Scarcity, or rather artificial scarcity.
“Since money is not wealth, but a means of exchange, it is absurd to say that a shortage of it makes
us poor when we have abundance of real wealth in the shape of commodities”.
Eimar o Duffys economic & social observations.
This final second edition from early 1930s
Since money is not wealth, but a means of exchange, it is absurd to say that a shortage of it makes us poor when we have abundance of real wealth in the shape of commodities.https://t.co/BfU4XbhfKApic.twitter.com/zk3BbS1lHZ
— Real-Estate Land Development Limited (@RealEstateLand3) March 6, 2023
“Solutions for an “abundance economy” aren’t going to help us as we enter an age of scarcity.”
I would like to see the evidence regarding Material scarcity. Regarding Peak Energy, we are still at a high level of output although the expense EROEI for the historically very cheap Oil extraction is clear in the evidence from SEEDS.
On Output generally, I think there is an Abundance but we have a distribution and accounting problem.
These I have suggested can be tackled in the following stages.
The problems in Political Economy as it stands presently and the question of future Political Economy based upon future Energy realities are I think helpfully separated which is something Prof. David MacKay is very successful with, in his presentation of the question.
The Problems are only weakly related with respect to future solutions and breaking the process into 3 parts is useful rather than lumping them all together. It is clear that the existing Form of Market economy and political economy is not able to solve the problem at stage 3 ( I.E Post 2050 post-Oil Economy) Stage 1 requires a reform of the existing paradigm which involves facing up to the broken debt-based money system. Pension provision, the sovereign debt crisis and Public debt crisis are all addressable and will see improvements even within the deteriorating Cost of energy inputs as a share of output. We could call this stage let’s fix what we know is not working. Stage 2 covers the Post Financialised ( Big Bang Experiment) period to the oil running out in 2050.
This requires a much more long-term investment horizon and complicating the energy mix by overstating the ”Climate Change question** seems to be counterproductive, again I like the way Prof David Mackay dealt with the question including stating the necessities of **Clean Coal and Nuclear”. In this stage, we will be implementing ideas previously barred due to the denial inherent in clinging to a failing system. Stage 3 Post-2050, This part is much easier than Stage 2 and stage 1, in my opinion, the myth-busting and leveling out inherent in solving the political problems at stage 1 and the challenge to vested interests in stage 2 are by far and away the largest obstacles to getting down to Brass tacks in my opinion.
A Speech by Mary Elizabeth Lease (circa 1890)
This is a nation of inconsistencies. The Puritans fleeing from oppression became oppressors. We fought England for our liberty and put chains on four million of blacks. We wiped out slavery and our tariff laws and national banks began a system of white wage slavery worse than the first. Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street, and for Wall Street. The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master. The West and South are bound and prostrate before the manufacturing East. Money rules, and our Vice-President is a London banker. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us. We were told two years ago to go to work and raise a big crop, that was all we needed. We went to work and plowed and planted; the rains fell, the sun shone, nature smiled, and we raised the big crop that they told us to; and what came of it? Eight-cent corn, ten-cent oats, two-cent beef and no price at all for butter and eggs-that’s what came of it. The politicians said we suffered from overproduction. Overproduction, when 10,000 little children, so statistics tell us, starve to death every year in the United States, and over 100,000 shopgirls in New York are forced to sell their virtue for the bread their niggardly wages deny them… We want money, land and transportation. We want the abolition of the National Banks, and we want the power to make loans direct from the government. We want the foreclosure system wiped out… We will stand by our homes and stay by our fireside by force if necessary, and we will not pay our debts to the loan-shark companies until the government pays its debts to us. The people are at bay; let the bloodhounds of money who dogged us thus far beware.
Money and Good are different, Quiggley’s Tragedy and hope.
”Thus, clearly, money and goods are not the same thing but are, on the contrary,
exactly opposite things. Most confusion in economic thinking arises from a failure to
recognise this fact. Goods are wealth which you have, while money is a claim on wealth which you do not have. Thus goods are an asset; money is a debt. If goods are wealth; money is not wealth, or negative wealth, or even anti-wealth. They always behave in opposite ways, just as they usually move in opposite directions. If the value of one goes up, the value of the other goes down, and in the same proportion.”
The Relationship Between Goods and Money Is Clear to Bankers
In the course of time the central fact of the developing economic system, the
relationship between goods and money, became clear, at least to bankers. This relationship, the price system, depended upon five things: the supply and the demand for goods, the supply and the demand for money, and the speed of exchange between money and goods. An increase in three of these (demand for goods, supply of money, speed of circulation) would move the prices of goods up and the value of
money down. This inflation was objectionable to bankers, although desirable to producers and merchants. On the other hand, a decrease in the same three items would be deflationary and would please bankers, worry producers and merchants, and delight consumers (who obtained more goods for less money). The other factors worked in the opposite direction so that an increase in them (supply of goods, demand for money, and slowness of circulation or exchange) would be deflationary.”
John on the Slog today says that 60% or so of folk are still following and believing the Party Line Narrative as presented in MSM land but not in the organs of Alt Media favoured by the Savvy 1 in 8.
1 in 8 is 12.5% way in excess of the 3.5% of support required for effective civil disobedience by the calculations of Erica Chernoweth. See
Their team identified over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns. Twenty-six per cent of the violent revolutions were successful, while 53 per cent of the nonviolent campaigns succeeded. Moreover, looking at changes’ in democracy (Polity IV scores) indicates that nonviolence promotes democracy while violence promotes tyranny.
In addition, every campaign that got active participation from at least 3.5 percent of the population succeeded, and many succeeded with less. All the campaigns that achieved that threshold were nonviolent; no violent campaign achieved that threshold.[4]
the tipping point in an exponential is chaotic and not forecastable, we will know only in the rearview mirror that it has happened.
Where are we on the Curve? I suspect a good way along the steeper part with the Bureaucracy of the Elites very very worried. Hence the various crackdowns and censorship initiatives
Whether we live in an idiocracy or not what is important is not the belief in the efficaciousness of Electrolytes, but the Eyeball to eyeball blackballing of those at the trough and on the take. Tell their mothers.
This is all about nCov and supply chains. Nothing to do with energy. The effects will be 10X worse than the GFC.
Agreed. There is something of the Problem of the Tool here. If the only tool one has is a Hammer then sooner or later all problems turn into Nails.
Obviously, essayists in the Alternative media and people in the media generally giving “Content ” to the 1 in 8 or a wider and less august “Mob Audience” are not going to like this simple piece of advice.
Have a quiet word about making it right, in the ears of those who are “Troughing” and generally enabling the emperor to parade around naked.
Now flamed the dog-star's unpropitious ray,
Smote every brain, and wither'd every bay; 10
Sick was the sun, the owl forsook his bower,
The moon-struck prophet felt the madding hour:
Then rose the seed of Chaos, and of Night,
To blot out order, and extinguish light,
Of dull and venal a new world to mould,
And bring Saturnian days of lead and gold.
BOOK THE FOURTH.
ARGUMENT.line 10.
the mock-hero should have “Vanity, Impudence, and Debauchery”. As a wise man knows without being told, Pope says, so the vain man listens to no opinion but his own, and Pope quotes Cibber as saying, “Let the world… impute to me what Folly or weakness they please; but till Wisdom can give me something that will make me more heartily happy, I am content to be gazed at“.[26]
Some Dæmon stole my pen (forgive th’ offense)
And once betray’d me into common sense:
Else all my Prose and Verse were much the same;
This, prose on stilts; that, poetry fall’n lame (I 187–190[30])
As my blogs are scrapbooks, doodle pads, and streams of consciousness as I ponder the longer cycles of my own discombobulation I add bits as I get into my workflow through the day, occasionally a new book is discovered which I find I really need to read, other times another distraction might set off another train of thought. Ian Crane’s insight into Zelikow’s thesis on manipulating public perceptions has repaid the re-watching. Also, the P2P foundations founder introducing the series in the Nation Magazine has given me further pause for thought along with the Keen Layne Hartsell interview, Satoshi launched the Bitcoin whitepaper in the P2P foundation discussion group a discussion in which Hartsell participated. Makes you think?
“Whenever you get two people interpreting the same data in different ways,” “that’s metaphysics.” is a quote from an interview published in Scientific American with Thomas Khun the coiner of the term and proposer of the concept of paradigm shifts. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/
We are not in the habit of stating the limits of which, what we believe and state as fact will remain to be true and stand up to scrutiny. We tend to state our claims as if they were absolutes much of the time.
This interchange between Kunstler and Berman on where did peak oil go from 2018 was interesting to contrast with Kunstler’s recent appearance on Geo-Politics and empire where he also professes an enduring dislike personally for Noam Chomsky. This, then contrasted with both appearing in the Nation magazines video series on Peak oil and then finally with the journey of Mike Ruppert from 9-11 truth to peak oil propagandist, which ties in also with Peak prosperity and Chris Martenson. Cognitive dissonance is a much better first explanation for contradictions in all expressed opinions in this day and age as quoted above from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. The Scientist and the Church. , which commentator or blogger is not confronted with sure bet betting slips that “now hang on the thread of cognitive dissonance”.
Always of course begging the question were they gambling with their own skin in the game. ( Hugh Hendry anyone.)
6:15
with prospects for recovery much worse are we going to see the phenomenon from
6:21
2019 people on the street undressed creating more difficult environment for
6:27
policy makers
The Way Out of the bottle. Solidarity- 12 Log 2-8
From the viewpoint of capital as power, penality and unemployment are not
distinct aspects of politics and economics, respectively. Instead, they are different
forms of capitalized resistance and sabotage. Human creativity is a positive form of
resistance to capitalist power, and the threat of unemployment is the means by which
the ruling class tries to strategically sabotage and subjugate this creativity to capitalist
ends. Similarly with crime and punishment. Illegality is a negative form of resistance
to capitalist power (a ‘primitive rebellion’, as Engels 1971 called it), and penality is the
major institution that keeps this resistance from undermining the capitalist creorder.
These forms of resistance and sabotage fit into the breadth and depth regimes of
capital as power (Nitzan 2001; Nitzan and Bichler 2009a: Chs. 15-17). In the past, we
argued that during a depth phase, the sabotage of stagflation (stagnation and inflation)
assists the process of ‘accumulation through crisis’ (Nitzan and Bichler 2002). Now,
since crime and punishment are tightly correlated with unemployment, we can see
how this additional form of sabotage kicks in. During the depth phase of the 1970s and
1980s, unemployment and inflation increased, as did crime and punishment.
Conversely, during the breadth phase of the 1990s, they all decreased.
And here we come to the enigma of Figure 5.
During the systemic crises of the
1930s and 2000s, the tight correlation between penality and unemployment seems to
have broken down: in both periods, the sabotage of unemployment rose sharply; yet
crime and punishment, instead of rising in tandem, actually receded.
What could explain this enigma? One possibility is that some of the data we use
are incorrect or inaccurate. A second possibility is that our top-down presentation of
the data is too crude, and that a more refined set of proxies for unemployment, crime
and punishment will eliminate the anomaly. But there is also a third, substantive,
possibility, and that is that systemic crises alter the rules of the game. These crises not
only dent the resolve of the ruling class; they also change the class disposition of
criminals. Under the system of ‘business as usual’ (including its cyclical crises), the
poor feel that there is ‘no way out’. Without jobs, without dignity and with little
prospect for change, the only alternative is crime. But during a deep, systemic crisis,
there emerges another, transformational, alternative. This alternative is based not on
individual alienation and protestation, but on class solidarity; not on defying the
system through Quinney’s ‘crimes of resistance’ (1980), but on altering its very
structure. Perhaps it is the emergence of this democratic opening during a systemic
crisis that causes crime to drop despite soaring unemployment.12
12 The third possibility was suggested to us by the Israeli criminologist, Professor Jacob Reuven.
At 37.42, in my chat with Ranjan back in January, I was still puzzling over whether or not Mark Carney had “Fluffed” his lines at Cop 26, in our discussion over the weekend just gone I explain why I have now formed the conclusion that he did.
Ranjan and Roger Discuss 3 Strikes Swine Flu 1, 2 , 3 – Creorder Out of Covidstroika chaos. Never let a good myth go to waste , Population Population Population. Gatekeepers, Controlled Opposition, Useful idiots
Recorded in early Autumn 2007, Ian R Crane shared his insights into the deep geopolitical machinations of the Oil Industry and challenged the emerging ‘Peak Oil’ Cult. Eight months later the price of oil peaked at $147 per barrel, then crashed to $35 per barrel in November 2008. The parallels between 2008 and 2015 may well serve as an indicator of yet another imminent Global Financial Collapse!
As with Peak Oil, it’s actually Plateau, bullshit. But the chattering classes deserved media, mass, mainstream, and alternative keep pumping it and probably always will.
don’t get fooled again.
This.
or the enduring
A Giant Sucking Sound,
Tides of the Dollar Moon
A planet to its Star must look
The planet no less needs its moon.
As the Sun is the store of energy, New.
The moon drives and regulates currents,
of the tides, time and the nature of things.
That Golden Orb gives all
That silvery Moon regulates all
Both work together even as the other
Seemingly sleeps and yet currents
of the tides, Time and the nature of things pass.
On the nature of Man-made things
On a standard of gold which
Jennings would not be crucified upon,
That cross Of Gold-alone hard food of Midas.
No tides to complement the Orb
For Silver was its currency,
the Silvery moon to that crosses Golden Sun
which means of exchange fed the common man
The Silver Moon drives and regulates
Currencies of the tides, Time and the nature of things.
Time passed and Man forsakes the Golden Orb
and its silvery moon. No credit he gave
to drivers of Tides, Time and the nature of things
Fiat of imperial rule enforces debts,
new tides in political Economy.
FIAT dictates the new tides of Commerce.
Ephors of debt above and astride the law.
No silvery moon, complementary to the Golden Orb.
There are no tides by means of which the common man
may be fed. Hard food of Midas alone- Starvation.
King Kanute Like those ephors
wave bidding the advancing tide backwards
Still, they advance tides in a tsunami of debt
Tides of a Dollar moon by fiat
Hegemonic Tides of the Dollar Moon.
Roger G Lewis (2016)
Bi-oilism.Petro/CarbonDollar Standard
This JP Morgan report is rather good
Mountains and Molehills. The Green New Deal mandates zero net emissions for the US by 2030 for the entire energy sector (not
just from electricity generation), and does so while phasing out nuclear power and relying heavily on carbon sequestration by
forests. This sets a goal that cannot be achieved. At best, the Green New Deal is a slogan to galvanize support for change; at worst,
it’s a sign of how little work its proponents have done. This year’s paper gets into the details of where energy comes from, how it’s
used, and the de-carbonization challenges facing the world’s industrialized and emerging economies. Additional topics include the
latest research on wildfi res, and Trump’s War on Science.
There is every reason to doubt the BBC’äs report on the new report, The BBC and Roger Harribin are alarmist extremists, there’s no sugar-coating that pill or indeed the same conclusion of Mr Monbiot at the Guardian.
Jamie Dimons Report last Spring (2019)
Mark Carney and Michael Bloomberg are photographed at the top of the news page of The Producers of the report the BBC are dishonestly referring to as JPMorgan, the group is independent of JPM apparently.
That the Central Banking cartel is pushing carbon credits and a carbon-based taxation/Debt system to replace the current Broken system is undoubted, This is Green Washing, Clive Spash is the go-to on the impossible contradictions engendered in this new elitist fix to keep the rest of humanity in debt bondage.
Yumpu channel embeds appear in personal blogs I ( Roger Lewis) have compiled over the past few years.
Each group has its own economic interests and perspective foremost when it analyses the economy and promotes a particular viewpoint. Politicians, economists, and business people rarely promote analysis that conflicts with their group interests. Clarity and analytical integrity generally work against private interests and are usually absent.
In an attempt to seek out and further the public interest, even where this may conflict with the privileged private interests which usually dominate the analysis and debate in corporate discourse. I would ask the easily shocked to consider that the uncompromising approach in This video will pose a major challenge to those who have learned their analysis exclusively through channels devoted to promoting privileged and usually private interests, and must “unlearn” erroneous but pervasive assumptions
What it means to be a disrupter in the BigTech/Ego Machine complex , as with so much else has become corrupted or at the least the meaning has been inverted.
These crises not only dent the resolve of the ruling class; they also change the class disposition of
criminals. Under the system of ‘business as usual’ (including its cyclical crises), the
poor feel that there is ‘no way out’. Without jobs, without dignity and with little
prospect for change, the only alternative is crime. But during a deep, systemic crisis,
there emerges another, transformational, alternative. This alternative is based not on
individual alienation and protestation, but on class solidarity; not on defying the
system through Quinney’s ‘crimes of resistance’ (1980), but on altering its very
structure. Perhaps it is the emergence of this democratic opening during a systemic
crisis that causes crime to drop despite soaring unemployment.
a third possibility was suggested to us by the Israeli criminologist, Professor Jacob Reuven.
Sub-prime Mortgages: A New Global Frontier for Finance
The 1980s opened a new financial phase that became yet another disciplining mechanism.22
Here it was not structural adjustment programs but financial adjustment crises. Since the
1980s there have been several financial crises, some famous, such as the 1987 New York
stock market crisis and the 1997 Asian crisis. And some obscure, such as the individual
country financial crises that happened in over 70 countries in the 1980s and 1990s as they
deregulated their financial systems, mostly under pressure from global regulators aiming at facilitating the globalizing of financial markets.
Conventional data show the post-1997 financial crisis period to be a fairly stable one,
until the current crisis. One element in this picture is that after a country goes through an
‘adjustment’ crisis, ‘stability’ (and prosperity!) follow. This then produces a representation
of considerable financial stability, except for a few major global crises, such as the dotcom crisis. A much mentioned fact regarding the current 2007 – 2008 crisis intended to
show that the system is fine, is that in 2006 and 2007, 124 countries had a GDP growth
rate of 4% a year or more, which is much higher than that of previous decades. The suggestion is then that the 2007 – 2008 crisis is precisely that—an acute momentary event, but that
the system is fine.
But behind this stability lies a savage sorting of winners and losers, and the fact that it is easier
to track winners than to track the slow sinking into poverty of households, small firms, and
government agencies (such as health and education) that are not part of the new glamour
sectors (finance and trade). The miseries these adjustment crises brought to the middle sectors
in each country and the destruction of often well-functioning economic sectors is largely an
invisible history to the global eye. These individual country adjustment crises only intersected
with global concerns and interests when there were strong financial links, as was the case
with the 1994 Mexico crisis and the 2001 Argentine crisis. Further, when these miseries
became visible, as when members of the traditional middle class in Argentina went on food
riots in Buenos Aires (and elsewhere) in the mid 1990s—after adjustment!—something
unheard of in Argentina, and which took many by surprise.
Besides the very partial character of post-adjustment stability and the new ‘prosperity’ much
praised by global regulators and global media, there is the deeper fact that ‘crisis’ is a structural
feature of deregulated, interconnected, and electronic financial markets
What stands out in this phase that begins in the 1980s is that global and adjustment crises had
the effect of securing the conditions for globally linked financial markets and the ascendance of
a financial logic organizing larger and larger sectors of the economy in the global North. In
this process large components of the non-financial economy in these countries were ruined.
24
In what follows I argue that the specific way of using the sub-prime mortgage in the 2001 – 2007
period makes it a dangerous instrument that is likely to be used worldwide over the next decade. It
The complexity of the financial innovation was a series of products that de-linked
sub-prime sellers and investors’ profits from the creditworthiness of consumer home mortgage-buyers. Whether the mortgage is paid matters less than securing a certain number of
loans that can be bundled up into ‘investment products’. The crisis of home-buyers was not a
crisis for financial investors, even though millions of middle and working class families now
live in tents in the US. For finance it was a crisis of confidence. But it showed the importance
of the systems of trust that make possible the speed and orders of magnitude of this financial
system. The crisis of home-owners (valued at a few hundred billion dollars) was the little tail
that dented the enormous dog of trust in the financial system.
It is important to emphasize that the viral infection of sub-prime mortgages originated in the
United States but spread to other countries via the globalization of financial markets. This spread
was helped by the fact that non-national investors are, as a group, the single largest buyers of
some of the weakest types of mortgage instruments. Together with banks, non-national mortgage
buyers are over a third of all sub-prime mortgage holders. Foreign ownership strengthens the
potential for spill-over effects well beyond the United States
One way of thinking of this systemic deepening is as the expansion of the operational space
for advanced capitalism—it expels people both in the global South and in the North even as it
incorporates spaces. The devastated economies of the global South subjected to a full decade or
two of debt servicing, are now being incorporated into the circuits of advanced capitalism
through the accelerated acquisition of millions of hectares of land by foreign investors—to
grow food and extract water and minerals, all for the capital investing countries. This also
holds for such a radically different instance as the sub-prime mortgage crisis, a largely global
North dynamic. I see the sub-prime mortgage as extending the domain for high finance but in
a way that delinks the financial circuit from the actual material entity that is the house, and
hence from the neighborhood, and from the people who got the mortgage. All of these materialities are excluded from this type of articulation with high-finance—which means that the
devastated neighborhoods are expelled from what are, strictly speaking, also traditional circuits
of capital. It is akin to wanting only the horns of the rhino, and throwing away the rest of the
animal, devaluing it, no matter its multiple utilities. Or using the human body to harvest
some organs, and seeing no value in all the other organs, let alone the full human being—it
can all be discarded. But unlike the clear realignments we see in vast stretches of the global
South, it is not clear how these devastated urban spaces in the global North will be incorporated
into the circuits of advanced capitalism.
This systemic shift signals that the sharp increase in displaced peoples, in poverty, in deaths
from curable illnesses, are part of this new phase. Key features of primitive accumulation are at
work, but to see this it is critical to go beyond logics of extraction and to recognize the fact of
systemic transformation, with its system-changing practices and projects—the expulsion of
people that transforms space back to territory, with its diverse potentials.
24 We saw this also in the 1997 Asian financial crisis which destroyed thousands of healthy manufacturing firms in
South Korea. These firms had a global demand for their products, with the workforces and the machines. Yet
they had to close because credit dried up, preventing them from paying for all the up-front costs of production,
and causing the unemployment of over a million factory workers. 25 The financial deepening of economies has become one of the major dynamics characterizing advanced economies.
The ratio of global financial assets to global gross domestic product was nearly 350% in 2006. The number of
countries where financial assets exceed the value of their gross national product more than doubled from 33 in
1990 to 72 in 2006 (McKinsey & Company, 2008). Securitizing a broad range of types of debt is a key vehicle for this financial deepening. The extension of securitization into consumer debt, including mortgages, took off in
the 1980s in the US. The sharp growth of mortgages to enable the massive housing construction boom in developed
countries in the decades following World War II produced a vast money pool, which became a prime object for
securitization in the 1980s. Deregulation became the critical step to enable securitization: mortgages had to be
pulled out of their protective encasements—that is, pulled out of millions of small credit unions and hundreds
of highly regulated banks. In The Global City (Sassen, 1991, see generally ch. 4) I examined how this generated
a series of innovations—new types of mortgage instruments, of which the current generation of so-called
structured-investment instruments is but the latest. The overall effect was a vast expansion of credit in the
mortgage sector. 26 The trends in financial globalization point to geopolitical shifts. The US is still the largest financial power with
$56.1 trillion assets, almost a third of the world’s financial assets. Europe’s Eurozone financial markets were
almost $40 trillion, and including the UK’s $10 trillion and Eastern Europe’s $1.4 trillion puts Europe close to
the US. The Euro is becoming a strong alternative global currency to the dollar, with the value of euro currency
in circulation surpassing the latter in mid-2007; it is also the top currency for the issuing of international bonds.
Japan, China, India, and several other Asian countries are a fast growing third financial block. The composition
of financial assets in these major national and regional financial markets varies sharply. The largest components
in the US are equity securities and private debt securities, which together account for 70% of the financial
market. In contrast, in China, bank deposits account for 55% of financial assets
Begin with Lewis Mumford. His book Technics and Human Development: The Myth of the Machine (1967) offers a novel interpretation of the early rise of power civilizations – or states – in the Fertile Crescent. The rulers of these ancient states, he argues, discovered the eternal cosmos and began to unlock some of its secrets, and this breakthrough has had far-reaching dialectical consequences. On the one hand, it enabled those rulers to leverage energy in ways that were previously unimaginable, while on the other, it showed them that, compared to the vast cosmos, they themselves were utterly insignificant. The result was a massive cognitive dissonance – an acute tension between infinity and nothingness, creation and termination, omnipotence and mortality – and according to Mumford, this dissonance subjected those early civilizations to a totally new obsession: power for the sake of power.
To manifest their newly found prowess while alleviating their fear of death, the rulers of these societies started to play god. And they did so, says Mumford, by constructing a social ‘mega-machine’, a highly mechanized hierarchical structure that sought to mirror their own cosmos and make them – the mega-machine’s overlords – appear omnipotent and immortal.
The visible footprints of this mega-machine were phenomenal by prehistoric standards. The subjects of the mega-machine were forced to toil in the fields, dig canals, build complex irrigation systems and large granaries, construct huge palaces, temples and megalomaniacal graves and, last but not least, become cogs in large standing armies and palatial bureaucracies. Moreover, their endeavours mobilized energy at levels that earlier Palaeolithic and Neolithic societies could not even fathom. But according to Mumford, these were all means to an end. The ultimate goal was not to capture energy or transform the physical environment, but to make the mega-machine’s rulers feel almighty, divine and, above all, eternal. It is not for nothing that the Epic of Gilgamesh – perhaps the world’s first written myth – is about a ruler’s quest for immortality (Mitchell 2004).
“But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”
I hope everyone knows that Peak Oil is a fraud perpetrated by the oil companies to jack up the price of oil…Venezuela has the potential to pump more oil than Iraq…ditto for the oilsands in Alberta. What is the motive behind the Green movement? Carbon Tax? UN resolution aplenty? World government? We need to curb pollution and reign in our consumptive lifestyles, but let’s be sure of the facts before we resort to fear-mongering.
1 thought on “THE DEVILS EXCREMENT .50 THINGS THAT MADE THE MODERN ECONOMY, #OIL. #PEAKBULLSHIT #PEAKeverything, #Don’tGetfooledagain. #CBDC #CarbonCurrencyEndGame #DigitalGulag #Covidstroika”
https://therealslog.com/2022/04/26/we-are-nowhere-near-peak-snake-oil-propaganda/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbeL8nXuZJo 
https://www.thespectacle.net/gallery/lewis-mumford
This is all about nCov and supply chains. Nothing to do with energy. The effects will be 10X worse than the GFC.