Oil, Power, and War by Matthieu Auzanneau

Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History By Matthieu Auzanneau Originally published in 2015 as Or noir, by La Découverte Translated from the French by John F. Reynolds 672 pp, hardcover. Chelsea Green Publishing. – Nov 2018. $35.00. In Oil, Power, and War, French journalist Matthieu Auzanneau presents a comprehensive, provocative history of humankind’s relationship […]

The Geopolitics of Petroleum

Petropolitics Presentation by G. Chia to ReNew/ATA group on 27/9/18:   ADDENDUM: I mentioned the main feature of capitalist banking is that it charges interest on debt. The other key feature is that it creates money (for new loans) out of nothing, the so-called fractional reserve banking system.   ERRATA: APOC was the abbreviation for […]

True Revolution

A radical change in human behavior away from its patterns of oppression, exploitation, war and ecocide will necessarily involve a drastic transformation in humanity’s relationship with thought. I’ve been saying this over and over again in different ways for a long time now, and yet I still get criticisms saying that I have useful insights […]

Economic Meltdown Worse than Great Depression Coming

Renowned trends researcher Gerald Celente is making a big change to his 2018-2019 economic forecast. What is the timeline for this coming market meltdown? Celente says, “The timeline is tough, but look . . . all you need is one major failure or one major hedge fund pulling out because that’s who is running the […]

12 Reasons Why People Refuse To Address The Idea That We’re Headed For Near-Term Societal Collapse

The starting point for a generative discussion of the deep adaptation agenda is a difficult one. Because to begin to rigorously and imaginatively discuss this topic first requires us to accept the likelihood of near term societal collapse. By which I mean that within ten years, in whatever society we are living in, that we […]

The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly

Deadly diseases like Ebola and the avian flu are only one flight away. The U.S. government must start taking preparedness seriously. There are plenty of security threats that could keep a former homeland security advisor awake. There is the possibility of a terrorist attack, a cyber-cataclysm, or any number of natural disasters—all threats that are […]

Dealing With Collapse: The Seneca Strategy

The ruins of the Egyptian Pyramid of Meidum, perhaps the first large building to collapse in history (*). The collapse of large structures is part of a fascinating field of study that we may call “Collapsology.” I already wrote a book on this subject, titled “The Seneca Effect” (Springer and Oekom 1917), available in English […]

Ponzinomics

“Tolerable parasites are those that have minimum pain and cost to the host.“   DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, AT THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY: In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country. America is so thrilled. (LAUGHTER) I did not expect […]

Preparing for Collapse, A Few Rants

For a while now I been promising that when I got some other things out of the way, I’d actually talk about preparing for collapse. And that is just what I’m going to be doing in this and the next few posts. Unfortunately, my crystal ball isn’t any better than anybody else’s, probably worse than […]

The problem with models…is getting stuck on just one

Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, first uttered what must now seem like a well-worn phrase: “The map is not the territory.” And yet, I don’t think this view has yet been well-incorporated into human culture. In a time when social media outlets are trying to sort what is “fake” from what is “genuine” […]

What Comes Next?

Previews of the coming reckoning… All things have a beginning, a middle and and end. And now, more than 3,480 days into the current bull market, the longest in history, we can say with high confidence we are very close to its end. Why? For manifold reasons that are multiplying fast. So many, in fact, […]

Richard Heinberg: Human Predators, Human Prey – Part 3

6. “Disease organisms” (revolutionaries), “parasites” (criminals), and “immune systems” (law and punishment) in times of growth and release In his brilliant 1976 book Plagues and Peoples, historian William H. McNeill explored how infectious disease has shaped human societies through the ages. A remarkable paragraph on page 84 of the Anchor paperback edition has stayed with […]

The world’s not as bad as our brains would have us believe

Even highly educated people have gross misconceptions about state of the world, says the book “Factfulness.” On many fronts — economic, health, mortality, — the real picture is a lot brighter than people think. Chimpanzees are better at answering questions on the state of the world than Nobel Prize winners, according to a book I’ve […]

Chris Martenson: The Whole System Is Rigged

As the dog days of summer wind down, it’s hard not to notice how the climate is suffering brutally right now across many areas of the globe. Crop failures have hit hard across Europe. Australia is under an intense drought. Warm water representing ‘archived heat’ has penetrated deep into the arctic.  Coral reefs are dying through […]

Snyder: Society Is Unraveling

The thin veneer of civilization that we all depend upon on a daily basis is disappearing at a staggering pace.  On Sunday, the young men that gathered to participate in the Madden Championship Series tournament in Jacksonville probably never imagined that they would be in any sort of danger, but then gunfire erupted around 1 […]

Bahrain Sees Beyond Oil and Gas, Eyes a Path To Tech Greatness

Offering unique benefits, this Persian Gulf country attracts a wave of tech startups, from food to fintech to fitness. Bahrain 25.930414° N, 50.637772° E view map 1,492,584Population Arabic, EnglishSpoken Language $51,846GDP Per Capita ManamaCapital City Indian tech entrepreneur Amjad Puliyali had worked for a decade in Dubai, but in 2016, he relocated to tiny Bahrain […]

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual […]

Blind Spot and Fuel: a Review of Two Peak Oil Documentaries from 2008

Blind Spot: Peak Oil and the Coming Global Crisis A documentary directed, written, photographed and edited by Adolfo Doring Music by Randall Wallace Produced by Michelle Cicalese, David Gil, Randall Wallace and Amanda Zackem Presented by Wallace Global Fund in association with Dislexic Films Release Date: October 2008 Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes Fuel […]

why do political and economic leaders deny peak oil and climate change?

Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there’s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I’ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it’s for exactly the same reasons you don’t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil. 1) Our […]

Kunstler: The Winners Will Lose and the Losers Will Win

Who doesn’t want to think that they are a good human being? That they are a person of good intentions, clear conscience, fair-minded, generous, loving, and merciful? On the other hand, who wants to be a loser? The current political predicament in the USA has America’s winners turned losers and the consequent pain of that […]

A Better World Is Here

The belief that everything is getting worse paints a distorted picture of what we can do, and makes us more fearful. But while getting the facts wrong – or willfully misrepresenting them – often results in misguided policies, fact-based recognition of what humanity has achieved encourages policies that can achieve the most good. SKANDERBORG, DENMARK […]

Peak oil went in the barrel — now the debate is over peak oil demand

When I started writing this column here a decade ago, I laid down several markers that might shove us sideways. Long before the word became a tech commonplace, I called the sum of these trends the Great Disruption. One was peak oil. This didn’t mean “the world about to run out of oil.” Instead, it […]

How the World Elites are Going to Betray us: Lessons from Roman History

The more I study the story of the Roman Empire, the more I see the similarities with our world. Of course, history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it is impressive to note how with the start of the collapse of the Western Empire, the Roman elites abandoned the people to build themselves strongholds in safe […]

Its Not The Heat. It’s The Stupidity

With your sweaty host, Category5. (Thanks, J.T., J.S. and T.M. for the donations. Its been put to good use for a future article)   There is only one subject worth talking about. THE subject. The Heat. Ya. I know I said I wouldn’t be back till the winter once all the chores and Honey, Do […]

Why Collapse Is Leaving Americans In Shock

Have you ever been in a car crash? Do you know that weird, numb, nauseous, out-of-body feeling that hits, after the adrenaline fades? You’re in shock. Now imagine that you were in a car crash every day. How would you feel, after a month? Now consider the fact that we describe the world as a […]

American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths

Our society should’ve collapsed by now. You know that, right? No society should function with this level of inequality (with the possible exception of one of those prison planets in a “Star Wars” movie). Sixty-three percent of Americans can’t afford a $500 emergency. Yet Amazon head Jeff Bezos is now worth a record $141 billion. […]

The Seneca Glass: Half Full or Half Empty?

  Optimist: the glass is half full. Pessimist: the glass is half empty. Catastrophist. It will not be half full for long. Cornucopian: We are running into water rather than out of it. Oil executive: The water level grows more the more we drink from the glass. Conspiracy Theorist: Water? What water? THEY want us […]

You Can’t Stop A Wave But You Can Surf-3

“The struggle with any addict is to produce permanent change.“   Part Three Just when things seem most dire, and there is no possible escape, we catch another faint flicker of hope. In my two previous installments I laid out the predicament. By now anyone who has followed this blog for a while (and a […]

Stop the hand-wringing, humankind will adapt and prosper

When people go public with private tears I am immediately suspicious. Not that I am against tears; as a physical reaction to emotion they are a fact of life best controlled in some circumstances but uncontrollable in others. But articles, tweets and interviews that deliberately lob personal tears into the public domain sound the alarm […]

Are Things Getting Better or Worse?

Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at CUNY; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had been reading histories of the postwar decades, by […]

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