Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on October 13, 2016
An Afternoon in Early Autumn
I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term “deep time” for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It’s a useful label for an even more useful concept. In our lives, we deal with time in days, seasons, years, decades at most; decades, centuries and millennia provide the yardsticks by which the life cycles of human societies—that is to say, history, in the usual sense of that word—are traced.
Both these, the time frame of individual lives and the time frame of societies, are anthropocentric, as indeed they should be; lives and societies are human things and require a human measure. When that old bamboozler Protagoras insisted that “man is the measure of all things,” though, he uttered a subtle truth wrapped in a bald-faced lie.* The subtle truth is that since we are what we are—that is to say, social primates whow have learned a few interesting tricks—our capacity to understand the cosmos is strictly limited by the perceptions that human nervous systems are capable of processing and the notions that human minds are capable of thinking. The bald-faced lie is the claim that everything in the cosmos must fit inside the perceptions human beings can process and the notions they can think.
(*No, none of this has to do with gender politics. The Greek language, unlike modern English, had a common gender-nonspecific noun for “human being,” anthropos, which was distinct from andros, “man,” and gyne, “woman.” The word Protagoras used was anthropos.)
It took the birth of modern geology to tear through the veil of human time and reveal the stunningly inhuman scale of time that measures the great cycles of the planet on which we live. Last week’s post sketched out part of the process by which people in Europe and the European diaspora, once they got around to noticing that the Book of Genesis is about the Rock of Ages rather than the age of rocks, struggled to come to terms with the immensities that geological strata revealed. To my mind, that was the single most important discovery our civilization has made—a discovery with which we’re still trying to come to terms, with limited success so far, and one that I hope we can somehow manage to hand down to our descendants in the far future.
The thing that makes deep time difficult for many people to cope with is that it makes self-evident nonsense out of any claim that human beings have any uniquely important place in the history of the cosmos. That wouldn’t be a difficulty at all, except that the religious beliefs most commonly held in Europe and the European diaspora make exactly that claim.
That last point deserves some expansion here, not least because a minority among the current crop of “angry atheists” have made a great deal of rhetorical hay by insisting that all religions, across the board, point for point, are identical to whichever specific religion they themselves hate the most—usually, though not always, whatever Christian denomination they rebelled against in their adolescent years. That insistence is a fertile source of nonsense, and never so much as when it turns to the religious implications of time.
The conflict between science and religion over the age of the Earth is a purely Western phenomenon. Had the great geological discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries taken place in Japan, say, or India, the local religious authorities wouldn’t have turned a hair. On the one hand, most Asian religious traditions juggle million-year intervals as effortlessly as any modern cosmologist; on the other, Asian religious traditions have by and large avoided the dubious conviction, enshrined in most (though not all) versions of Christianity, that the Earth and everything upon it exists solely as a stage on which the drama of humanity’s fall and redemption plays out over a human-scaled interval of time. The expansive Hindu cosmos with its vast ever-repeating cycles of time, the Shinto concept of Great Nature as a continuum within which every category of being has its rightful place, and other non-Western worldviews offer plenty of room for modern geology to find a home.
Ironically, though, the ongoing decline of mainstream Christianity as a cultural influence in the Western world hasn’t done much to lessen the difficulty most people in the industrial world feel when faced with the abysses of deep time. The reason here is simply that the ersatz religion that’s taken the place of Christianity in the Western imagination also tries to impose a rigid ideological scheme not only on the ebb and flow of human history, but on the great cycles of the nonhuman cosmos as well. Yes, that would be the religion of progress—the faith-based conviction that human history is, or at least ought to be, a straight line extending onward and upward from the caves to the stars.
You might think, dear reader, that a belief system whose followers like to wallow in self-praise for their rejection of the seven-day creation scheme of the Book of Genesis and their embrace of deep time in the past would have a bit of a hard time evading its implications for the future. Let me assure you that this seems to give most of them no trouble at all. From Ray Kurzweil’s pop-culture mythology of the Singularity—a straightforward rewrite of Christian faith in the Second Coming dolled up in science-fiction drag—straight through to the earnest space-travel advocates who insist that we’ve got to be ready to abandon the solar system when the sun turns into a red giant four billion years from now, a near-total aversion to thinking about the realities deep time ahead of us is astonishingly prevalent among those who think they’ve grasped the vastness of Earth’s history.
I’ve come to think that one of the things that feeds this curious quirk of collective thinking is a bit of trivia to be found in a great many books on geology and the like—the metaphor that turns the Earth’s entire history into a single year, starting on January 1 with the planet’s formation out of clouds of interstellar dust and ending at midnight on December 31, which is always right now.
That metaphor has been rehashed more often than the average sitcom plot. A quick check of the books in the study where I’m writing this essay finds three different versions, one written in the 1960s, one in the 1980s, and one a little more than a decade ago. The dates of various events dance around the calendar a bit as new discoveries rewrite this or that detail of the planet’s history, to be sure; when I was a dinosaur-crazed seven-year-old, the Earth was only three and a half billion years old and the dinosaurs died out seventy million years ago, while the latest research I know of revises those dates to 4.6 billion years and 65 million years respectively, moving the date of the end-Cretaceous extinction from December 24 to December 26—in either case, a wretched Christmas present for small boys. Such details aside, the basic metaphor remains all but unchanged.
There’s only one problem with it, but it’s a whopper. Ask yourself this: what has gotten left out of that otherwise helpful metaphor? The answer, of course, is the future.
Let’s imagine, by contrast, a metaphor that maps the entire history of life on earth, from the first living thing on this planet to the last, onto a single year. We don’t know exactly when life will go extinct on this planet, but then we don’t know exactly when it emerged, either; the most recent estimate I know of puts the origin of terrestrial life somewhere a little more than 3.7 billion years ago, and the point at which the sun’s increasing heat will finally sterilize the planet somewhere a little more than 1.2 billion years from now. Adding in a bit of rounding error, we can set the lifespan of our planetary biosphere at a nice round five billion years. On that scale, a month of thirty days is 411 million years, a single day is 13.7 million years, an hour is around 571,000 years, a minute is around 9514 years, and a second is 158 years and change. Our genus, Homo,* evolved maybe two hours ago, and all of recorded human history so far has taken up a little less than 32 seconds.
(*Another gender-nonspecific word for “human being,” this one comes from Latin, and is equally distinct from vir, “man,” and femina, “woman.” English really does need to get its act together.)
That all corresponds closely to the standard metaphor. The difference comes in when you glance at the calendar and find out that the present moment in time falls not on December 31 or any other similarly momentous date, but on an ordinary, undistinguished day—by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would be September 26.
I like to imagine our time, along these lines, as an instant during an early autumn afternoon in the great year of Earth’s biosphere. Like many another late September day, it’s becoming uncomfortably hot, and billowing dark clouds stand on the horizon, heralds of an oncoming storm. We human mayflies, with a lifespan averaging maybe half a second, dart here and there, busy with our momentary occupations; a few of us now and then lift our gaze from our own affairs and try to imagine the cold bare fields of early spring, the sultry air of summer evenings, or the rigors of a late autumn none of us will ever see.
With that in mind, let’s put some other dates onto the calendar. While life began on January 1, multicellular life didn’t get started until sometime in the middle of August—for almost two-thirds of the history of life, Earth was a planet of bacteria and blue-green algae, and in terms of total biomass, it arguably still is. The first primitive plants and invertebrate animals ventured onto the land around August 25; the terrible end-Permian extinction crisis, the worst the planet has yet experienced, hit on September 8; the dinosaurs perished in the small hours of September 22, and the last ice age ended just over a minute ago, having taken place over some twelve and a half minutes.
Now let’s turn and look in the other direction. The last ice age was part of a glacial era that began a little less than two hours ago and can be expected to continue through the morning of the 27th—on our time scale, they happen every two and a half weeks or so, and the intervals between them are warm periods when the Earth is a jungle planet and glaciers don’t exist. Our current idiotic habit of treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer will disrupt that cycle for only a very short time; our ability to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will end in less than a second as readily accessible fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, and it will take rather less than a minute thereafter for natural processes to scrub the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and return the planet’s climate to its normal instability.
Certain other consequences of our brief moment of absurd extravagance will last longer. On our timescale, the process of radioactive decay will take around half an hour (that is to say, a quarter million years or so) to reduce high-level nuclear waste all the way to harmlessness. It will take an interval of something like the same order of magnitude before all the dead satellites in high orbits have succumbed to the complex processes that will send them to a fiery fate in Earth’s atmosphere, and quite possibly longer for the constant rain of small meteorites onto the lunar surface to pound the Apollo landers and other space junk there to unrecognizable fragments. Given a few hours of the biosphere’s great year, though, everything we are and everything we’ve done will be long gone.
Beyond that, the great timekeeper of Earth’s biosphere is the Sun. Stars increase in their output of heat over most of their life cycle, and the Sun is no exception. The single-celled chemosynthetic organisms that crept out of undersea hot springs in February or March of the great year encountered a frozen world, lit by a pale white Sun whose rays gave far less heat than today; the oldest currently known ice age, the Cryogenian glaciation of the late Precambrian period, was apparently cold enough to freeze the oceans solid and wrap most of the planet in ice. By contrast, toward the middle of November in the distant Neozoic Era, the Sun will be warmer and yellower than it is today, and glacial eras will likely involve little more than the appearance of snow on a few high mountains normally covered in jungle.
Thus the Earth will gradually warm through October and November. Temperatures will cycle up and down with the normal cycles of planetary climate, but each warm period will tend to be a little warmer than the last, and each cold period a little less frigid. Come December, most of a billion years from now, as the heat climbs past one threshold after another, more and more of the Earth’s water will evaporate and, as dissociated oxygen and hydrogen atoms, boil off into space; the Earth will become a desert world, with life clinging to existence at the poles and in fissures deep underground, until finally the last salt-crusted seas run dry and the last living things die out.
And humanity? The average large vertebrate genus lasts something like ten million years—in our scale, something over seventeen hours. As already noted, our genus has only been around for about two hours so far, so it’s statistically likely that we still have a good long run ahead of us. I’ve discussed in these essays several times already the hard physical facts that argue that we aren’t going to go to the stars, or even settle other planets in this solar system, but that’s nothing we have to worry about. Even if we have an improbably long period of human existence ahead of us—say, the fifty million years that bats of the modern type have been around, some three and a half days in our scale, or ten thousand times the length of all recorded human history to date—the Earth will be burgeoning with living things, and perfectly capable of supporting not only intelligent life but rich, complex, unimaginably diverse civilizations, long after we’ve all settled down to our new careers as fossils.
This does not mean, of course, that the Earth will be capable of supporting the kind of civilization we have today. It’s arguably not capable of supporting that kind of civilization now. Certainly the direct and indirect consequences of trying to maintain the civilization we’ve got, even for the short time we’ve made that attempt so far, are setting off chains of consequences that don’t seem likely to leave much of it standing for long. That doesn’t mean we’re headed back to the caves, or for that matter, back to the Middle Ages—these being the two bogeymen that believers in progress like to use when they’re trying to insist that we have no alternative but to keep on stumbling blindly ahead on our current trajectory, no matter what.
What it means, instead, is that we’re headed toward something that’s different—genuinely, thoroughly, drastically different. It won’t just be different from what we have now; it’ll also be different from the rigidly straight-line extrapolations and deus ex machina fauxpocalypses that people in industrial society like to use to keep from thinking about the future we’re making for ourselves. Off beyond the dreary Star Trek fantasy of metastasizing across the galaxy, and the equally hackneyed Mad Max fantasy of pseudomedieval savagery, lies the astonishing diversity of the future before us: a future potentially many orders of magnitude longer than all of recorded history to date, in which human beings will live their lives and understand the world in ways we can’t even imagine today.
It’s tolerably common, when points like the one I’ve tried to make here get raised at all, for people to insist that paying attention to the ultimate fate of the Earth and of our species is a recipe for suicidal depression or the like. With all due respect, that claim seems silly to me. Each one of us, as we get out of bed in the morning, realizes at some level that the day just beginning will bring us one step closer to old age and death, and yet most of us deal with that reality without too much angst.
In the same way, I’d like to suggest that it’s past time for the inmates of modern industrial civilization to grow up, sprout some gonads—either kind, take your pick—and deal with the simple, necessary, and healthy realization that our species is not going to be around forever. Just as maturity in the individual arrives when it sinks in that human life is finite, collective maturity may just wait for a similar realization concerning the life of the species. That kind of maturity would be a valuable asset just now, not least because it might help us grasp some of the extraordinary possibilities that will open up as industrial civilization finishes its one-way trip down the chute marked “decline and fall” and the deindustrial future ahead of us begins to take shape.
The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer
36 Comments on "An Afternoon in Early Autumn"
makati1 on Thu, 13th Oct 2016 6:55 pm
Very nice time line! Kinda puts humans in their place. An eye-blink in the history of the planet. lol
Still, he is a bit “hopey/feely” with his insistence that when the SHTF we will only regress a few hundred years. Does he even consider climate change or the 400+ nuke plants that will go rogue? Or the currently high odds of a nuclear war? Nope! Just an economic/energy loss and less of the same. And an unrealistic hope that humans will wake up and change. I guess even druids cannot face the real negative possibilities.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 2:26 am
For German speakers a German talk show broadcast yesterday night about the all-western phenomena of the “populists”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEHskuQZNz8
They globalist system parties are in panic mode about the frontal attack against the, let’s call them, “1968 generation”. Key to the success of the populists will be what will happen in the US in less than a month time.
GregT on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 2:39 am
Even as an anti-globalist, you can still become a registered member cloggie.
GregT on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 2:49 am
Sorry,
Registered member here, on PO.com.
Anonymous on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 3:03 am
Your blind faith in the trumpster is puzzling. Yes, hes a loose canon, and has an even looser mouth. No, the ‘banker’ class does not want him on the ‘inside’ potentially throwing their well-rehearsed schemes in possible dis-array.
None of this means the ‘donald’, should he win, will deliver us from the NWO. You know full well the uS ‘president’ is a figurehead, a puppet. Why you expect miracles from him is beyond me. Unless you are just trolling or a shill. Just because every 1%er and their tools are lining up against him, is not a measure of whether they ‘fear’ him or not.
The repub insiders failed to deliver on their end of the bargain, to field a candidate that was meant to lose. Don threw that script into the dumpster, and they are mad as hell about that. Sanders stepped aside, even after he learned she rigged the game against him from the start. The repubs were SUPPOSED to step aside, but got blindsided when trumpy thought it would be ‘cool’ to be called ‘mr president’ for a few years. Notice how the ever malleable uS ‘free-press’ is going on non-stop about where the donalds tongue has been, and saying exactly nothing about Shillary rigging the dem primary.
They just want the already chosen one to assume the throne, to put her rubber stamp on 8 more years of war, chaos and upwards transfer of wealth. The ‘don’ could well be trained to do the same for them, but, hes just too impulsive and unpredictable. But i’m pretty the thing, no one in Tel Aviv, Jew York, or anyone at the CIA or pentagon is, is afraid of him, or what he might ‘do’.
makati1 on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 4:13 am
Anon, you are sure about that? Maybe…
“… These folks need to finally admit to themselves that they were half right; the globalists would not allow the passage of the Brexit, UNLESS, a successful Brexit actually works in their favor. … I continue to hold to the position I always have — that Donald Trump is going to be ALLOWED into the White House, and that this will be a prelude to economic crisis. The stage is being set for a grand finale to our ongoing financial collapse. The great villain behind the whole disaster will be revealed, and we will be told that the villain is us.”
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/3034-global-elites-are-getting-ready-to-blame-you-for-the-coming-financial-crash
It is a very complicated and intricately interwoven world out there. Do we REALLY know what is going on behind the curtain? I doubt it.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 4:57 am
Your blind faith in the trumpster is puzzling. Yes, hes a loose canon, and has an even looser mouth. No, the ‘banker’ class does not want him on the ‘inside’ potentially throwing their well-rehearsed schemes in possible dis-array.
For me it is enough to observe who his enemies are, notably the [cough] ‘bankers’, in order to support him.
For starters there isn’t anybody else.
None of this means the ‘donald’, should he win, will deliver us from the NWO. You know full well the uS ‘president’ is a figurehead, a puppet.
Yes true, but all the signs are that Donald “I don;t need your money” Trump will refuse to be BAU puppet. Why do you think the media and political landscape is in a state of panic, both in the US and in Europe? Why do you think that our resident NWO trash [ghung, Friday and boat] are fighting tooth and nail against Trump?
Trump’s program:
– peace with Russia (US, EU and Russia are together invincible)
– building a nice wall at the Mexican border to halt further decline of European America
– halting the handing over of US industry to China
– declared political correctness (“Jewish sharia”) dead
– Trump demands military burden-sharing with Europe
Don’t expect anything from Trump on the climate/fossil fuel front; doesn’t matter, leave that to Europeans (and Texans.lol).
What Trump wants goes entirely against the logic of the NWO: that is a world without borders and completely mixed races, with nominally a UN government, but in reality owned by the “sanhedrin” (“Soros types”).
If he succeeds is another matter, but it is obvious that he is going to try, with the full backing of the “American commoner”.
I am judging it all from a European right-wing perspective. Four Trump years would offer the opportunity for Europe to rearm, with the explicit purpose to create the option to eventually intervene in North-America if all interracial hell will break loose, probably after or even during a Trump presidency.
Germany announced they finally want a European army, if necessary outside of the EU if Britain keeps blocking it. Currently Europe spends half of what the EU spends. There is a chance that the US and EU will agree on 50/50, so Trump can release funds for highly urgent infrastructure projects.
Russia has shown that the seemingly unstoppable decline of the Europeans can be reversed by promoting conservative values, gender roles, pushing back gay culture, promoting family values. We in Europe and eventually in America can do that too.
A Trump presidency will offer the opportunity to Europeans to finally escape from the US empire (without making an enemy of America) and organize an overthrow of the 1968 political class in western Europe 1989-style. A (potentially violent) revolution is brewing everywhere in Europe. Eastern Europe is already liberated as it was never colonized by the sanhedrin in the first place.
Trump could play exactly the same role Gorbachev played in Eastern Europe, when the latter signaled that the old communist-globalist ways were over and essentially opened the door for the Eastern Europeans to escape from the USSR empire.
The European Right wants to open up to Russia, just like Trump. Putin has for years proposed a Paris-Berlin-Moscow confederation, but the US has instructed its satraps in Europe that’s a no-no. Many Europeans are very uneasy with this “ever closer union” idea of the EU (EUSSR) and would gladly see it replaced with a lighter version of cooperation (the Gaullist “Europe of the Fatherlands”), a confederation of highly independent, sovereign states, who cooperate on a limited number of fields (military, space program, energy, etc.), with its main (unoutspoken) purpose to keep the rising Chinese colossus in check.
But i’m pretty the thing, no one in Tel Aviv, Jew York, or anyone at the CIA or pentagon is, is afraid of him, or what he might ‘do’.
Why are these kosher types than all in a state of panic? Even “forum hero” Cuntler suggests that Trump should be killed by the “deep state”. No, I am pretty sure that Trump sees Putin as his great example and that he would love to smash the um… oligarchs. Yeah, that’s it: oligarchs.
And Trump has 190 million fire arms to back him up. And potentially 640 million from PBM.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CVoL5CyXAAAiKRA.jpg:large
Let’s have it. The revolution succeeded in Russia, thanks to Putin. Time to reverse 1945, the kosher victory over European man.
The new home of European America: the Missisipi River basin:
http://tinyurl.com/ho93dbe
When the revolution has succeeded we’ll have four great European people’s: Germans, French, Russians… and the Amerikaner, united in a “Commonwealth”…
http://www.directupload.net/file/d/4486/8rrlwfhb_jpg
…and military alliance of ca 800 million, in “Samuel Huntingtonian world”. That’s enough to keep China of 1400 million and 1.5 billion Muslims at a distance.
That’s the program, that’s the vision.
If you have a better, more constructive, non-nihilistic, non-hand-wringing, non-we-are-all-going-to-die program, then speak up.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 6:01 am
Trump’s programs may change this brittle and atrophied world. Presidents have talked big before then amounted to nothing. Obama is a case in point. I hope the peace with Russia would be the top of either candidates list. Unfortunately Clinton will make the situation worse. I am not sure about Trump but I am hopeful. In a deflating localizing world we are likely entering soon reduced tensions are vital for positive change in a negative decline. We will likely not see any more 20th century grand alliances. There is no decoupling from Asia for globalism and the alternative to globalism is a collapse process. There might be a transition period in the collapse process of alliance forming in the last grab or “gasp” of national efforts to maintain the unmaintainable. Clog’s Europe, Russia, and US alliance against Asia sounds like a fictional story.
Trump’s wall really should be two walls one at the southern end of Mexico and one on the border with the US. In any case walls and globalism don’t mix. Globalism is about free movement of peoples and goods. Walls are expensive and carry moral hazard. Walls don’t work well against determined people. I would like to see beefed up border arrangements of some kind. Employers need an abstract wall to their efforts to capitalize on cheap labor. I am not anti-immigrant but I am a doomer concerned about carrying capacity. When SHTF we don’t want to be an Asia in overshoot from a grotesque carrying capacity breach. I have no problem with whoever is here. This is a country of immigration good or bad but the future of a nation state is not immigration in a vastly overpopulated world in collapse mode. Globalism is dying and with it the US economy. I suspect immigrants will not be welcomed into a country falling apart socially and economically. That will likely in the end stop immigration. If people are already hungry we will not be asking for more mouths to feed.
The possible trade wars with Asia should be interesting in a globalized world. It will hasten economic decay and deflation that is already visiting globalism now. Asia and the US are intertwined economically such that little can be done to change this without dangerous dislocations. I see nothing good for the status quo with trade wars. I am happy for trade wars though. I see what appears to be a collapse coming. I believe in the positives of localism and declining affluence of stoic and spartan living of our ancestors. Ending globalism in a more moderate way is preferable to a hard sudden collapse and Trump trade wars will likely hasten this process. We can adjust and find time to make other arrangements in a declining world not so much in a world in cascading collapse. This Trump policy is not going to make America great again and it won’t be bringing back high paying jobs. Those are dying in the US and Asia alike. Many of you on this board are part of this process all you cubical dwellers, pensioners, mom’s basement trolls alike. I am part of this. I am farming in the status quo and soon it will be postmodern farming. That is a greatly different occupation made for young men not old ones like me. A greatly reduced job world in a world of decline with a population in a die off is likely the future. Reality is pointing there it is just that the human narrative has not caught up to reality.
Political correctness and equal rights will evaporate in the decline and destructive change of collapse. This will not happen completely but it will happen in efficiency and necessity. Women will be back in the house and men in the fields so to speak. Our current arrangements are energy intensive and a product of complexity. That is ending so arrangements will coalesce that support survival. Women as sex objects will end. Men with toys and weekends of fun will end. The hard tough slog of survival will demand the best of both sexes where they naturally gravitate. So much of modern life is fat that will be pared from the bone. Political correctness is a product of fat, intellectually lazy elites that are bored because of affluence. The hard tough life of collapse will end this quickly and decisively.
Trumps policies may shake up the military world. The word is “may”. The generals the world over are in charge in the end. When shit hits the fan it is the armies that will run things. Leaders will become generals or be relegated to figure heads. Trumps foreign policy may initiate detente with Russia and diminish or end the NATO pig trough. The Asian alliances may likewise be reduced or eliminated. This is a multipolar world but it still is a dangerous world. This process should proceed slowly or a dangerous vacuum with missteps might initiate WWIII. NUK war is MAD that is clear. It is clearly the case that the military world must reshape because it is currently dysfunctional. It is a product of globalism with all the fancy toys and power projections. This is not realistic in a collapsing world where localism and declining affluence will dictate the terms of war.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 6:09 am
“Is It Safe To Travel In Europe?”
http://www.acting-man.com/blog/media/2016/10/safe-holiday-destinations-europe-2016.jpg
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 6:29 am
I wish that the real terrorist threat in Europe was at least 10 times as high as it really is.
“To get things moving”.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 7:13 am
Another Republican donor has withdrawn support for Trump, the Khazar Bruce Kovner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Kovner
This for those people who still think that Trump is BAU and can be controlled by the sanhedrin.
He won’t. His former donor knows meanwhile better.
onlooker on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 7:57 am
“If you have a better, more constructive, non-nihilistic, non-hand-wringing, non-we-are-all-going-to-die program, then speak up.” Good luck with your alliances kumbaya. The whole Economic Globalization Trade edifice is beginning to break up and will continue to do so at an accelerated pace. Then it will be either thy War as in nuclear or nations will sink or swim and social order will fluctuate between extreme dictatorial in some places to hardly any in others
makati1 on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 8:17 am
Does anyone else here believe that Cloggie is senile? Perhaps living in another world? He certainly does not live in this one.
onlooker on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 8:31 am
He is just one of many who is still attached to the Old world and cannot confront the Brave New World we exist in now.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 8:31 am
Makati he is less senile then you are dumbass.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 8:36 am
What is really senile is that you think that history will end will you watch the world go under from a comfortable stretcher on a Philippines beach with a glass of mango juice, while gently passing away. Now that’s solipsism.
You should be worried not to end up in a Chinese concentration camp when the Ps come in cross hairs of the coming US-Chinese standoff over the South China Sea and occupied by the Chinese to prevent the Ps being used by the US as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in order to bombard mainland China.
A Chinese occupation will mean this for you and Americans in general (Luzon):
http://tinyurl.com/jolv76f
1942 revisited.
(Swap Japanese for Chinese)
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 8:55 am
Goh, Davy, I never figured you for a Breitbart Boy. Knowing that the current paradigm is becoming more of an unworkable narrative, and promoting its demise, are two different things. These people want to tear everything down and fill the void with nothing that thinking proactive people would subscribe to. Anger and ignorance is the greater evil as contraction/collapse proceed. Followers of Steve Bannon and his boy Trump prefer to burn everything down. Plenty of very unpleasant examples of that in our history; lazy ignorant cowards following Pied Pipers to the demise of anything worth preserving.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 9:20 am
Yea, ghung, and you? I am the same as you choosing between two bad choices with your Clinton leaning. It’s called a catch 22. The difference is I am not labeling you as you me. Keep your labels to your own battles. Wasn’t it you who in the past chastised me over my battles with Makati and now you are doing the same thing with cloggie. I have high respect for you but if you are going to spit I spit back.
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 9:57 am
Firstly, my dealings with Cloggie are merely standing my ground against his lies about me and others. There’s a difference.
Secondly, I haven’t expressed any support for Clinton other than to say I consider her the less insane of our two primary choices.
Thirdly, anyone who can even consider supporting Trump is supporting chaos, promotional ignorance, violence against others, and an utterly hate-filled campaign based on lies. His handlers at Breitbart have even admitted that their goals are agenda-driven even if the truth is the victim; the end justifies the means. I see absolutely nothing that qualifies Trump to be president, and almost everything that disqualifies, especially his utter lack of knowledge of just about everything except his underhanded business dealings. He will surround himself with manipulators bent on bringing this country down. He already has.
I have grand-daughters and grand-sons. You? I’m working hard to show them a way forward. I also live in an area with a significant number of people who aren’t interested in reason, and a Trump presidency will encourage them to take what they want, when they want it, while inventing reasons to do so.
In short, I haven’t seen Clinton dehumanising people the way Trump does with such delight. I’ve heard him use the word HATE many times. The people who surround him promote HATE. The last thing we need to do is endorse more hate, or even excuse it.
I may not vote on the presidential ballot, but am absolutely opposed to Trump and his ilk.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 10:37 am
Thirdly, anyone who can even consider supporting Trump is supporting chaos, promotional ignorance, violence against others, and an utterly hate-filled campaign based on lies.
Violence against whom? Trump promotes peace with Russia where the sea hag will maneuver us all into WW3.
Trump is his own man, where Clinton represents her Wall Street backers who want the entire world.
You’re not going to admit it openly, but you will not refuse anyone who knocks on the gates of America (anything else would be “hate” right, the new commie battle cry), but in reality you create a society of conflicting ethnicities that sooner or later will explode. A Yugoslavia, Iraq or Syria scenario isn’t very far off for America. That’s the secret fear of the folks frequenting the huge Trump rallies. And that fear won’t go away and can be expected to grow until the ignition point has been reached.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 10:45 am
I am not supporting Trump. I am not voting. My musing on the election is my reaction to how I see a collapse process benefit. I am not advocating him.
Your descriptions of your cloggie feud are no different than mine with Makati and others just you feel somehow above this behavior but engaged in it. We have labels for that.
Come on Ghung, Clinton is better at dehumanizing people. She does it the smart way in secret and undercover. Clinton embodies hate. She is worse than Trump because she has the power of the corrupt establishment behind her. She has paid everyone off. Her bed is made if she gets in. Apparently corruption is less an evil then being a trump idiot. Idiots aren’t as dangerous as career criminals which Clinton is. The establishment behind Clinton is a danger to the world. Golly that is a good example for the kids.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 11:00 am
I am supporting Trump (verbally, the only way open for me) ***wholeheartedly*** as the only way to stave off disaster.
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 11:17 am
Cloggie said, above; “For me it is enough to observe who his enemies are…”
Gosh Clog, let’s make a list of people he’s alienated/made enemies of, right here in America:
Women who don’t have perfect bodies
Women over the age of 35
Women who reject his unwanted advances
Latinos and immigrants
Most of black America
Asian Americans
One of the world’s largest religions
Anyone who calls out his lies
The environment
Anyone who feels we need sensible regulations
Anyone who now has healthcare coverage due to the ACA
All Democrats
A big chunk of the Republican party who nominated him, including the very people he’ll need to work with in order to accomplish his stated agendas
The top-tier military leaders who he expects to be Commander-in-Chief of
The many people he has stiffed in his own under-handed business failures while padding his own pockets
The people he ripped off with his Trump University scheme
Christians who actually hold the Ten Commandments and the idea of Cardinal Sins sacred
Many religious leaders
Mexico
Civil liberties and the Constitution
The truth is his greatest enemy.
I could go on, but it’s clear he’s either too arrogant or too stupid to realise that you can’t badmouth a large collective majority of people in your own country and expect to lead them.
You ask: “Violence against whom? Trump promotes peace with Russia where the sea hag will manoeuvre us all into WW3.”
I guessed you missed the part where he said (more than once) “.. I’ll just bomb the crap out of them.” Further, you seem to relish the idea of WW3, according to many of your posts. You also like to forward the idea of an invasion of the US by EU/Russian forces. You want to talk about Trump being a fucking “peace maker”? Pretty bizarre, that.
“Trump is his own man..”?! The guy is a juvenile arrogant spoiled child who attracts juvenile simpletons who don’t want to do the hard work of considering complex issues for what they are. He mis-characterises anything and anyone that doesn’t fit into his false agenda, just as you do, and is now totally controlled by people who have no interest in solving anything.
Good news? He’s losing.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 11:45 am
Yea, Ghung, I fully agree with your list above and I am disgusted by it. Yet, read this and think long and hard on who is a greater danger. I would also include the likelihood Clinton will take here revenge out on Putin with more dangerous political and military escalations:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-14/wall-street-journal-blasts-press-consistently-buries-hillary-clintons-sins
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:00 pm
Good, if Trump has so many enemies as you say he has, why bother even attacking him as he is going to lose anyway?
“I’ll just bomb the crap out of them”
That was about IS, not Russia. Yawn.
“Further, you seem to relish the idea of WW3, according to many of your posts.”
Absolutely not, but if we are going to have it anyway, than let’s get on with it. WW3 won’t be initiated by Russia, China, let alone Europe. America will start it and price the price for it: dissolution.
“You also like to forward the idea of an invasion of the US by EU/Russian forces.”
Only as an intervention, if the US descends into large scale interracial violence, which is going to happen anyway, sooner or later.
““Trump is his own man..”?! The guy is a juvenile arrogant spoiled child”
Wrong, he is a juvenile arrogant spoiled billionaire, a subtle difference.
“and is now totally controlled by people who have no interest in solving anything.”
Names? Links?
“Good news? He’s losing.”
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:11 pm
Yeah, Davy, though it may be an awful choice, I have to consider that Trump bases his world-view on arrogance, anger, self-interest, and exploitation. He clearly bases his decisions on emotion and ego.
As deeply flawed as Clinton is, she has a long history of demonstrated of compassion for others, at least on some levels, and bases her decisions on intellect, and at least with some sense of inclusion.
One shoots from the hip, and one takes careful aim, even if both are ultimately self-serving. One has a poor record of considering consequences, and, IMO, the other at least attempts to weigh consequences. Those are the qualities I’m considering. One seems to learn nothing from his failures other than how to avoid accountability. The other is forced to weigh accountability against political expediency because that’s the world she chooses to live in.
I’ve often said that the office of President requires a certain level of “corruption” due to the nature of our processes and electorate, but one of these candidates is clearly corrupt by his very nature, and the other is corrupt largely out of necessity.
Take your pick.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:13 pm
“Only as an intervention, if the US descends into large scale interracial violence, which is going to happen anyway, sooner or later.”
Cloggie, the US may not be the last man standing in this collapse process. I would put my money on Putin’s Russia over the US primarily because leadership matters and ours is gone. Yet, Europe will be likely be the first to descend into mayhem and you can’t see it. You are blind to what is right outside your door.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:21 pm
As deeply flawed as Clinton is, she has a long history of demonstrated of compassion for others
Let’s concentrate on an example of this ‘compassion for others’. Currently 500k people were killed in Syria and counting.
The war was entirely instigated by Obama and Clinton (on orders of the sanhedrin), as the latest wikileaks revelations prove beyond any doubt. Not that it is a real surprise for ME watchers, but there are always those who prefer to deny it:
http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/wikileaks-confirms-hillary-sold-weapons-isis-drops-another-bombshell-breaking-news/
She is The Hague International Court of Justice material. As Trumps says, she belongs in jail. The fat pig is an absolute psychopath. You can go f* yourself with her compassion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmIRYvJQeHM
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:28 pm
OK, Ghung, you make an excellent point except this is more than two people. This is an establishment that is a danger to the US and the world. Clinton is their champion. It is possible Trump will be sucked up into that cesspool but that is an unknown. Clinton is a known. The establishment is a known. The establishment is getting particularly dangerous because it is no longer covert about corruption. It is getting to the point of overt corruption. That is the last stage of a society’s consumption by corruption. We are nearly gone as a country and Clinton will be the end. It is likely over anyway so maybe you are right let the process run its course with someone politically correct and psychopathically smart and at least on the surface compassionate (if you don’t cross her) For me Clinton is evil and embodies the evil of an evil system. Evil here is not religious it is existential. It is about the mechanization of a thoroughly nasty regime and the lies and apathy that come from the destruction of the truth.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:35 pm
Yet, Europe will be likely be the first to descend into mayhem
Yes, in limited areas, because Europeans have a stronger sense of national identity and hence are more “racist” than Americans.
Mayhem? The sooner the better, bring it on all these terrorist attacks. But over all the demographic balance in Europe is still much better than in the US. Europe is still whiter than America has ever been in its entire history (on average). Eastern Europe is still 100% white. A civil war, likely to begin in France, will be over much sooner than in the US. The Serbs for instance had entire Kosovo ethnically cleansed in less than 48 hours, until the USAF intervened, as always on the side of the Muslims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5Dc9P-W_Yo
The disaster was a direct consequence of shifting demographics, Muslims out-bred Serbs and demanded independence.
Mind your, the refugees shown in the video were ethnically just as Slavic as their Serb opponents, very difficult to discern from looks. The difference was religion: Orthodox vs Muslim.
Good luck with keeping America together, Europeans, Africans and Latino’s. Preposterous idea.
As Pat Buchanan suggested: 2025 max., Trump or no Trump. Trump can merely postpone the inevitable.
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:41 pm
Cloggo said “The war was entirely instigated by Obama and Clinton…”
The war is an artefact of Bush/Cheney policies and neocon lies. Clinton didn’t create ISIS. Further, if you truly believe that 9/11 was a “false flag” conspiracy, as you have repeatedly stated, how can you blame Clinton for that, and the following consequences? Idiotic and dishonest.
Ghung on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 12:49 pm
Right, Davy, if the things you say about Clinton are true, do you really think throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks will have a snowball’s chance in hell of fixing it? Trump? Really? Do you think his nationalist minions and their protectionist stances will fix it? History says otherwise. Nazi Germany? Japan? Italy? North Korea? ….
This ain’t no party. It ain’t no disco. And it certainly ain’t one of Donald Trump’s businesses.
Hawkcreek on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 1:18 pm
All this from “An Afternoon in Early Autumn”?
It seems the elite have the peons doing just what they want – fighting one another, rather than trying to bell the cat.
Face it – both sides of the uni-party suck. They both need to be totally destroyed.
Davy on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 1:22 pm
Ghung, I don’t know and you don’t know who will be worse. Watch “House of Cards” Art is reflecting reality perfectly with our election. Clinton likely has this thing sewed up anyway. We are just arguing about spilled milk. Your logic is no better than mine because both candidates are that bad. Both parties are that bad. Finally we are no longer a nation with a functioning constitution. I will be glad when this shit is over so we can get on with our death row existance. This is not going to end well and I look far to discussing our end game with a known element of terror.
Cloggie on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 2:47 pm
The war is an artefact of Bush/Cheney policies and neocon lies. Clinton didn’t create ISIS.
Bush & Cheney & Clinton don’t “have” policies, they carry them out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Civil_War
The Syrian war began March 15, 2011. ISIS didn’t exist before that date in the western public mind. Between 2009 and 2013, Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. I have to admit that ISIS did indeed exist before the war (new for me), but it was propped up and made big by Washington on Clinton’s watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant
neocon lies
Now you’re talking. You are smart enough to understand what a “neocon” is. Your 1941-Lithuanians understood it also very well, after they were paid a visit by Stalin and couldn’t help noticing that all these nice kosher neighbors enthusiastically collaborated with the invaders and betrayed those Lithuanians who didn’t like the new invader very much.
Further, if you truly believe that 9/11 was a “false flag” conspiracy, as you have repeatedly stated, how can you blame Clinton for that, and the following consequences? Idiotic and dishonest.
I never blamed Clinton for 9/11, not even Bush. The conspirators were:
Mastermind: Dov Zakheim (remote control idea & link between Israeli and US-politics)
Israeli government: Olmert & Netanjahu (commanding Mossad).
US government: Cheney; gentile #1 in US-politics; dominates US-government including Bush. Cheney’s role is to convert the 9/11 event into making sure the US invades Iraq & Afghanistan. Cheney is well aware of the impending oil shortages (peakoil) and wants to secure the 60% of the world’s oil reserves, located in the Middle East, for the USA. Here is where American interests go hand in hand with Israeli interests as formulated in the Clean Brake document.
Operative level:
– Silverstein: leasing WTC & hiring Israeli security firm Kroll.
– Jules & Jeremy Kroll: security firm WTC, make sure Israeli demolition team has access to WTC and can work undisturbed.
– Giuliani: WTC7 command & control center; handles aftermath ‘on the ground’ in NY.
lower echelon:
– Atzmon: asked by Olmert to handle 9/11 at departure airports.
– Hauer: works for Kroll and ‘does the media’ on 9/11.
These are the only people, not counting Mossad agents, who do not need to know the big picture… just plant demolitions charges, kill a few Arabs, take some flying courses to plant a trail and make some fake phone calls on 9/11 and you’re good
onlooker on Fri, 14th Oct 2016 4:46 pm
911 is nothing less than the master stroke of the declining West and it’s financial hegemons to maintain they’re grip on power and privileges and even advance plans to create a NWO. So the masterminds are the Banking/Royalty/Vatican and related select few families behind the scenes who wield enormous power via vast financial resources