Kunstler: Boomer Elegy

History will probably record that America’s Baby Boom generation threw one helluva party; Gen X was left with the sorry task of cleanup crew; and the Millennials ended up squatting in the repossessed haunted party-house when it was all over. On behalf of the Boomers, let me try to explain and apologize. We came along […]

The Great Madness

Has the world gone mad? It certainly seems that way to some of us. Even the most cynical never imagined the government shutting down the country for fear of a virus, but it has suddenly become the new normal. The cynical, if they thought of it at all, would have thought the opposite. Instead of […]

What Can Collapsologists Learn From the Coronavirus Disaster?

——————  This time, it is for real!  ——————– Guest post by Herbert Krill March 23, 2020 These are interesting times for collapsologists and for anyone interested in collapse. For many years, we all studied the past, historic collapses like the Fall of Ancient Rome, and speculated about future collapses. We studied Joseph Tainter, Jared Diamond, […]

Nate Hagens: An Overview of the Systemic Implications of the Coronavirus

With the exception of some public talks, I’ve largely been quiet the last five years on social media and other venues with respect to describing our societal situation, despite having strong opinions on what is happening and what is going to happen. I’ve mainly been working behind the scenes on responses to the coming end-of-growth […]

Richard Heinberg: How Does Pandemic Change the Big Picture?

As of 2019, the Big Picture for humanity was approximately as follows. Homo sapiens (that’s us), a big-brained bipedal mammal, had spent the Pleistocene epoch (from 2.5 million years ago until 12,000 years ago) developing its ability to control fire, talk, paint pictures, play bone flutes, and make tools and clothes. Language dramatically enhanced our […]

Kunstler interviews Gail Tverberg of Our Finite World

Gail Tverberg is an analyst who has been researching the connection between oil limits and the economy for nearly 10 years.  She writes a widely-followed blog called Our Finite World. Her background is as an actuary, working as a consultant to insurance companies. She also has a foot in the academic world, where she has […]

The System Will Not Return To “Normal”…And That’s Good, We Can Do Better

The pandemic is revealing to all what many of us have known for a long time: the status quo was designed to fail and so its failure was not just predictable but inevitable. We’ve propped up a dysfunctional, wasteful and unsustainable system by pouring trillions of dollars in borrowed money down a multitude of ratholes to avoid a […]

The Shit Might Actually Be Hitting The Fan But Somehow It Doesn’t Feel Real

So here we are. Right on the cusp of that SHTF event that we’ve been prepping for all these years. A global pandemic. A breakdown in the supply chain. Shoppers who are already becoming agitated and even violent. We’re watching it all unfold in our hometowns and across our nation right now. Yet, somehow, it […]

Kunstler Confab with David Collum about Corona Virus, Markets Gone Wild, and Politics

David Collum is the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is the intellectual utility infielder of internet commentary, covering all the bases: culture, politics, finance, science, and technology, with often surprising views on the the predicaments of our time. Here we attempt to make sense of the fast-moving corona virus story […]

How to Prepare Now for the Complete End of the World

When the end comes, some will not be waiting in a bunker for a savior. They will stride out into the wilderness with confidence, ready to hunt and kill a deer, tan its hide and sleep easily in a hand-built shelter, close by a fire they made from the force of their two palms on […]

Energy Storage and our Unpredictable Future

It’s a fine spring day and you decide on a whim to go camping. By early afternoon you’ve reached a sheltered clearing in the woods, the sky is clear, and you relax against a tree trunk rejoicing that “The best things in life are free!” as you soak up the abundant warmth of the sun. […]

Max Keiser interviews James Howard Kunstler

In this episode of Keiser Report from Mexico City, Max and Stacy discuss the fact that the Fed’s ‘Cantillon Effect’ has allowed many tens of billionaires to shower the deplorables with seemingly generous donations. When looked at a little closer, they buying themselves a great deal of positive publicity with the deplorables’ own money . […]

Extreme Panic Could Soon Hit USA

U.S. government officials are doing their best to keep the general population calm, but everyone can see what is happening in the rest of the world.  There are now empty store shelves in Italy just like there are in China.  People are waiting in extremely long lines to buy masks in South Korea just like […]

The Contagion Escalates

From February 4 to February 19, the Diamond Princess cruise ship sat moored in the port of Yokohama, Japan, undergoing a two-week quarantine. Of the more than 3,600 people on board, 621 were diagnosed with COVID-19, a new type of coronavirus that spreads via sneezes and coughs and causes respiratory illness. Passengers had meals delivered […]

Collapse

Americans generally like to hear good news. They like to believe that a new president will right old wrongs, that clean energy will replace dirty oil and that fresh thinking will set the economy straight. American pundits tend to restrain their pessimism and hope for the best. But is anyone prepared for the worst? Meet […]

Do Civilisations Collapse?

l breakdown and civilisational collapse run deep in our culture, from Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a wrathful god, to the destruction of Atlantis, submerged under the sea after a massive earthquake. No matter whether literally true or not, these remain two of the most well-known stories in our society – dramatic and vivid, easy […]

Let ’em find doomsday on their own

I’ve recently watched a few reruns of the Doomsday Preppers episodes from National Geographic, seven years old now. The coronavirus brought the series back to mind. The 1918 flu pandemic killed perhaps 1% of those infected, resulting worldwide in about 50 to 100 million deaths (3% to 6% of world’s population then); 675,000 Americans were […]

It Is Easy to Overreact to the Chinese Coronavirus

Recently, a new coronavirus has been causing many illnesses and deaths. The virus first became active in Wuhan, China, but it has already spread to the rest of China. Scattered cases have been identified around the rest of the world as well. There are two important questions that are already being encountered: How much of […]

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 […]

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• Nate Hagens: An Overview of the Systemic Implications of the Coronavirus