What a Way to Go: Network

This is long and I wrote it off-line. It is not inspirational.

This entire issue is a “gut feeling” thing. For me it is what I believe, for you it is the same, and that in no way implies that we agree about everything.

It may be that my beliefs have more roots in the ground than those of many others, but there are some other others who have even deeper roots. The thing with “beliefs” is they cannot be proved. The things that I can prove are the things that I know. And while I am among the top percentile in the “knowledge” arena I am often in awe of how much I do not know. Yet despite this relative ignorance, I am fully competent to trundle along. And I say trundle because at present my gut is saying “not that way” but is most unclear on “which way”.

The crash is here and now. It is just like and very unlike the infamous tsunami of 2004 [?]. Did you feel it? Did it change your life? The reality is that it has changed your life, regardless of your response. The very idea that Mother Nature could be so destructive was beyond the imagination of virtually every person living at the time. The idea that she would be, even further. But now we know.

It may be that faced with this colossal ignorance, our collective egos over the millennia have created the domain of “faith” to cope with the fear of all that we do not know. It was so then and it is so now.

If I do not know that a snake can bite and that it will probably be fatal, there is every chance that I will try and pick it up and be bitten. So, unless you are there to pass on the lesson, my ignorance will have cost me my life and the general ignorance about the danger remains. Maybe this is the origin of animal deities in the many religions of early man and some that survive today. It would appear that there is a collective need for an explanation of the inexplicable.

The signs, those disruptive demonstrators along the tracks not to mention the bombers [thanks Mann], are right here in my face and there is no way I can relate them more eloquently, more graphically or with more impact than Tim and Sally have already done. The question is less where are they pointing than what should I do. The signs, clear though they are, are each small ingredients in a system so complex it remains beyond our [mental] grasp, well mine at least. The signs are themselves consequences, of human action and natural cyclic [?] changes and they largely fall into the “Thou shalt not - - - “ category – like the ‘don’t try and pick up a snake’ lesson of a few lines back which led to my death.

The thing is, with my well beyond QED [quid errat demonstrandum] inability to foresee the consequences of my part in the Grand Crumble that is happening now, what am I to do in the next moment, and the one after that? A part of the problem for me is my inability to predict which crumb will crumble next and get out of its way. Another part of the problem is my inability to accurately predict when the crumble will transit into an avalanche, or for that matter whether it will.

I am immovably persuaded that a large part of the current instability is rooted in the number of us “sapiens” roaming around, just the number. And one of the crumbs is this morning’s bombing of the crowd at the marathon fun-run in Sri-Lanka. And if I am correct, then guess what an avalanche of those crumbs will be like.

Everything in me says “Walk away”.

My neighbour Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe is one of the more castigated figures of today’s political scene, not because he is a threat to the world like Amadinajhad [?] but because his actions have put his currency 99.99999 laps ahead in a 100 lap inflation race. He did this 8 years ago by allowing, and supporting, the poor and landless multitudes to drive Caucasian [white] farmers off what the latter believed to be “Their land”. Now the country has very little and there are no more bandages for the wounds of Empire in the supermarkets. Now, If Bob would just step down out of his stretch Merc limo and ride a bicycle or a donkey, I would have a bit more respect for the guy, but he hasn’t done it yet and while his tenure is in the balance as I write, he shows no signs of letting it go.

There is a rather painful saying “the masses are asses”. Sadly it is largely true in my view. So, in this grand global democracy we glorify being ruled by the asses for the asses, so much so that if you are in a non-democratic country you are also a node in the axis of evil and you have paid good money to have Georgie-boy come up with that slogan, and so have I [our Government went into a deal with GM with my good tax money a couple years back] [Oops – did I just say GOOD money? – forgive the slip]. Unless, of course, you are sitting on a pond of crude in which case if you are relatively benign and keep a generally low profile you are not a node. So the allegory of the grand global democracy is that we have what we deserve and I have what I deserve, no matter how blindly or unconsciously I contributed, ass that I am.

Now, putting the ‘hanging on” syndrome together with the demonstrated wisdom of the world’s leadership, my prophecy for the near term future is that the powers that be, the ones I have allowed and you have allowed, will hang on, desperately, irrationally at all costs trying to maintain the present order.

The early sign is Orlav’s financial collapse and we are skipping around the edges of that sink-hole right now. The bulls eye of the financial collapse will be unaffordable crude which will stop the tankers, the trains, the cars and the planes. Very quickly the bandages of Empire will disappear. Like the morning mist – Commercial collapse. Bear in mind that it is not so much the alice bands and hair clasps that are the issue here, rather the staple things like corn and wheat and veggies and meat, and for those things people have been known to kill and they will, again.

As insurrection grows, a primarily urban thing at first, the ‘hanging on’ powers that are still hanging will find their choice limited to Newtons Law of Gravity, and their fall will be grievous indeed. But it will not be a single event, rather it will be chunks instead of crumbs with some chunks still hanging in there, those with stored resources, probably military. But just like crude, there is only so much stored away and when that runs out there is nothing for the remaining chunks [chumps?] to hang on to so they go into free fall too [according to Newton’s law of gravity] and the chunk of chumps disintegrates and disperses into what remains of humanity around them.

What would happen if overnight, everything except my income jumped by 20%. Well, I guess I would just tighten my belt and make do with less. However, there are many many more that are already on the poverty line and a tragic many below who are already at rock bottom. Since I started this response, Haiti has come into the headlines and the Philipines are also in a rice-crisis.

Africa is strewn with internally displaced people and refugees and in South America the jungle is shrinking faster than the glaciers of the north. But the peak traffic in NYC and London and countless other cities continues its ominous advance. The Refugee problem from Africa has now become a problem for Israel and the BBC recently devoted a whole 2 to 3 minutes to the problem of plastic pollution for a few days in its world news. There was also a brief mention of the international trade in pollination bees and how that has caused the spread of disease causing a radical decline in the global bee population.

I am strongly persuaded that self imposed simplicity will be vastly more livable than forced simplicity. And by simplicity I mean a horse rather than a car, maybe even a donkey. It’s a matter of cutting losses. Far better to have little left to lose than lose it all.

Walk away. Find a place that is generally unattractive to your fellow humans because it is too harsh and find a way to live there. You are standing against the stream now because you are questioning the way we are going, so do the obvious next thing and walk away, the other way.