duped us for a while, but now the people see it all and we’re coming back in style. Be careful in your fall from grace, as you are destined to join the people, to chat with them, face to face.

We must, and we will, transition to relocalization. This is not mere flippancy: The truth is, we have no choice. We demand a better world.

Am I going to fight the system that enslaves my brothers and sisters and, ultimately, me? I have no choice.

Do you?

This essay will not go down the rabbit hole of inflation vs. deflation, preferring instead to use the simple, technically incorrect, but well-understood route of equating increasing prices with inflation. The academic ground of inflation vs. deflation has been worked to death with little understanding. If you want to pursue that topic, I encourage you to check in with Mish Shedlock, Nicole Foss, John Embry, Peter Schiff, and Gonzalo Lira (Lira believes hyperinflation has already been triggered). Rather than chase the tail of terminology, I’ll simply assume that when average folks can no longer afford food and water, economic collapse has occurred. At that point, we needn’t worry about the terms of the debate.

The U.S. industrial economy still faces strong headwinds from the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse: energy, employment, credit, and housing. Ultimately, the U.S. gets to choose from few remaining options. They all spell the end of American Empire: default or hyperinflation seem likely, along with extreme deflation. And although we’re already there, these 23 latter-day doomsayers figured out we’ll be in an economic depression next year.

The oil crunch has arrived, despite OPEC’s lies, and the oil squeeze is running the show. Oil prices are headed up on the perception of global economic growth, according to JP Morgan and a report prepared for the New Zealand Parliament. Even the International Energy Agency questions whether reserves will fill the gap between supply and demand. They’ve never been so circumspect. Similarly, the United States Geological Survey has infused reality into its estimates by reducing Alaska’s reserves by 90%. Meanwhile, the U.S. military — charged with making sure U.S. consumers have enough crude oil to keep the Hummers running — is feeling the squeeze.

Never mind that we’re still in an economic depression, according to unemployment numbers and other metrics of macroeconomic reality. The United States, and indeed the OECD, is no longer driving the world’s economic bus. And, of course, the entire field of economics is a sham built on a foundation of incorrect assumptions, lies, and misinformation. To call economics the dismal science is to denigrate all legitimate sciences while smearing the word “dismal.”

Is France foreshadowing the rest of the developed world? Will protests in France make it across the pond? Personally, I doubt Americans can be bothered to turn off the television long enough to notice the lies in which they are immersed. But I’ve been wrong a few million times before.

The only question of economic significance at this point is which event puts the stake in the heart of the industrial economy. At this point, a single tremor, an inopportune echo, an unexpected shift in the winds, and the entire icy edifice will come down like an avalanche. Will the derivatives explode? They’re still out there, and the exposure of JP Morgan alone exceeds global GDP. Or maybe somebody will notice the actual U.S. government debt, which is beyond belief, much less payment. Perhaps the big bank death spiral will get it done. Maybe the ongoing, ever-growing foreclosure crisis will bring it all down. The natives are growing restless about that issue. Perhaps a Keynesian liquidity trap will do the trick — and, by the way, we’re already in that trap, and there’s no way out. Under this scenario, the monetary authority (in our case, the Fed) loses control because long-term interest rates are very low (we’re stuck at zero for the Fed’s foreseeable future, and even the Fed acknowledges they’ve lost control when — in an act of treason — they defer decisions on monetary policy to banks). Although Benny Bucks have levitated the stock markets so far, the impending collapse of those markets, as foretold by insider trading at a sell to buy ratio of 3177 to 1, might be sufficient to terminate the industrial economy. Most stock trades are done robotically, so don’t think stock prices have anything to do with the worth of a company or that the time-tested buy-and-hold strategy is a safe bet. In fact, regular people have already fled the stock markets because the markets no longer reflect economic reality (although, unlike conspiracy theorists such as Charles Hugh Smith, I don’t believe stock-market movements are engineered). There’s good news elsewhere, too: We’re blowing bubbles faster than an eight-year-old with a fresh pack of Hubba Bubba, as even historians can see, and the collapse of any of those bubbles could sink the imperial ship. Bonds, anyone? There’s a fiscal train wreck on the way in the bond market. Indeed, Ben Bernanke is acting like a possessed zombie intent on destroying the U.S. economy all by himself, through hyperinflation if necessary. Ben, you’re not alone: I’m here to help.

Non-economic phenomena could bring civilization to its knees, too. Most obviously, the ongoing environmental collapse, including profound rates of extinction, could take us with the rest of the living planet. But an overdue electromagnetic pulse from a solar flare — or a nuclear device — could terminate many of the world’s electronic infrastructure instantly. A sufficiently sophisticated Stuxnet-style cyber-attack could do some serious damage, too. On the other hand, civilization could simply starve itself to death.

If the end of American Empire is the silver lining, then continuation of the empire represents the blackest cloud in world history. If Americans would get off their collective lazy asses, they might start a civil war. That’s a big if, and I’m not willing to bet on it. Additional imperial news includes war crimes perpetrated by U.S. soldiers and the abject shaming of this country by our naked aggression throughout the world. And then covering up the whole stinking mess, just as the oligarch’s presidential administration continues to cover up the environmental effects of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. But those problems are about to take care of themselves in the undertow of economic collapse. And even the silver lining bears its own bad news: Peak oil spells peak human population.

Empires are not benevolent. This world has never had a larger, more effective empire than the current one. If you’re cheering for continuation of the age of industry in an overshot world, you’re cheering for more torture, more human suffering, and more human deaths. Needless to say, we’re on opposite sides of this issue.

And if you’re living that comfortable life in the city, regardless how much you recycle, bicycle to work, and tithe at the altar, you still haven’t figured out the immorality of imperial living. Cities are the nadir of civilization, and they have an increasingly short and burning fuse. Furthermore, nothing about our survival as a species matters if we keep adhering to an irredeemable set of living arrangements, even if your city has “walkable” neighborhoods. Who wants to live as if life has no merit?

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This essay is permalinked at Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly, Counter Currents, Island Breath, and Before It’s News.

Let’s ignore the fact that the media tack “-gate” onto every single event, large or small, as if every event since Watergate is a REALLY BIG DEAL. How many thousand “gates” have we experienced since Nixon waved goodbye, with no appreciable change in the national scenery? Politicians are slippery enough to squirm away from this crisis. And by politicians, I mean banksters and corporations. They’re all cut from the same coarse cloth, after all.

If we set the guilty free this time, the pundits say, we have abandoned the rule of law. Chaos will erupt. Anarchy will rule the day.

Never mind the difference between chaos and anarchy, which most people cannot distinguish. Let’s cut straight to the argument about the rule of law.

As if that’s mattered in this country, or the entire industrialized world, for the last several generations. When was the last time you saw a person of color, accused of raping a while college girl, receive the same treatment as, say, an east-coast, Ivy-league, blue-blood with blue eyes that reflect familial bling? To suggest we are a nation of laws that apply equally to all citizens is to express a level of national naivete we haven’t seen since the cultural revolution of the 1960s. I’d like to think we are equal under the law, and that resistance will overcome inequalities. But I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

We’re a nation of grifters, addicted to Ponzi schemes. We specialize in scams that transfer financial wealth from the poor to the rich. There is no honor among the conniving thieves herding this country into the abattoir. The last American on the stinking, sinking ship of empire will be laughing maniacally because he is holding onto a chest of fiat currency as he sucks his last gulp of air. “I won, I won,” he’ll cry to the crashing waves, failing to notice the seagull gliding through the azure sky.

Imperial myth number one: We are a nation of laws that apply equally to all citizens. But I have seven more:

We can bail out countries by loaning them money.

Printing money creates wealth (in the case of the U.S., it’s contributing to poverty).

Consumerism creates happiness (in the case of the contemporary American, consumerism has created resentment, frustration, and anger).

The Fed is primarily concerned about the citizens of this country. No comment necessary.

The two-party system actually presents a choice. Ditto.

Your home is a good financial investment. Ah, those were the days.

The recession has ended. Okay, that one’s not a myth. The recession is over, and the Greatest Depression is fully under way (aka the empire is in decline).

I’m sure I missed some. But any number can play (hint, hint).

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This essay is permalinked at Before It’s News, Island Breath, and Running ‘Cause I Can’t Fly.

When I discuss mitigation for ecological and economic collapse, I stress the crucial role of human community. And I’m not the only one: A few students with whom I am working this semester are focusing on how to communicate in community, with full awareness where we are and where we’re headed. They have developed a blog, and I encourage your participation as we struggle to find our way in a world turned inside out.

Louisville, Kentucky public library Tuesday, 28 September 2010

Audio file (special thanks to Nate Pederson for recording and archiving the presentation — may he attract the attention of the government as a result)

Powerpoint (pdf)

International Bioenergy Days 2010 presentation Monday, 27 September 2010

Powerpoint (pdf)