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The End Of The World? It’s All In Your Head.

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on July 3, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Saturday, July 3rd, 2010

Yeah, yeah. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, yadda yadda. Maybe all this recent eschatology is actually just taurine scatology.


Is the end of the world near?
Probably not, but talking about it
sure sells a lot of books and DVD’s

Okay, western civilization. You had your shot, and the best you could muster was Lady Gaga, Glenn Beck, mortgage derivatives, and American Idol. So when the hell are you going to end like any other self-respecting civilization? Well, pretty soon, according to the seemingly intelligent people who’ve posted 18 pages of immensely detailed commentary on sites like this. And also according to seemingly intelligent people like Michael Ruppert, former LAPD officer, writer, and founder/editor of From The Wilderness , the popular newsletter and website devoted to investigating political cover-ups and peak oil issues. I recently watched the film Collapse, which is essentially an 80-minute monologue delivered by Ruppert in an Errol Morris-like documentary style. Ruppert is an intelligent and articulate guy, and has clearly done his research. And he’s convinced the end is near. I can actually recommend the film; it’s definitely thought-provoking. But as I watched it, a line of thought kept occurring to me. People like Ruppert present a pretty good case for our impending demise, but why are they so fixated on this simplistic outcome? Why such apocalyptic alarmism? I personally don’t think we can use historic models to predict even our immediate future; this is an unparalleled period in human development simply because of population density, mobility, and rapid information exchange that just makes things less predictable across the board. So why do people ranging from a respected scientist like Frank Fenner, who says the human race will be extinct in 100 years to collapsitarians like Ruppert, to borderline nutjob survivalists like the American Preppers Network all think we’re doomed? If you don’t feel like taking the plunge, at least skim The Psychology of Apocalypticism, a lengthy exploration of the topic from a “psychohistoric” point of view. It mostly frames the topic in terms of how religion has shaped our culture, but doesn’t explore two psychological angles I think are pertinent when exploring the “psychology of the apocalypse”. One being the simple anxiety aroused by realizing we may have to change our way of life, and the other being an unconcious collective guilt for how good we’ve had it in the west while so many around the world suffer. And let’s not forget that according to Oxfam, natural disasters actually have increased six-fold since 1980. Oh crap. Maybe the end IS near. Read the rest of this entry »

Just What IS The G20, And Who Is Protesting It?

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on June 28, 2010 by admin in Politics

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel last weekend, the protesters mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. And is the G20 creating the new world order? Maybe.


Whatever the G20 is up to, it gets their fans
more excited than Detroit Tiger fans in 1984

If you don’t feel like you have a clear idea of what the Group of Twenty really is, you’re not alone. More than half the people randomly surveyed on the streets of New York recently had no idea either. Is it a luxury car? A high-powered handgun? A French supermarket chain? A group of avant-garde Belgian artists? While the answers to all those questions are “yes”, we’re talking about the G20 that met in Toronto over the weekend. And the answer to what that G20 is is a little more complicated. If you’re a little more on the paranoid side, you’re probably convinced that it’s the public face of the mysterious Bilderberg Group, and that it’s an evil cabal engineering the demise of the US Dollar and planning a global currency so that its members (essentially bankers and multibillionaires) can take control of the global economy, and thereby have secret control of all the nations of the world. And who knows; you may be right. In spite of the Group of Twenty’s wall-to-wall media coverage, we still mostly only hear about how much their meetings are being protested, not what they’re actually planning. I personally don’t get a warm tingly feeling about the organization; if you look at the member list, you’ll note that the US representatives are two of the geniuses – Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke – that spin back and forth through the revolving doors of Wall Street, the Treasury Department, and the Fed Bank, and can largely be given credit for getting the economy in the mess it’s in in the first place. Which should be reason enough to protest them. But seriously, what are the protesters protesting? Judging by the damage done to Starbucks and American Apparel, they mostly hate crap coffee and hipsters. But this piece on SocialistWorker.org probably sums it up with the least hyperbole I was able to find, and it boils down to this: the G20 is a handful of bankers and world leaders that no-one has asked to get together and decide that they know what’s best for over 6 billion people, and they haven’t shown in the past that they really have anyone’s interest in mind but their own. And who exactly are the protesters? Well, it’s hard to tell, because the Black Bloc strategies used by the more violent ones dominate media coverage, to the extent that the more “wingnut” sources perform in-depth shoe analyses to imply that the black bloc protesters are actually cops. But if you visit a site like TorontoMobilize.org, it appears the bulk of the protesters were Toronto-based organizations of women, people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, the working class, queer and trans people, and disabled people, and that they just may have some legitimate complaints. Read the rest of this entry »

Collapsitarian Visions Of A Shiny New Apocalypse

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on June 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Monday, June 21st, 2010

The fact that our civilization is doomed doesn’t make me a pessimist.

On a day-to-day basis I’m probably one of the most upbeat people you’ll meet, but in the big picture, I’ve been waiting for the end of the world since the 1980′s, when it seemed pretty obvious – at least based on the fashion of the era – that it was just around the corner. In fact, back then it was quite fashionable to be awaiting the apocalypse. Many of the best dystopian films (Blade Runner, Brazil, Mad Max, etc.) were made in that decade, and Reagan ended the cold war by bumping things up a notch with the Star Wars Defense Initiative and flippant sound check jokes about outlawing Russia and bombing them. Which is why I’m so excited that apocalyptic thinking is back in style, and that people like me even have a catchy new name: Collapsitarians. I have to admit that ever since the financial catastrophes of late 2008, I feel a gleeful giddiness every time the global markets wobble, excitedly anticipating their total collapse and ensuing mass financial panic and social disorder. My enthusiasm for this sort of cataclysm isn’t the same as the crowd yelling at the person on the ledge to jump, nor does it stem from some Gloomy Gus attitude. No, I just have an intuitive understanding that the industrial age is toast, and as Einstein said: “the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them“. I’m not hoping for “the end of the world” like some kind of Rapture hopeful, I only welcome the demise of our current way of life as a means to expedite a new and better way of life. If you have a hard time embracing this idea because of your consumer culture driven cognitive dissonance, I highly recommend John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, which explores our impending demise in a kinder, gentler fashion. In it he does a great job of explaining concepts like peak oil, but in a less alarmist manner, and with a broader cultural context than the intellectual NPR liberal that typically rants about topics like this. He also points out that we’re not likely to see some abrupt cataclysmic collapse, but rather a slow “slide down statistical curves that will ease modern industrial civilization into history’s dumpster”. For a quick insight into his line of thought without reading the book, check out On Catabolic Collapse, in which he outlines the simple ideas that 1.) Historically, most civilizations’ expansions have exceeded the availability of the resources they were built on, and 2.) There are outcomes that are more likely than the polarized extremes of eternal progress or total collapse. I for one would welcome a more difficult future if it meant we’d all be too busy simply surviving to argue ignorantly about politics or prattle on all day about who’s going to win on American Idol. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s An Elephant In The Room

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on May 26, 2010 by admin in Politics

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

The GOP’s mascot is an excellent symbol for the dysfunctional oblivion of America these days.

There’s a big elephant in the room we call America, and it’s making me a little uneasy. Although I joked recently that a monkey would be the perfect mascot for the American voter, it had never struck me until today how appropriate the GOP’s mascot is if you can pause and view the nation as one big dysfunctional family. After one of the most self-righteous and elitist administrations of my lifetime gutted the economy and destabilized the world in general with their clearly ill-conceived agenda, we now have to listen to former Bush buttboys like Karl Rove implying that the BP spill in the gulf is somehow “Obama’s Katrina”, as if a man-made and Bush-enabled catastrophe can somehow be compared to a hurricane and a shockingly inept and profoundly unqualified FEMA director. And this is just the most recent glaring example of the self-deceit of a typical GOP supporter these days. Don’t get me wrong, I hardly define myself as a Democrat; what makes me even crazier is that this kind of self-delusion seems to cross all party lines when it comes to economics. Have you noticed that as huge segments of the global economy skid into the ditch, what mostly is going on is that people in general and the media in particular keep acting like somehow the trillions in imaginary money that the world is loaning itself is somehow going to materialize later in some magic fairy bank of the future? To me it feels like the global economy is a cartoon character that just skidded off a cliff and hasn’t fallen into the abyss because it hasn’t looked down yet.

Vampire Squids Causing American Brain Death Epidemic?

[ Add A Comment ]Posted on May 5, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Will the SEC’s investigation into Goldman Sachs finally help Americans pull their heads out of their asses and right some of the wrongs with the virulently corrupt banking and insurance industries? No.

goldman sachs vampire squidDo you know what frightens me more than any terrorist ever could? The average American these days. They’re a scary bunch. Hostile, frustrated, and often either misled or just plain ignorant. And the scariest part? I think they actually mean well. I was reminded of this the other day as I took a train to Chicago. The passengers in the seats on both sides in front of me were pretty average married couples in their seventies. They had just met on the train, and as they started talking, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a strange queasiness. I usually tend to get along really well with most people of their generation, because I’m a bit of a cultural/moral Luddite myself; I think making money through the misfortune of others is bad, I think we should help each other out when needed, I have a practical level of materialism, and an old-fashioned work ethic. So what caused the queasiness I’m referring to? Well, the utter loss of hope for humanity any rational person might feel as a result of simply listening to their conversation. They started their dialog by agreeing how terrible it was that our president isn’t a US citizen. And then lamented that he had already destroyed the economy and the American way of life with his evil socialist agenda. I knew it would be an exercise in futility, so I didn’t bother asking them why the judicial system and congress and all of Washington was letting a known illegal alien run the country. I also didn’t ask them why, if the president was a socialist, he had so many bloodthirsty capitalists working at his side to prop up the biggest capitalist fraud in history and thereby Read the rest of this entry »

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