Couple of things important enough that I feel I need to post out for everyone.
End of the Financial World As We Know It /How to Repair a Broken Financial World: The only thing you need to read about the self serving and self interest that made things like the housing crisis and the Madoff’s scheme possible. It’s a long pair of articles that I think should be required reading. Via Boing Boing and almost everyone else on the internet apparently.
Also from BB is this link to Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2009. This is worth reading if you’re interested in the series of bubbles we’ve seen and what to expect after the industrial age. Bruce is a science fiction writer and so is a very forward thinker. There’s plenty to muse over here. Some of the discussion will lead you names such as Carlotta Perez, who writes articles with phrases like “Techno-economic paradigms as the meta-routines for a long period” and The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, and Dimitry Orlov, who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union and has been predicting financial collapse in the US for several years.
More on Orlov for a moment because he’s written some very interesting things over the past few years that I hope to share with you:
The Five Stages of Collapse Financial, Commercial, Political, Social and Cultural are the phases that Orlov says we have to look forward to, and he’s already saying his job of prostignation is done because we’re already in the first one. As convincing as Orlov is in his other writings I still doubt that I’ll see the collapse of the Federal Government in my lifetime. Closing the Collapse Gap and Post Soviet Lessons for a Post American Century are both sobering thought experiments that make me reconsider and I would hope you to read and think over.
Keeping in line with the rest of the doom and gloom next up is John Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. Kunstler’s blog is called Clusterfuck Nation and let me say that the man must mainline straight vitrol for breakfast, lunch, and dinner because he doesn’t hold nothing back when it comes to saying what he believes. Some of the things Mr. Kunstler believes:
- World oil production reached a peak sometime between 2000-2008.
- The current way of life made possible from petroleum-fed factories and highways is unsustainable.
- Alternative fuels such as solar, wind or even nuclear will not be able to meet American energy demands in time to meet the decline in petroleum supplies.
- Suburbia and its commuter lifestyle is the worst blight on American culture.
- Walmart and its ilk are the second worst. Save a dollar and destroy society all at the same time.
- A return to localism and self-sustainablility is the key to avoiding a Orlovian collapse and environmental crisis.
- The latter half of 2009 will be worse than 2008.
I just started the book today. I picked it up because Kunstler puts a voice to a lot of the frustration that I’ve internalized over the past few years as I’ve matured and started to think about the way things are in the world. He’s been posted on Metafilter quite a bit lately, most recently for his 2009 predictions. He already has a new post up saying Goodbye to GWB. He’s been pretty prolific lately and and has a good writing voice despite his schadenfreude and snark. I’m hooked, if you can’t stand him there’s still the possibility that we can still be friends, it’s OK.
So far I’ve found little consolation in the naysayers to Orlov and Kunstler. Most of the debate I’ve heard so far is that one is an engineer, so what does he know, and the other wants us to return to hippie commune idyllic utopia that never existed in the first place; I don’t don’t think either are valid ones so I invite your well thought critisicms like I love good games of chess.
Anyone who’s seen Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai has heard this quote from the Hagakure:
Death is Life
The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one’s body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one’s master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead.
I bring this up not to be pessimistic. I bring them up because I find them fascinating. I bring them up because I think that talking about something that may never happen is not as bad as being surprised that does happen. The quote from the Hagakure means to always be prepared for the worst, to keep one’s head in the midst of it and to be mentally prepared for it. I’m telling you because I want to you to think about it lest it ever happen. When I worked in sales I was taught to play a mental trick on myself by setting my goal twice as high as my quota. In this way even if I did miss my self-set goal I would still most likely beat my quota. Hopefully I will be able to look back 10 years from now and say “gee, things weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they were gonna be, were they?”
I hope you can take some time out of your day to read up on some of these links. This is the kind of stuff that I spend a lot of time thinking about so I would appreciate to hear from others who find this stuff interesting. Hit me up on if you’d like to start a new political party or debate this kind of stuff further. Also, I will buy dinner for the person that comes up with the best phrase to describe the theme of this post.
Till next time, meditate on these great Ghost Dog/Hagakure quotes.
