collapse naysayers

COLLAPSE NAYSAYERS


At the risk of being just like my baggage train of trolls that follow me everywhere, complaining and bitching the whole way as they consume my free content, I’ll admit to listening to NPR last night. Why not? Our tax dollars at work. Anyway, they had an interesting show on the guy that was both the father of card counting in gambling and the original computer geek at Wall Street. I don’t actually know if there were useable computers available to the early hedge fund operators or if it was originally just mathematical formulas, but I found the whole thing fascinating. His name was Ed Thorp and he was featured in a book by Scott Patterson, “The Quants”. Ed is a pretty smart fellow and had always warmed against the Black Swain events that could invalidate his process, but obviously his modern trading system was kidnapped and raised to be a monster by the greed and idiocy of the financial institution.

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Today, let’s talk about the collapse naysayers. I won’t name any names to protect the guilty. Let’s just say he is one of those fellows that is embarrassed when a cammie wearing, carbine totting, MRE eating, underground lair dwelling survivalists is mentioned while describing his work on system slow decline. One excuse giving for the decline versus the collapse is the Black Plague of the middle ages. After a twenty five percent population decline, life pretty much went on as usual. There was no anarchy or collapse of government. Hence, large scalecatastrophes will not see a collapse. Now, we could sit and argue all day long about what happened after the fall of Rome. Was it a slow decline over centuries or was it pretty much a total collapse with 90% population declines? You know where I stand on the issue, but it is all based on conjecture. You know, I know, and even Ross Perot knows that with almost no written records on the event, speculation is the best we can do. But the Black Death has much better records. We know a lot more about it. So this is used as proof that us crazy doomers are just whistling Dixie out of our asses, thinking we will all be savagely beating each other over the heads with pieces of concrete rebar and throwing the loser into the stew pot.

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But the bubonic plague that wiped out large segments of Europe ( I’m sure it did the same over in Asia, but that is where Mongols and Muslims hang out, not to mention where the disease originated, so we tend to dismiss the region in history, or at least the history we are interested in- kind of like Africa is ignored outside a few interesting colonialism tales ) was actually not a disaster at all. The survivors had enough to eat after it was all said and done. Overpopulation was solved, there was then enough fertile land for everyone. I’ve already written about the shrinking farmland leading to overpopulation and famine. Just as in Rwanda recently. Plots got smaller and smaller as more and more people were born until no one had enough to eat. European farmland, even though increasing, its output was not enough to keep pace with population growth. Malthusian theory had already been proven before it was published. The book just put a nice mathematical shine on it. A 25% population decline was not enough to destabilize society in general, but it was enough to take the pressure off the survivors calorie count.

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The coming famines will be caused by decreasing energy inputs. We can go 100% organic and still not be able to feed our population if the transportation infrastructure can’t keep feeding the urban populations. It isn’t really so much the lack of artificial fertilizers and tractor fuel ( although their absence or just their decrease will make a huge difference ) as it is being able to get the food hundreds of miles away to feed the cities. Unless we start today, we can’t relocate millions out of the cities and have then start gardening to feed themselves. Gardening and raising livestock, because our meat producing facilities have been centralized. Which leads to lack of both meat and fertilizer for the gardens. The migration of farmers to the cities took place over generations, in an energy increase environment. You can’t simply move them back in an oil down scenario. Yet you can’t keep feeding people over three thousand miles from centralized locations if energy is decreasing. This is why it is vital for you to have your grain stockpile. No, it won’t support you indefinitely. But it will see you through a die-off. You can’t garden again until order is restored.

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This time around, we won’t just lose 25% of the population. The globe is supporting many more mouths than can be fed organically. Perhaps as much as tens times too many. Only oil feeds them, even, or perhaps especially, in America. Oil down is soil down, water down, centralization down. Grain down. War, conflict, famine, refugee up. Don’t worry, if you forget I’ll keep warning you.

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