Political and Economic Organization

The Achilles Heel of the Climate Change Warriors: The limits of complexity science

Saturday, December 30th, 2023

The goals of this essay are two. First, I will expand the critique of the ways we do science that I made in premise #3 of  An agroecological model for the end of the oil age. My hope is to raise questions about our deeply ingrained faith in all the current methods of scientific inquiry. [...]

Increasing craziness in Western governing classes: a theory

Thursday, March 9th, 2023

The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray – from a Scots poem by Robert Burns
The highest act of love in a criminally insane society is disobedience. – John Schumacher

Bouts of collective insanity are no surprise to historians, who have detected a pattern of such spectacles in collapsing empires. We all [...]

What is causing the astonishing self-demolition of the West?

Thursday, January 5th, 2023

After a successful 500-year run, why is Western hegemony slowly falling apart, and moreover, as Pogo famously said, why is it that “the enemy is us”? This essay will explore a complex of root causes, focusing on the built-in dynamics of the capitalist system, which drove it to produce the expected positive results – increasing [...]

An Unprecedented Geopolitical Tilt

Sunday, March 27th, 2022

We are seeing a planet-wide shift in geopolitical ascendency that is political, economic and cultural, and is unprecedented in the last five hundred years. It is a slow process that one could best describe as tectonic in scale, like a slanted table set with nations all sliding in one direction, which gradually rights itself, becomes [...]

End Games of Modernity – a Convergence of crises

Tuesday, January 18th, 2022

As I have written earlier in this series, modern civilization has reached an end game[1]. I am defining modernity as a form of civilization that began in the West – let’s call it EurAnglia – 500 years ago and spread in different degrees to the rest of the planet by Western imperial conquest. This essay [...]

Seasonal Greetings and State of the World

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

As the old Teutonic pagan rite approaches, we sally forth, hatchet in hand, seeking evergreens to deck the halls. O Tannenbaum! Conveniently, our mile-long track to the woodlot snakes through ten acres of clearcut logged by the previous owners in a vain attempt to cover their debts from a failed ‘back to the land’ venture. Wunderbar! Blossoming [...]

More End Games of Modern Civilization: factional fractures in ruling elite policy

Thursday, December 16th, 2021

Historical studies of civilizational collapse reveal a pattern that occurs at some point in the collapse process[1] – ruling elites begin to lose control, and policy disagreements arise. In this essay I will explore evidence that faultlines in pre-existing factions in the US ruling elite, once kept in the background, are emerging into the public [...]

Who’s Afraid of the Great Reset?

Saturday, November 6th, 2021

In a recent piece I said, “Great Reset narratives reveal that transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of degrowth. Hence, they are planning degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them.” Because their agenda calls for a major systemic shift in resource allocation, a centralized digital currency and other draconian policies [...]

What props up the delusion of growth paradigm?

Sunday, September 19th, 2021

The general trend in the global economy has been toward lower growth and productivity in the last half century. This trend is easily explained in biophysical economics as due to 1) increasing scarcity of finite resources due to depletion, itself the result of massive consumption in the modern age, and 2) erosion of carrying capacity [...]

End Games of Modern Civilization: false flag scare strategies and global cultural revolutions

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it… – Santayana
…First as tragedy, then as farce. – Karl Marx
Modern civilization is an interactive and interdependent whole that ties together, however loosely, specific energy drivers, technologies, physical and social structures, ways of living and cultural beliefs and values. Elements distinctive of this whole [...]

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