Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US??

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259

http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html

"What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last, uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great deal of hope that would otherwise not exist."


My response: Hi Dmitri, I tend to agree with most of your theses. However, the past is not a recipe for the future. I.e., modern Russia, having gotten the taste of its scavenger bazaar version of "capitalism" and having progressed through to a sort of neo-feudal stage (with medieval religious beliefs, nationalism, and superstitions on the rise) will respond differently to the new crisis.

Also, the Obama administration is clever enough (I think) to "boil the crab" slowly by raising the temperature 1 degree at a time, so the crab does not jump out of the pot. Of course, this does not change the fundamentals of the impending national bankruptcy but it can stretch it out and disguise it.

Every strata of the community will respond somewhat differently to the crisis, depending on its psychology, material and political means at its disposal, and the international situation (such as a potential state of war).

Reading through forums like this, we may get a wrong idea of how most people think and act. The Chinese, for example, are responding to the crisis by using their surplus of dollars to buy up resources to fuel their next stage of growth (military and industrial).

Will oil get onto another hyper-inflationary spiral, together with the essential commodities like food? Not sure about that one.


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Paul and Anne Ehrlich's recepe for a livable planet

Below is their menu for a livable planet. What’s on your menu?

From the letter to the president-elect from Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University:

1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.

To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.

2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.

3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.

4) Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.

5) Rapidly expand our empathy. We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups…. People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time — not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future.

6) Decide what kind of world we all want. What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?

7) Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability. …In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.

All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. “Totally impractical,” people will say, “not gonna happen.” Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don’t change our ways, they’ll be changed for us.

Sarah Palin to swap with Putin McCain goes to Kenya

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The United Nations Presidential Exchange Program:

Sarah Palin to swap places with Putin, McCain sent to Kenya

http://www.patrushev-publications.com

Michelle Obama to be the US President in 2016

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Prediction based on multifactor analisys, including her dress during the victory speech.

"The people have spoken…the bastards." ...

From: http://www.dailyreckoning.com/


"The people have spoken…the bastards."

America's voters spoke yesterday. And they said, "Give us Obama."

And it came to pass that the man called Obama was given unto them.

"America is a place where all things are possible," said the man himself in his victory speech.

And yes, it is possible for a half-black man to be elected. But no, all things are not possible. It is not still not possible to get rich by spending money. Nor is it possible to save a man from too much debt by giving him more credit. And you still can't trust a politician…or his money.

The election "changed everything," shouts the headline on today's International Herald Tribune. But the eternal verities still apply; Barack Obama is not going to change them.

And that means that a slump caused by too much debt cannot be made to disappear. You can disguise it. You can delay it. You can push the losses onto someone else. But you can't escape it.

And I reply:



Yes, the debt and all of that... But you are the most creative and free society on this earth. And you have chosen a young, enterprising and clever man to help you straighten up your affairs. It may take years or even decades. But you will be on the right track. Good luck to you!

We in Australia also chose a bunch of young and relatively inexperienced politicians to run the country. The problems have not gone overnight (in fact we only now know that the mess the old bunch got us into will take decades to clean up) but we have more sanity and hope than we had for a long time.

The tasks for Obama:

1. Most importantly, foster innovation;
2. develop energy strategies that can help the US and the world reach sustainability instead of funding extremism through oil money;
3. build health care based on prevention rather than treatment;
4. and make education project-oriented and practical, giving young and old skills to cope with the most pressing problems we face as families, communities, and temporary residents of this fragile and abused planet.

SARAH PALIN SWAPS PLACES WITH PUTIN, MCCAIN SENT TO KENYA

© 2008 Dolphinpower



This was announced by the recently formed UN Presidential Exchange Program (PEP). Kenya was a natural choice for McCain since Barak Obama’s father came from Kenya. It was also judged to be the best country to show off McCain’s skills in cleaning up corruption and reducing taxes to zero (wealthy Kenyans already pay little tax and the poor are too poor to pay). His military skills can come handy on a continent racked by constant wars.

The UN PEP office also announced that Sarah Palin will exchange places with Vladimir Putin (a neighbor she often waves to from her porch). However, PEP later issued a correction saying that due to her poor knowledge of geography Sarah agreed to go only as far as Siberia. Siberian natives were overjoyed, saying that the moose hunting season had just begun. Mr Putin was judged to be too risky for Alaska as it contains mineral resources that the Russian oligarchs might covet. He will be sent instead to Tonga to boost the tourist potential of the flagging, and sinking, island economy.

The North Korean President Kim Jong Il will be sent to run Guantanamo Bay Jail. After a year, he will be locked in with inmates for a night of conflict resolution training.

Arnold Schwarzenegger will go to Pakistan to terminate Osama Bin Laden.

Big Al Greeenspan will be sent to China to ruin the Chinese economy.

French President Sarkozy and the German President Angela Merkel will swap places. Sarkozy was judged to be the best person to improve German cuisine and fashion while Merkel promised to tackle trade unions, slim down overblown French bureaucracy, and impose order on the inevitable student protests.

President Bush will be dispatched to Albania to help run a home for retarded children.

President Clinton will go to the South East Asia as a goodwill ambassador to clean up the sex trade there.

Hilary Clinton will be sent to Saudi Arabia to create at least one crack in the glass ceiling of male dominance there. She will be equipped with a crash helmet.

Italian President Silvio Berlusconi will be sent to India as it was judged to be the only country that would continue on its way, no matter who you sent there.



Keywords: McCain, Kenya, UN, Presidential Exchange Program, comedy.

End of dispatch