What's Good for Covid, is Good for the Gas Crisis: the Trojan Horse of EU-led centralisation shows enormous contempt, staggering incompetence, and the end of popular sovereignty in Europe
What's Good for Covid, is Good for the Gas Crisis: the Trojan Horse of EU-led centralisation shows enormous contempt, staggering incompetence, and the end of popular sovereignty in Europe
Bonus features include historical analogies and a rant to rouse the citizens of Europe to fight the looming power grab by the EU Commission, if only for their and childrens' future
Hahahahahaha! What is the solution to centralization? More centralization! Get more fuel so you can fight over what? More fuel!
Disconnect from the centralization and become a tree tenant peasant now and avoid the rush!
And stock up on the iodine!
I could tell you what I've been doing, the more than just typing part, but you won't listen because all you want is what most everyone wants; cheap fuel and an easy vacation filled life, which ironically, not paying attention to reality leads to no such thing. One of the best posts I've read here recently describing the situation, but again, no solutions (independence from centralization) offered. Here is a question: What would it take on an individual level to not need the gas? That is the most important question if the gas is cut off. But you can't answer that because you are totally captured by this social/economic arrangement.
That's a funny thing about Europeans: they treat vacations (travel for fun) as essential. I find this very weird (even though I'm European myself). Sometimes, I'll watch documentaries and such about poor or "struggling" people, and it's funny how big of a role an inability to travel plays. You cannot afford to travel? Okay, then use your vacation days to relax at home, visit some museums perhaps (that's often free or quite cheap), or just take a walk in the local park. But no. Travel is sacred.
Interestingly, Americans don't seem to be so obsessed with travel. Oh, sure, the upper middle class is (weekends in Paris and all that). But the lower middle class and poorer? Nope. Americans are hung up on some other things (apparently, a one-bedroom apartment for a person living alone is a sign of failure), but not travel.
As to the 'sanctity' of travel (I like the ironic undertones here), well, it's mainly propaganda at-play, but it takes two to Tango, as the saying goes.
That said, I think the one thing any individual can do, and right away as well, is to get ready for harder times, at least spiritually and emotionally. If one accepts that the old paradigm of an 'easy vacation-filled life' accompanied by expectations of sustained future growth of material goods is coming to a close rather sooner than later, I'd argue that the next steps are much easier.
It's incredibly hard to let go of these deeply engrained notions, but, judging from my personal experience of the past two decades, it's very much liberating, and a lot of subsequent steps are taken with much greater ease.
Every journey, it has been said, begins with the first step.
There is no "solution." Or rather, the "solution" is that we all just get poorer. That's inevitable due to resource shortage, but the EU is working overtime to expedite its own day of reckoning.
A typical individual cannot do much of anything other than, I suppose, wear some warm clothes and cut energy consumption as much as possible (in other words, adapt to poverty). Weatherproofing/insulation is an option to some extent, but even that is non-trivial for those of us in rental apartments. Other "solutions" (e.g. use wood) do not work in densely populated areas. That is, sure, a few individuals can do it, but if "everyone" (or any significant percentage of "everyone") did that, you'd run out of resources very, very quickly.
Eventually, this is pretty much inevitable. However, this will almost certainly be accompanied by a large drop in population density (and therefore, population size). How do we get from here to there? Partly via collapsing birth rates, but very likely at least in part via the Four Horsemen.
The odds are this will happen. Just for the sake of conversation if people grew the food they eat bio intensely, we, the 8 billion, would need less than 5% of the land now in the control of the fascist cultivation system. But the fascists want concentrations of people in cities so they are more easily manipulated in their system, so yeah, prepare yourselves!
5%, you say? Meh. That just doesn't pass the sniff test. If it were reasonably doable, you'd have some community somewhere (Cuba?) doing it by now. Either it's total nonsense, or it's possible in theory, but would be so incredibly difficult to pull off for technical or other reasons that it simply doesn't work in practice. I mean, I'm sure you're convinced, but plenty of people are convinced you can run the industrial civilization on wind and solar, but somehow, as soon as you try, it's a spectacular failure. (Which isn't to say you cannot farm more intensively, or that you cannot get any useful work done using wind/solar. Totally different statement.)
Well, Rick, I'm a subscriber to your Substack, and I'm very much on board with what you're doing.
I'm glad you find value in my writing, however little it may be, but your point is very well taken: centralisation-fuelled crisis breeds more: centralisation. And, yes, your reading as in 'problems eating their solutions, giving rise to more, albeit different problems' is equally spot-on.
I suppose that, as long as 'we' (as in: society) don't want to return to a seemingly Hobbesian world of life being 'nasty, solitary, brutish, and short', a certain modicum of all the ills that bedevil Modern Life--from division of labour to large institutional frameworks to the massive (ab)use of hydrocarbon energy, to cite but the most obvious categories--are necessary, if not outright inevitable prerequistes.
Thus follows, logcially, the following notions (I doubt you or anyone might wish to call them axioms, or 'laws'), given in no particular pecking order or ranking, and of course the below listing, intended to supplement the above, is incomplete--as in: feel free to add items:
* division of labour
* social stratification
* geographical diffusion of infrastructure and population
* and many, many more
So, if you don't know to be 100% self-sufficient in everything, this means, to me at least, that there will have to be a 'trade-off' between these above items and individual liberties and autonomy: the tricky part, of course, is to somehow find the 'right' balance between the needs of the many and (vs.) the sovereignty of the individual.
I don't claim to know where that balance, of sorts, might be. I also don't wish to be in the position to be the arbiter of these things.
What I do know, however, is this: we're so deep in a hole, and by means of more centralised decision-making we continue to dig, that this mode of thinking--this way of life--cannot go on indefinitely. I suppose, somewhat fatalistically, we're soon, in a very much Nietzschean way, will find out about it, our shared (?) morality and values, as well as how much chaff is in the wheat, so to speak.
Yet, to also try to address your question in more concrete terms:
I suppose a way to keep warm during winter.
You know, personally, I don't rely on gas for heating, mainly due to Norway exporting this stuff to other places (such as Austria, by the way) and using electricity, mainly generated by hydropower. Yet, this is an 'accident', of sorts, as the infrastructure has been put in place well before I moved here.
I do rely on natural gas in a myriad of other ways, most importantly via the food I buy at grocery stores (first planing season on the farm), with natural gas being an essential feedstock for artificial fertilisers, there's literally nothing any one individual can do about this anyways.
As in more realistic 'solutions', well, I suppose to leave hydrocarbon energy before it leaves Modern Life (and throws us all back into a quite pre-industrial world), I guess that the most realistic way 'forward' (ahem) would be to use the remaining fossil fuels to figure out a way to produce the stuff needed for a spriritually fulfilling, meaningful existence without the absurdities and depravities of our times.
(Post)Modern Life, they way it is currently configured and, perhaps more importantly, where I fear it is headed, is something you may call it perhaps the 'Gene Roddenberry vision' of a 'replicator' or the like, which would abolish the need to mass produce and consume, thus doing away with the felt necessity by the few psychopaths (billionaires) to accumulate ever more 'money'.
Personally, I'm unsure if Roddenberry's crypto-socialism (ever saw a character perform manual or even industrial 'work' in 'Star Trek'?) is something that will ever materialise (pun intended), and personally, I'm very much in favour of freeholding, property-owning democracy, but given the current trajectories, I fear that the powers-that-be will opt for the insanity masquerading as the Roddenberry fantasy.
Perhaps, much like, to cite another pop-culture reference of a more recent vintage ('Hunger Games') the few who elect to forego most of these 'amenities', may be 'allowed' to do so in zones well beyond the willingness of 'the centre' to control as the cost/benefit analyses will render such undertakings uncomfortably expensive in terms of return on investment.
Send all those bastards to Mars! The land there is already purified for them! Beam me up Scotty!
Let me think about your comment for a time. I am not an academic but am attempting to get in touch with one of them. I am growing very healthy food easily (well, the natural food provides lots of energy to my body, I suppose a couch potato chip eater would think it very hard work) without any commercial fertilization. All I can eat for myself on the veg and fruit segment, no animals here, maybe someday, anyway, I even have enough to share with two other people. I must add I am having to learn how to eat it even. A good start to positive change is most people should grow some, or all of the food they eat. Of course, the fascists control land production so that's impossible right now.
I am also captured by the system, the fascists (government by corporation in this respect) have passed all the laws to prohibit free tenancy, I am merely advancing ideas for thought not believing anything will change until the resources are no longer profitable for the fascists to sell.
Which will be soon if we are not allowed to own anything.
The energy side is similar, very hard to disconnect. That will take time and money if one wants to maintain the level of energy consumption, so its learning to use less, and less, and less. Hahahaha! because that is what's coming regardless of what anyone thinks. That's why its the right question, to those dependent there is no answer until this social economic system collapses. Then you will have to learn quick, probably not quick enough though so start now.
But the fascists want to kill soil life, weeds, everything but their weak financial siphon pump patented GMO plants and force people to buy the help aids. Billions for the fascists and their investors and debts for the growers and consumers!
Oh, and sick people from eating this nutrition less food then need to visit the fascist health care factories believing there is a miracle injection or pill that will save them. The fascists even set up a government system that will pay for it all. Imagine that!
And then all the people blame me for planting trees, bushes, and plants that grow food, leading by example so to speak. Well, not speak, I'm not good at that, but since most people only seek entertainment I am last on the list. Not even on the list! Of course, the facts are what bothers them, not me in particular.
Oh, plus I ferment the weeds in a barrel, the microbes release the nutrients from these plants into the water, and I water the plants with it. Imagine that, instead of killing the weeds even before they grow with poisons, I convert them to an asset. And it just so happens whatever element is in short supply those weeds that accumulate those elements in other ways miraculously appear!
I published a video this morning reviewing a very small community garden rental bed I am growing food at/on/in. The plot is fertilized by one bucket of my aerobic compost plus utilizing bacterial quorum sensing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI9OETWQ58
Just in case this is interesting to someone, here is a playlist from the start, I will add as I go along. I don't have to do this, but maybe there are people who own next to nothing that want to start. Doesn't even have to be a community garden structure, just make a deal with the neighbor with a yard, pay the owner with food! Halfsies sort of deal!
I need to read this a couple more times, but latching on to one angle where I do have insight and knowledge, I can say this and even dare to claim some authority:
This energy panic is one of Russia's strategic long-term goals.
When the KGB-bureaucrats took over from Jeltsin's coterie of oligarks, the goal was to (use already inherent) corruption in western financial institutions to buy their way into US/EU politics, to move any and all borders be they geographical or political or financial or other as far away from the russian heartland as possible, establish an extended border of dependent states, and a further border of subservient nations in a state of disorder and chaos as to safeguard againts US (and future chinese and indian) encroachment.
That this has succeeded so well is mainly due to the flawed assumption in the west that economy follows hard scientific rules and denying that it is as much a social science and part of humanities as is sociology. Also, as pointed out by prof. Huntington all the way back before 1995, different civilisations use different metrics, have different perspectives and interpret and interact with the world in different ways - one cannot assume that the american neoliberal end-of-history and american exceptionalism-perspectives are true, universal or even desireable for other civilisations.
So, Russia has as of mid-May achived it's goals re: EU. The true power and the true ruler of the EU, Germany, is now forced to suffer or to oppose US-British financial war against Russia via Ukraine. And as all german politicians knows full well, should they go against the US-British axis of power, France and sundry stands ready to immeidately capitalise on this, while if they should choose to suffer and rebuild (again) internal politicking and power shifts may well mean the fulcrum of EU-power shifts to both the west/south of Germany, as to the East, pulling the union apart.
All of these being a win-win for Russia and the US (and Airstrip One).
It is to me amazing that, going by common media but also pol sci mags, this all seems like something new to so many. Haven't this been the game since right after the Black Death?
Hahahahahaha! What is the solution to centralization? More centralization! Get more fuel so you can fight over what? More fuel!
Disconnect from the centralization and become a tree tenant peasant now and avoid the rush!
And stock up on the iodine!
I could tell you what I've been doing, the more than just typing part, but you won't listen because all you want is what most everyone wants; cheap fuel and an easy vacation filled life, which ironically, not paying attention to reality leads to no such thing. One of the best posts I've read here recently describing the situation, but again, no solutions (independence from centralization) offered. Here is a question: What would it take on an individual level to not need the gas? That is the most important question if the gas is cut off. But you can't answer that because you are totally captured by this social/economic arrangement.
Re: "easy vacation filled life"
That's a funny thing about Europeans: they treat vacations (travel for fun) as essential. I find this very weird (even though I'm European myself). Sometimes, I'll watch documentaries and such about poor or "struggling" people, and it's funny how big of a role an inability to travel plays. You cannot afford to travel? Okay, then use your vacation days to relax at home, visit some museums perhaps (that's often free or quite cheap), or just take a walk in the local park. But no. Travel is sacred.
Interestingly, Americans don't seem to be so obsessed with travel. Oh, sure, the upper middle class is (weekends in Paris and all that). But the lower middle class and poorer? Nope. Americans are hung up on some other things (apparently, a one-bedroom apartment for a person living alone is a sign of failure), but not travel.
Exactly my thoughts as a fellow European.
As to the 'sanctity' of travel (I like the ironic undertones here), well, it's mainly propaganda at-play, but it takes two to Tango, as the saying goes.
That said, I think the one thing any individual can do, and right away as well, is to get ready for harder times, at least spiritually and emotionally. If one accepts that the old paradigm of an 'easy vacation-filled life' accompanied by expectations of sustained future growth of material goods is coming to a close rather sooner than later, I'd argue that the next steps are much easier.
It's incredibly hard to let go of these deeply engrained notions, but, judging from my personal experience of the past two decades, it's very much liberating, and a lot of subsequent steps are taken with much greater ease.
Every journey, it has been said, begins with the first step.
There is no "solution." Or rather, the "solution" is that we all just get poorer. That's inevitable due to resource shortage, but the EU is working overtime to expedite its own day of reckoning.
A typical individual cannot do much of anything other than, I suppose, wear some warm clothes and cut energy consumption as much as possible (in other words, adapt to poverty). Weatherproofing/insulation is an option to some extent, but even that is non-trivial for those of us in rental apartments. Other "solutions" (e.g. use wood) do not work in densely populated areas. That is, sure, a few individuals can do it, but if "everyone" (or any significant percentage of "everyone") did that, you'd run out of resources very, very quickly.
I'm just glad I don't have children...
Humans will switch to biological resources and humans will learn how live within its production. Just a matter of how many and when.
Eventually, this is pretty much inevitable. However, this will almost certainly be accompanied by a large drop in population density (and therefore, population size). How do we get from here to there? Partly via collapsing birth rates, but very likely at least in part via the Four Horsemen.
The odds are this will happen. Just for the sake of conversation if people grew the food they eat bio intensely, we, the 8 billion, would need less than 5% of the land now in the control of the fascist cultivation system. But the fascists want concentrations of people in cities so they are more easily manipulated in their system, so yeah, prepare yourselves!
5%, you say? Meh. That just doesn't pass the sniff test. If it were reasonably doable, you'd have some community somewhere (Cuba?) doing it by now. Either it's total nonsense, or it's possible in theory, but would be so incredibly difficult to pull off for technical or other reasons that it simply doesn't work in practice. I mean, I'm sure you're convinced, but plenty of people are convinced you can run the industrial civilization on wind and solar, but somehow, as soon as you try, it's a spectacular failure. (Which isn't to say you cannot farm more intensively, or that you cannot get any useful work done using wind/solar. Totally different statement.)
The people have to grow the food they eat is the key. This is by the numbers, a comparison of production of bio intensive versus monoculture farms.
You don't have to worry, you will be riding in a chariot powered by four horsemen instead of getting your fingernails dirty. Ha!
Well, Rick, I'm a subscriber to your Substack, and I'm very much on board with what you're doing.
I'm glad you find value in my writing, however little it may be, but your point is very well taken: centralisation-fuelled crisis breeds more: centralisation. And, yes, your reading as in 'problems eating their solutions, giving rise to more, albeit different problems' is equally spot-on.
I suppose that, as long as 'we' (as in: society) don't want to return to a seemingly Hobbesian world of life being 'nasty, solitary, brutish, and short', a certain modicum of all the ills that bedevil Modern Life--from division of labour to large institutional frameworks to the massive (ab)use of hydrocarbon energy, to cite but the most obvious categories--are necessary, if not outright inevitable prerequistes.
Thus follows, logcially, the following notions (I doubt you or anyone might wish to call them axioms, or 'laws'), given in no particular pecking order or ranking, and of course the below listing, intended to supplement the above, is incomplete--as in: feel free to add items:
* division of labour
* social stratification
* geographical diffusion of infrastructure and population
* and many, many more
So, if you don't know to be 100% self-sufficient in everything, this means, to me at least, that there will have to be a 'trade-off' between these above items and individual liberties and autonomy: the tricky part, of course, is to somehow find the 'right' balance between the needs of the many and (vs.) the sovereignty of the individual.
I don't claim to know where that balance, of sorts, might be. I also don't wish to be in the position to be the arbiter of these things.
What I do know, however, is this: we're so deep in a hole, and by means of more centralised decision-making we continue to dig, that this mode of thinking--this way of life--cannot go on indefinitely. I suppose, somewhat fatalistically, we're soon, in a very much Nietzschean way, will find out about it, our shared (?) morality and values, as well as how much chaff is in the wheat, so to speak.
Yet, to also try to address your question in more concrete terms:
I suppose a way to keep warm during winter.
You know, personally, I don't rely on gas for heating, mainly due to Norway exporting this stuff to other places (such as Austria, by the way) and using electricity, mainly generated by hydropower. Yet, this is an 'accident', of sorts, as the infrastructure has been put in place well before I moved here.
I do rely on natural gas in a myriad of other ways, most importantly via the food I buy at grocery stores (first planing season on the farm), with natural gas being an essential feedstock for artificial fertilisers, there's literally nothing any one individual can do about this anyways.
As in more realistic 'solutions', well, I suppose to leave hydrocarbon energy before it leaves Modern Life (and throws us all back into a quite pre-industrial world), I guess that the most realistic way 'forward' (ahem) would be to use the remaining fossil fuels to figure out a way to produce the stuff needed for a spriritually fulfilling, meaningful existence without the absurdities and depravities of our times.
(Post)Modern Life, they way it is currently configured and, perhaps more importantly, where I fear it is headed, is something you may call it perhaps the 'Gene Roddenberry vision' of a 'replicator' or the like, which would abolish the need to mass produce and consume, thus doing away with the felt necessity by the few psychopaths (billionaires) to accumulate ever more 'money'.
Personally, I'm unsure if Roddenberry's crypto-socialism (ever saw a character perform manual or even industrial 'work' in 'Star Trek'?) is something that will ever materialise (pun intended), and personally, I'm very much in favour of freeholding, property-owning democracy, but given the current trajectories, I fear that the powers-that-be will opt for the insanity masquerading as the Roddenberry fantasy.
Perhaps, much like, to cite another pop-culture reference of a more recent vintage ('Hunger Games') the few who elect to forego most of these 'amenities', may be 'allowed' to do so in zones well beyond the willingness of 'the centre' to control as the cost/benefit analyses will render such undertakings uncomfortably expensive in terms of return on investment.
Send all those bastards to Mars! The land there is already purified for them! Beam me up Scotty!
Let me think about your comment for a time. I am not an academic but am attempting to get in touch with one of them. I am growing very healthy food easily (well, the natural food provides lots of energy to my body, I suppose a couch potato chip eater would think it very hard work) without any commercial fertilization. All I can eat for myself on the veg and fruit segment, no animals here, maybe someday, anyway, I even have enough to share with two other people. I must add I am having to learn how to eat it even. A good start to positive change is most people should grow some, or all of the food they eat. Of course, the fascists control land production so that's impossible right now.
I am also captured by the system, the fascists (government by corporation in this respect) have passed all the laws to prohibit free tenancy, I am merely advancing ideas for thought not believing anything will change until the resources are no longer profitable for the fascists to sell.
Which will be soon if we are not allowed to own anything.
The energy side is similar, very hard to disconnect. That will take time and money if one wants to maintain the level of energy consumption, so its learning to use less, and less, and less. Hahahaha! because that is what's coming regardless of what anyone thinks. That's why its the right question, to those dependent there is no answer until this social economic system collapses. Then you will have to learn quick, probably not quick enough though so start now.
But the fascists want to kill soil life, weeds, everything but their weak financial siphon pump patented GMO plants and force people to buy the help aids. Billions for the fascists and their investors and debts for the growers and consumers!
Oh, and sick people from eating this nutrition less food then need to visit the fascist health care factories believing there is a miracle injection or pill that will save them. The fascists even set up a government system that will pay for it all. Imagine that!
And then all the people blame me for planting trees, bushes, and plants that grow food, leading by example so to speak. Well, not speak, I'm not good at that, but since most people only seek entertainment I am last on the list. Not even on the list! Of course, the facts are what bothers them, not me in particular.
Oh, plus I ferment the weeds in a barrel, the microbes release the nutrients from these plants into the water, and I water the plants with it. Imagine that, instead of killing the weeds even before they grow with poisons, I convert them to an asset. And it just so happens whatever element is in short supply those weeds that accumulate those elements in other ways miraculously appear!
I published a video this morning reviewing a very small community garden rental bed I am growing food at/on/in. The plot is fertilized by one bucket of my aerobic compost plus utilizing bacterial quorum sensing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxI9OETWQ58
Just in case this is interesting to someone, here is a playlist from the start, I will add as I go along. I don't have to do this, but maybe there are people who own next to nothing that want to start. Doesn't even have to be a community garden structure, just make a deal with the neighbor with a yard, pay the owner with food! Halfsies sort of deal!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDCRYtmkDsX9XHCD-higvYUoYRhc3-WhZ
I need to read this a couple more times, but latching on to one angle where I do have insight and knowledge, I can say this and even dare to claim some authority:
This energy panic is one of Russia's strategic long-term goals.
When the KGB-bureaucrats took over from Jeltsin's coterie of oligarks, the goal was to (use already inherent) corruption in western financial institutions to buy their way into US/EU politics, to move any and all borders be they geographical or political or financial or other as far away from the russian heartland as possible, establish an extended border of dependent states, and a further border of subservient nations in a state of disorder and chaos as to safeguard againts US (and future chinese and indian) encroachment.
That this has succeeded so well is mainly due to the flawed assumption in the west that economy follows hard scientific rules and denying that it is as much a social science and part of humanities as is sociology. Also, as pointed out by prof. Huntington all the way back before 1995, different civilisations use different metrics, have different perspectives and interpret and interact with the world in different ways - one cannot assume that the american neoliberal end-of-history and american exceptionalism-perspectives are true, universal or even desireable for other civilisations.
So, Russia has as of mid-May achived it's goals re: EU. The true power and the true ruler of the EU, Germany, is now forced to suffer or to oppose US-British financial war against Russia via Ukraine. And as all german politicians knows full well, should they go against the US-British axis of power, France and sundry stands ready to immeidately capitalise on this, while if they should choose to suffer and rebuild (again) internal politicking and power shifts may well mean the fulcrum of EU-power shifts to both the west/south of Germany, as to the East, pulling the union apart.
All of these being a win-win for Russia and the US (and Airstrip One).
It is to me amazing that, going by common media but also pol sci mags, this all seems like something new to so many. Haven't this been the game since right after the Black Death?