Coping With Global (& Local) Chaos: What You Can Control And What You Can’t

Have you been glued to the news lately, nervously watching what’s going on in the Middle East? Are you concerned that World War III is about to kick off at any moment? Is the state of the economy frequently on your mind? Maybe it’s Ebola that keeps you up at night or the risk of […]

The Year in Doom 2019

“Violence is as American as cherry pie.”  –H. Rap Brown​   2019 has been a year of notable accomplishments and disasters: China became the first country to gain access to the far side of the moon, thus announcing itself in the space race, the Ebola epidemic continued in the Congo, birds and insects continue to die […]

Our Genetic Timebomb

“The yaksha asked: “What is the greatest surprise?” Yudhisthira replied: “People die every day, making us aware that men are mortal. Yet we live, work, play, plan, etc., as if assuming we are immortal. What is more surprising than that? — The Mahabharata“ Every few days or weeks, Rob Mielcarski posts to his Un-Denial blog […]

Dave Collum’s 2019 Year In Review

Authored by David B. Collum, Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology – Cornell University (Email: dbc6@cornell.edu, Twitter: @DavidBCollum), “I hope David comes to his senses.” ~ Nassim Taleb (@nntaleb), best-selling author and Professor at NYU Every year, David Collum writes a detailed “Year in Review” synopsis full of keen perspective and plenty of wit. This […]

Caitlin Johnstone: Why Everything Is F**ked

We all slid out of the womb an itty bitty helpless information sponge into a world full of mentally ill giants who couldn’t wait to fill our tiny skulls with all of their inner demons. And now everything, understandably, is fucked. That’s basically our whole entire situation in a nutshell. You can add on as […]

Scientific Models and Myths: What Is the Difference?

Most people seem to think, “The difference between models and myths is that models are scientific, and myths are the conjectures of primitive people who do not have access to scientific thinking and computers. With scientific models, we have moved far beyond myths.” It seems to me that the truth is quite different from this. History […]

Why Collapse is not always a bad thing: the New Book by Ugo Bardi

New book provides an analysis of the process of failure and collapse, and outlines principles that help us manage these challenges in our lives Heidelberg | New York, 12 December 2019 Image: © Springer Nature Everyone experiences collapse in their lives: you may lose your job, get sick, or a close friend or family member […]

The World Is Getting Better. It’s Just That No One Tells You About It.

A special Morning Jolt today, as I try to run through a long but by no means complete list of good news from the past year that was astoundingly under-reported and discussed, particularly when compared to presidential tweets, discussions of which pop culture offerings weren’t woke enough, glowing profiles of the eighth or ninth-most popular […]

A Surefire Cure For Despair

“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” ~ Samuel Beckett Sometimes it just gets to be too goddamn much. You just finished a soul-draining argument with a family member who insists that Putin controls all major world events because that’s what the TV said so it must be true, then you check the poll numbers […]

A World on Fire

  Discuss this article at the  Collapse Morning Wake-Up Call table inside the Diner   Working up the energy for a blog for Sunday Collapse Brunch this week has been tough for a few reasons.  Health wise, I am doing crappy again, but this isn’t the only problem.  My main computer is also getting close […]

Ukrainian Rhapsody

“Our future will be more about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and non-state actors than stump speeches from the back of a bunted caboose. Facebook and Twitter have been weaponized.“ There has been a recurrent theme here at The Great Change over the past several months. It began with revelations from whistleblowers from Cambridge Analytica speaking to […]

What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene

Looming over the new food court of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is one of those creatures so massive and menacing that its mere existence in Earth’s ancient past counsels against time-travel research. It is an accurate, if unbelievable, model of the Megalodon shark—52 feet long, dagger-studded maw agape. These things ate baleen […]

Fire Engulfs New Saudi High-Speed Rail Station

Online videos showed what appeared to be major structural damage. The station is the centerpiece of a new multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project. A massive fire on Sunday ripped through a new high-speed train station leaving at least five people injured in Saudi Arabia’s coastal city of Jeddah. Videos posted on social media showed black plumes […]

Before Greta Thunberg, there was “Peak Oil”. Has everyone forgotten?

If you search the website of the Irish Times for the phrase “Peak Oil” you will find that it appears only once in 2019, in a motoring column, and only then as a throwaway comparison to the Chinese car industry. It is the first time the phrase has appeared in Ireland’s most august newspaper since […]

Kurt Cobb: Oil prices and the coming financial ‘Ice Age’

Albert Edwards turned bearish on stocks back in 1996—well, not exactly bearish, but cautious. He recommended to clients that they overweight long-term, high-quality bonds and therefore underweight stocks in their portfolios. It turns out that clients who followed his advice fared not quite as well as those 100 percent invested in stocks but also took […]

Richard Heinberg: Peak Oil & The Coming Crash

Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. In our examination of the themes presented Richard’s recent essay “Our Bonus Decade,” Richard discusses the role skyrocketing oil prices played in the financial crisis of 2008 and […]

A math equation that predicts the end of humanity

The most mind-boggling controversy in the contemporary philosophy of science is the “doomsday argument,” a claim that a mathematical formula can predict how long the human race will survive. It gives us even odds that our species will meet its end within the next 760 years. The doomsday argument doesn’t tell what’s going to kill […]

Prophets of doom: Is the end of the world near?

Armageddon didn’t happen in 1982 as predicted by American evangelist Pat Robertson (born in 1930). Then, he prophesied again and again, and flopped again and again. Even in predicting the end of the world, Americans and Russians were rivals. Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916), a Russian mystic who was assassinated in 1916, prophesied that fire would extinguish […]

Humankind’s innate ability to adapt will see us through brighter, hotter, days to come

The Enlightenment’s greatest forecasting error was made by a mostly forgotten Englishman, the Reverend Thomas Malthus. His mistake was due to his failure to account for mankind’s second most important trait; adaptability. The good pastor noticed that humans reproduced exponentially. Starting with merely two humans some four thousand years previously, there were one billion at […]

The Hawkwood Elephant

“Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions. They require only small-scale solutions within large-scale frameworks.” The author’s book signing circuit for small publishers like New Society and Chelsea Green is more likely to have you at something in Marianne Williamson’s comfort zone than Joe Biden’s, and it often brings me to scenic places with biodynamic […]

Has humanity reached ‘peak intelligence’?

You may not have noticed, but we are living in an intellectual golden age. Since the intelligence test was invented more than 100 years ago, our IQ scores have been steadily increasing. Even the average person today would have been considered a genius compared to someone born in 1919 – a phenomenon known as the […]

John Michael Greer: The Long View

For more than three years now, the themes of these online essays of mine—here, and in my previous blog The Archdruid Report—have had a relatively tight focus on the events of the present day. That hasn’t been accidental by any means. In 2016, strains that had been building for years within Western industrial civilization burst […]

Things aren’t so bad

In last week’s column I raised an issue that had hit home a bit personally — the increasing number of mass murders committed in our country’s public places by madmen who, armed with high-powered rifles and abundant ammunition, kill as many as they can. It had become a bit more personal because our company underwent […]

How to Survive Doomsday

Let’s be optimistic and assume that we manage to avoid a self-inflicted nuclear holocaust, an extinction-sized asteroid, or deadly irradiation from a nearby supernova. That leaves about 6 billion years until the sun turns into a red giant, swelling to the orbit of Earth and melting our planet. Sounds like a lot of time. But […]

Too Many People, Too Much Junk—Enter the Land of Confusion

Consider this extraordinary item for a moment: The population of the planet is greater than at any other time in human history. Chances are you already know this, but it is not on your mind every day. The rock band, Genesis, was thinking about it back in 1986 with their hit single, Land of Confusion.* […]

Kunstler with Rob Gourdie about Oil Price Waves and peak Oil

download (size: 0 MB )   #317 Rob Gourdie is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. He is also Director of the Center for Heart and Reparative Medicine Research at the same university. He writes under the pen name of Tom Therramus.  In his “day job,” he works on the repeating waves […]

“The Storm” and “Tower Time” – Simple Names For A Complicated Situation

I’ve written a bit lately about “The Storm” and “Tower Time” and “The Long Descent” – everyone knows what I’m talking about, right? Right? Such is modern language. Words get used in new ways – seemingly at random – and before long they become a part of ordinary language. Except that everybody doesn’t know what […]

Kunstler: The Zeitgeist Knows

Who said the global economy was a permanent installation in the human condition? The head cheerleader was The New York Times’s Tom Friedman, with his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, the trumpet blast for the new order of things. Since then, we partied like it was 1999, with a few grand mal […]

Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush by John Michael Greer

Like John Michael Greer’s numerous other books on the subject of industrial civilization’s demise, this one reveals its author to be an astonishingly gifted guide to a future that most people refuse to contemplate. The 25 short writings it contains were originally published on Greer’s former blog, The Archdruid Report, which was an institution among […]

Too Many People, or Too Much Greed?

During the dark early morning hours of a September 27 a few years after the Second World War, a passenger ship cruising calm South Atlantic waters struck a drifting forgotten mine, was violently breached, and quickly sank before any distress signal could be broadcast. Daylight found 26 survivors massed in, or floating in the sea […]

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