22 Billion Energy Slaves

Living in the Long Emergency, and Other Things

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 15:20:00 +0000

The universe demonstrated its sense of ironic timing the other week when I was informed by Amazon that my copy of James Howard Kunstler's new book Living in the Long Emergency had been held up. Apparently it was deemed a non-essential item in these times of emergency. This sucked, as I'd had the book on order for some time and had been looking forward to getting hold of a copy. Luckily - and perhaps this was just another sign of crossed wires and systems overload - my copy arrived on time anyway.

I'll get onto my review of it further down, but first I wanted to say that my fictional 2016 novel This Seat of Mars has been re-released as an eBook. The story concerns a mysterious event that throws a spanner in the works of the modern world, and follows a series of protagonists as they attempt to navigate this new and unfamiliar landscape they find themselves tossed into. It's mostly set in the UK where a sweating, overweigh old-Etonian is notionally the Prime Minister (until he becomes sick and can no longer function), although he seems to be controlled by a sinister bald-headed man with a different agenda.

Chaos ensues as people are stranded in remote locations and unable to get home, the army puts people on lockdown and key workers are asked to report for duty by text message. Conspiracy theories abound. We follow the fortunes of an anarchic young prepper with a penchant for survival (and revenge), a teenage goth girl who finds herself flung into a web of deep state intrigue and a millennial city couple who - stranded on holiday in Cornwall - are forced to decamp to a makeshift commune far outside their comfort zone.

It's a breezy story, not without its lighter parts, and I'm planning to release a follow-up as soon as it's written. This Seat of Mars eBook is all yours for the dirt cheap price of £2.99 / $3.60.

***

Okay, now onto Living in the Long Emergency. For many, James Howard Kunstler needs no introduction. His reputation as one of the cadre of original writers who delivered the unwelcome message about peak industrial civilisation was cemented back in 2005 when he published The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Kunstler's contention is that we've over extended ourselves, plastering the landscape with an unserviceable suburbia that has destroyed small town America, while beholden to an over-financialised economy that delivers benefits unevenly and produces almost nothing of value except for those at the top of the pyramid. He followed this book up in 2012 with Too Much Magic, a critique of modern culture's obsessive focus on technological solutions - including renewable energy harvesting methods - to predicaments that demand radically different ways of thinking. To demonstrate his projections in narrative form Kunstler went on to write a well-imagined set of novels - the World Made by Hand series - which vividly described what life might look like after a cataclysmic sudden end to the unstable edifice of techno modernity.

This latest book completes a trilogy, with the author travelling across America to seek out people who took his original message seriously and have either radically altered their lifestyle accordingly, or simply adapted in place by making the best of what resources are available to them. It's more than that, though, with Part 1 providing a kind of recap of our predicament (the first chapter is titled: Hey, what happened to peak oil?), and Part 3 (entitled: Now what?) offering an explanation as to what has been happening in the realms of energy, economics, politics, society and the biosphere as a whole since he wrote The Long Emergency, and what happens next. Sandwiched between all of this is the real meat of the book, that is the characters who have set out to deal with this overarching set of challenges in a range of original ways.

We get to visit Mark Shepard, who jacked in his job in a research lab firing bullets at Kevlar helmets and moved to the wilds of Alaska, only to return to Wisconsin and set up a model of silviculture (that is, using fruit and nut trees in an agricultural manner) that he hopes can reverse the ruination exacted on the land by modern agribusiness. There's also the woman who set up an off-grid bakery against the odds, a man who battled bureaucracy to establish a low-impact whisky distillery, and an odd couple of musicians who set up a permaculture farm above Puget Sound.

It's not all rural escape however, with one chapter following the life of a black man in inner city Baltimore, who says: "We need a common "American" culture based NOT on what you look like, but how you act (behaviour)." Josh Wickett (not his real name), a musician living in the ghetto, had found meaning in and was structuring his life around the teachings of Neely Fuller, in particular a code of conduct that seeks to avoid the psychological mind games that serve to split and fragment peoples who should ordinarily band together. He sees social media especially as a way technology is being used to weaponise people against one another. Wickett lives in a kind of post apocalyptic ruined house with rubble in the hallway (to deter looters) in what he calls "the black undertow of ghetto dysfunction" and yet maintains a mostly positive personal outlook, despite his bleak forecast for our collective future.

Another chapter follows KMO (Kevin Michael O'Connor) - Gen Xer, sci-fi graphic artist, ayahuasca partaker, original Amazon employee, radio presenter and friend of Kunstler - who some readers will be familiar with for his podcast The C-Realm. KMO, a liberal who found himself voting for Trump, finds himself living in Bellows Falls, Vermont, eking out a living in the post financial crash American landscape and counting himself lucky to have got this far. He explains the delusional outlook held by many: "... if you're doing well in a system which is collapsing, it's in the interest of your own psychological comfort to imagine the collapse is a fairy tale, that it's really just lazy people who should get to work and stop complaining."

KMO was the person I related to most closely of the ones Kunstler chose to include. As a Gen Xer myself, I too have felt for some time I've had one foot in the 'old' materialist world created by the boomers, and one foot in the 'new' paradigm of straitened energy dynamics and lowered material horizons that we are moving into. Also, like KMO, I have found myself bouncing around from pillar to post, never quite being able to make jobs work out or to earn a living from my own piece of land, and instead being forced to inhabit a kind of liminal limbo land where radical ideas of 'escaping the system' are dreamed of but tend to evaporate due to the way our over centralised systems reward efficiency and penalise the smaller players.

Jim Kunstler was an editor at Rolling Stone back in the 1970s, as well as an op-ed writer and journalist for the New York Times and Washington Post, and as such his pedigree as an old-school journalist could be considered pretty solid. What's more he has a reputation for going places others don't dare, and it's perhaps for that reason he included a white nationalist as one of his character study vignettes. The man, known as Rob, lives in a flyover Massachusetts region which Kunstler observes as: "... factory villages where the elegant Victorian redbrick mills with their once-proud cupolas stand empty and abandoned, wistfully evoking a bygone America of people who had something to get up for in the morning. A striking sample of the folks I saw on the streets in these places looked dishevelled, pushing shopping carts along the sidewalk, far from wherever the shopping carts originated."

It's in these decrepit and forgotten places that unsavoury politics can grow like mushrooms, bursting forth from the damp leaf litter of cultural decay. The author - himself Jewish - meets with Rob, who amongst other conspiracies claims Hitler was a British agent, and delves into his past to discover why he holds such opinions. As with all his other subjects, we are treated to a sometimes lengthy back story that shows their path through life and attempts to make sense of the choices and actions that brought them to where they are today. In the case of Rob, an intelligent and thoughtful man with convoluted views on race, had had a rough childhood and an adolescence in which his friends had once tried to sacrifice him on a fire in a Satanic ritual. It would seem that Kunstler included him as an illustration that in a society where the centre cannot hold, more extreme points of view will become more normalised. For anyone who has followed Kunstler's blog Clusterfuck Nation, they will be well aware of his contention that one day we might see a "corn pone Hitler" voted into power by disenfranchised and forgotten voters willing to trade liberties for security.

For the most part, however, it was the stories of the back-to-the-land folks I found most instructive. Nobody should imagine that the type of skills we would need to learn in a post-fossil fuel abundance world will be easy to come by, although perhaps we can hope the bureaucratic hurdles to making a living in a sustainable manner will be lowered. Kunstler himself indicates this in the last chapter when he writes about his own journey from New York City to a small, economically battered upstate town, and his travails with growing his own food (spoiler: the wildlife had other ideas).

I enjoyed reading Living in the Long Emergency. It deals with the converging nature of the crises we have, for the greater part, sleepwalked into, but reminds us that not everyone was asleep. It's reassuring to know there are people out there who are 'practical intellectuals', and Kunstler defines the term intellectual to be someone willing to engage in an idea and take action on it. These are the people who are searching out new modes of living that don't rely on the hyper-complex yet fragile industrial model we have come to think of as normal. Furthermore, these pioneers have taken a long and hard look at the situation, realised that salvation is not going to come in the form of a government handout, an economic miracle or even Elon Musk's brand of techno-narcissism, and decided to take matters into their own hands.

I'll be honest, there were sections of the book that I found myself skipping over. There is a fairly lengthy section towards the end on the minutiae of recent American politics, focusing on the political dishonesties on both sides of the aisle that I, as a non-American, found a bit tedious. But this was only a minor point in an otherwise decently-constructed, timely and well-written book. And Kunstler's eloquent prose is a marvel to behold, keeping the story flowing from page to page and raising the occasional chuckle. For example, here he is describing the rise of Donald Trump:

"History is a prankster. You order a Gray Champion, and cosmic room service sends up a casino developer and New York real estate mogul with a laughable hairdo, a big mouth and no experience running a government. And yet here he is, a rococo crypto-monarchist in gilded plastic trappings, living in the White House, oddly representing the most hapless segment of the electorate, the dispossessed, flyover deplorables, who had been cruelly ejected from a secure and comfortable middle-class existence when so much US industry was loaded on that slow boat to China."

To wrap up, this latest book from one of the elder statesmen of collapse could be a template for others to follow. When the hysteria surrounding the current COVID-19 panic subsides, and people realise that the economy has fundamentally changed while they were looking away and will not be returning to normal again, they'll be looking around for inspiration about ways to inhabit this planet whilst earning an honest income and maintaining their sense of human decency. Surprisingly upbeat at the end, Living in the Long Emergency might be just the book to dispel and sense of complacency and open people up to the numerous possibilities that still remain available.

Living in the Long Emergency is available here (UK) and here (US)

New Book - The Olive Press: News From the Land of the Misfits

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 11:38:00 +0000

The Olive Press: News From the Land of the Misfits

For those of you who may have been wondering what I’ve been up to for the past few months I can reveal that I’ve been writing – and publishing – my latest book. The Olive Press – News From the Land of the Misfits is my third and most ambitious book yet, and it took over 10 years to surface.

The book is a kind of a memoir of the time when I lived in a small farmhouse with my family in the mountains of southern Spain. I soon discovered that the idea of trying to be completely self-sufficient by growing my own food and producing my own energy using solar panels was an unrealistic one. With a young family to feed I had to also find a way of making money, so I hit on the idea of starting a newspaper.

The Olive Press was a kitchen table effort, and I had no journalism or editing experience to fall back on. Luckily, I met someone who said he was a journalist and so the two of us put the gears into motion and began to produce a small newspaper for the local area. The name came to me when I was listening to one of my neighbours complain about the poor prices he was being paid at the local olive press. Aha – I thought – what a great name for a newspaper.

It was somewhat peculiar and very beautiful region of Spain we were living in; a land of mountains and rivers, and of bountiful orchards and chestnut forests – in other words, quite unlike what many people assume Spain to be like. It was also one of those places that seemed to attract square pegs who had not managed to fit into any round holes elsewhere – these are the misfits of the title. Incidentally, I considered myself a misfit too. La Alpujarra, as the region is called, is situated between the Mediterranean sea and the Sierra Nevada mountains, just south of the lovely city of Granada. It was here that the Moors held out against the Catholics after 1492, creating a kind of earthly paradise by using their advanced knowledge of irrigation. It's an ethereal region of whitewashed villages and clear light where old traditions linger on and the 21st century lies just out of sight behind the mountains. There are buddhists and sufi mystics and all sorts of other misfits living peacefully in the hills there.

La Alpujarra is a place of clear light and peace

I found myself moving there having read a book called Driving Over Lemons, by Chris Stewart, which detailed how the author ‘escaped Thatcher’s Britain’ and lived the life of a penniless hill shepherd. It was that kind of place where everything seemed possible. At the time, I was feeling like I needed to escape the treadmill of tedious jobs I’d found myself on, and I wanted to move somewhere our kids could roam around and be free instead of suburban Copenhagen.

We started off living in an old (haunted, we discovered) stone house village high up in the mountains, but after about a year we bought an old tumbledown farmhouse in the lower foothills and set about converting it into a liveable building and a smallholding.

Our farmhouse in the lower foothills

Not long after setting up the newspaper we discovered just how difficult it was to make it pay. We employed a professional salesman, and he at least managed to save us from going bust inside the first year - although there was a cost to pay. I should probably have mentioned that The Olive Press was an unusual newspaper in that it exposed corruption and was all about protecting the local environment from the numerous businessmen who wanted to cover the entire region in plastic greenhouses, golf courses for the rich, and concrete 'urbanzations'. The anti corruption focus came from my journalist business partner, while the ‘green’ agenda came from yours truly. In retrospect, we were too idealistic to run a business, and it's a wonder we lasted as long as we did.

Our salesman brought in some big-paying advertisers, but the price that we had to pay was that we couldn’t be so controversial. We tried to behave but to be honest, we didn’t know what we were getting into. It wasn’t long before eyebrows were being raised and angry real estate agents were dumping our newspaper into bins and calling us ‘commies’ (we weren’t!). They said our focus on the wanton destruction of the environment by big agribusinesses was putting off investors in the region.

Another journalist came on board – this time a qualified one with a Fleet Street pedigree. He dragged our minnow of a newspaper into a much bigger pond, and it wasn’t long before we were involved in several high-profile spats – including one that could be reasonably identified as one of the first dominos that would topple Tony Blair’s government. All of a sudden we were in hot water and the pressure we were under led to internal conflict.

I bowed out after a couple of years, selling my share and doing whatever work I could find just to keep our heads above water. For the most part I earned money by working on building sites and delivering newspapers. We grew and ate what food we could but the financial crisis was beginning to bite and this had huge knock-on effects around the region.

Eventually, of course, the crisis of 2008-2009 engulfed almost everyone and we ended up almost losing our shirts. We found ourselves back in Denmark again (where my wife is from), sharing a single room and working jobs that we both hated. After a few months we were allocated a council flat and it was around this time – having experienced first-hand what an economic crisis looked like – I discovered the writings of Michael Ruppert, John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler and others, which led to the creation of this blog. Indeed, my brush with collapse had provided me with invaluable experience of what happens when the rug is pulled out from under you.

When life gives you lemons ...

I wrote most of the book soon after, but couldn’t find a publisher who would let me mention peak oil or the various environmental problems that spurred me on to produce the newspaper in the first place. Discouraged, and with other projects on the go, I saved the story on a memory stick, stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it.

I rediscovered it last year, and found myslef chuckling as I read the various chapters which had survived (many were corrupted – ironically by oil that had seeped into the chip from the surrounding casing - which was an advert for Hanover Airport with a floating toy airplane in it). Given that self-publishing had come a long way in the intervening decade I set up a small imprint and went about re-writing the book. This proved more arduous than I had thought, and there were legal implications for detailing real-life events. I had to re-write the entire thing at least twice, adding in extra chapters and cutting out large parts. At one point the manuscript was over 500 pages, so I had to slim it down quite a bit to make the story more readable. I even quit my job so I could focus on getting the book completed.

So anyway, The Olive Press – News From the Land of the Misfits is about that wild ride, but it’s not in any way a gloomy book. In fact there are parts of the story that are very funny. Oh, and it isn't just about my story; in the book I chronicle some of the inspiring and remarkable people I met who are working to regenerate the natural environment in Spain, as well as various other interesting people I got to hang out with, such as an on-the-run chef and a few famous and not-so famous personalities. Of the (so far few) people who have read it, they have all given it five stars and recommended it – I couldn’t ask for more.

Incidentally, the newspaper is still going strong and is now the largest foreign publication in Spain. It has four offices dotted around the country, including one in Gibraltar, although I can’t claim any credit for its success as it has changed quite a bit since I waved goodbye.

If you’d like to read The Olive Press you can buy it at all the various Amazon sites, as well as download the ebook, and - for those who want to avoid enriching Jeff Bezos even further - I believe it should also be available on sites such as Barnes & Noble in the next few weeks.

Prodigies of Peace

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 12:04:00 +0000

I’m not sure what to write about. I’ve been stuck in a kind of mental turmoil, my thoughts frozen on the event horizon of a black hole of catastrophe. Logic and reason can only take you so far and then you end up being snarled up by your own inconsistencies. For example, it’s pretty clear that civilisation is killing the planet – and by civilisation I mean our own one – the one that decimates ecosystems, poisons our mind and bodies, and hates nature.

So do I want this civilisation to crash and burn? You bet! But then that would likely mean the death of many of the people I know and love (including, probably, me) – and isn’t it a bit hypocritical to write such a thing on a computer and share it over the internet instead of scrawling it in charcoal on a piece of dried bark and parading around town with it on a stick?

So then, I think, maybe civilisation can be reformed. Perhaps we can all re-learn how to live in harmony with nature, stop fighting wars and filling the oceans with plastic. We could all listen to Greta Thunberg or AOC and demand a Green New Deal and everything would be all right again – capitalism with a nice shiny layer of green paint on it.

Or maybe not.

For some reason, and I’m not sure why this is, but for the last year or two I have been waking up in the mornings with music playing in my head. No, I haven’t fallen asleep with my headphones on, the music seems to be coming from somewhere inside. Perhaps it is because I have spent the last 18 months sitting in an office watching the hours and days tick by and my subconscious mind has been screaming at me to escape (which I did, last week, BTW).

It’s a different track every morning, and it could be anything. Two days ago it was a pop song from the 1980s – Into the Groove by Madonna – whereas yesterday it was the theme music to the sci-fi series Westworld by Ramin Djawadi.

This morning, when I woke up, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were performing a concert between my ears. They were playing Righteous and the Wicked, which includes the lyrics:

The righteous and the wicked
War and peace
The killing fist of the human beast
P.O.P., prodigies of peace
Hear me when I'm calling you
From my knees

I am playing for a better day
Playing for a better day, anyway
Oh yeah, I'm playing for a better day

Holy Mother Earth
Crying into space
Tears on her pretty face
I thought she had been raped

Killing your future blood
Fill her with disease
Global abortion pleas
That is what she needs

Perhaps my subconscious has got fed up with being too subtle, eh?

So what can we – I mean I, or each of us individually – do about this everlasting shit show?

Well, I suppose we can fight it.

But how does one fight against this nebulous, all-encompassing beast that we all live in the belly of? It seems pretty obvious by now that it’ll fight to the bitter end – it would rather kill every last man, woman, reindeer, tree and stag beetle than give up even an inch of ground. That’s the nature of, what my friend Thomas Sheridan calls the Psychopathic Control Grid (PCG) and Dmitry Orlov calls the Technosphere, that is effectively what our civ has become. It will take down the planet rather than relinquish control.

And just who is ‘us’. I seem to know a lot of people who are all of a sudden proclaiming themselves to be environmentalists. Lit with the fire of fervour, these people are demanding that the guvmint reduce carbon emissions to zero, practically overnight. Their strategy seems to involve wearing facepaint and glitter, stomping around in the streets holding up placards and drawing chalk outlines around children whilst shouting ‘Extinction!’

Are these privileged people? Sure. Do they demonstrate their commitment to their cause by curtailing their own impact on the environment? Maybe some of them do, but not that I’ve seen. Have any of them done a bit of research into how feasible their demands are if they were to be turned into public policy and what that would mean to society? Ummm …

Here’s another question: do I feel bad for mocking them? And the answer is: yes, I probably do. I mean, from my point of view they are likely being exploited by ‘green’ capitalist corporations who are trying to inflate a bubble of ‘renewable’ energy (not that such a thing exists, of course, unless you are talking wooden windmills and passive solar energy to heat your house) so that one last big money bubble can be blown up before everything comes crashing down.

But from the protestors' point of view they are fighting an evil tyranny of fossil fuel companies who are dead-set on being dastardly and evil because they are … dastardly and evil. Never mind that their form of protest – publicly having fun and dressing up – is a media-friendly gift to governments and corporations who can now claim to ‘have listened to the people’ and will gladly cut off the energy supply to the bottom 90% of said people (preserving, of course, their own privileges) and will then proclaim in truly Orwellian fashion that all CO2 emitters are bad, but some CO2 emitters are less bad than others.

The PCG is endlessly tormenting, that's just how it rolls.

So what to do about the killing fist of the human beast, as the Chili Peppers put it? How exactly do we fight back?

Well, here’s a thought that I’ve been having, and it starts with three premises:

Premise 1: Like a virus, ‘civilisation’ (aka the PCG) attempts to colonise all life forms, including, and perhaps especially, humans.

Premise 2: When it does so it undermines an organism’s ability to live its life in a manner to which it has naturally evolved – leading to fields of GMO plants growing in chemically saturated substrate (‘soil’), animals reared and killed in giant factories, and humans confined to perfunctory roles in office cubicles and retail outlets, while being harvested for their profit potential.

Premise 3: The PCG is addicted to expansion and control and will not voluntarily stop this expansion until it has turned the planet into an unliveable wasteland.

Premise 4: Its expansion is enabled by abundant and cheap fossil fuels, which as everyone who has studied peak oil will know, are now becoming less abundant and less cheap.

Premise 5: As it senses its expansion and therefore its survival is under threat, the PCG will attempt to consolidate its power at the centre, sacrificing all extraneous and ‘unproductive’ sectors, such as me and you and the oceans and the remaining forests.

Let’s be clear, the PCG is what most natural non-industrialised cultures would recognise as a ‘demon’. In the observable world it manifests as a huge interconnected mass of corporate, military, pharmaceutical hardware, that isn’t under the control of any particular human being, but just exists to sow mayhem and death seemingly with an emergent intelligence of its own.

But given Premise 2, that it colonises organisms and that it needs space to do so, one small way that it can be fought is to get to work on the one thing that you have control over (for the time being) i.e. yourself.

Decolonising your own mind and body would seem to be the beginning of fighting back against the PCG. If you refuse to play along to whatever extent that you are able, then you become a useless cell in the bloated body of the PCG.

It's intuitive that all organisms have the right to live their within their own gods-given biophysical limitations and to the extent that their free will allows, without having to be dominated by others. This is necessary for full-systems integrity, so you could say it it a type of natural law rather than a human-invented 'right'.

But how can we decolonise ourselves? I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know. I don’t think there is a book somewhere entitled “Decolonisation from the Psychopathic Control Grid for Dummies” and even if there was it’d be printed by a company owned by another company, that's owned by a media conglomerate that is part of the PCG, and it would contain dud information that'd get you killed. As I said, that's the way the PCG rolls: everything is coopted for its own advantage.

So for the most part we’re going to have to use the one thing that the PCG cannot ever commoditise: our innate intuition.

My innate intuition tells me, for example, that people in industrialised societies like the one I live in used to live close to the land. They hunted, fished, gathered berries and herbs, were reverent to the sun and the seasons, respected the limitations of the soils and knew that when it was all over their own bodies would nourish the plants and therefore the animals that they had borrowed from during their own life span.

And so one way I am going to fight back against the PCG is to get to know intimately the land where I live. This will involve a lot of learning; about plant lore, human (and animal) history, sleeping under the stars, walking through it, nurturing it and writing about it.

Really, at this stage in the ongoing train wreck of our civilisation it’s one of the few options left open to us. Sure, we can all eat vegan diets, protest to career politicians, drive less, fly less, consume less … and that’s all well and good, but from the perspective of the PCG it couldn’t care less about our small individual actions as it simply allocates the resources we don’t consume to somewhere else on planet earth where they can be consumed more efficiently.

It does this by getting the recently colonised (in ‘developing’ countries) to pick up the slack by offering them cheap credit and enslaving them that way. Let’s remember that every single government in the world is committed to infinite economic growth within our delicate planetary ecosystem, and that any serous challenge to this ethos is met by tanks and bombs and prison sentences.

But we don’t have to be slaves. If we each took a bit of control back and related to the patch of planet earth in our immediate vicinity new pathways of being could – and I reckon will – emerge.

So, to go back to the Chili Peppers, we can but try and opt out of helping the Killing Fist of the Human Beast, instead be Prodigies of Peace.

I will have more information soon on my efforts in another blog.

Meaningful Coincidences

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 21:31:00 +0000

Okay, so I'm going to veer a little 'off topic' with this one. Mind you, who's to say what is on topic anyhow? One of the reasons I took such a long break from this blog was that I was searching around for new ideas and exploring new avenues. So, in this one, I'm talking about those strange coincidences that we can get from time to time. I've had my fair share of them, some of which I mention below, and other people are often keen to share theirs.

Just a work of warning; if you suffer an allergic reaction to woo stop reading now. My next post will be about something firmly cemented in the material plane, so please come back then.

It was the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who first suggested the existence of ‘meaningful coincidences’. He was talking about coincidental experiences for which no causal relationship could be established. These, he wrote, may possess significance on some sort of deeper level, and he called these occurrences 'synchronicities'.

There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that synchronicities do occur, and that they occur for a reason rather than just ‘wishful thinking’. Often it will be in the form of a random piece of knowledge falling into place that leads to greater understanding, or a chance meeting with someone who you might just have been thinking about that day but hadn’t seen for a long time. Sometimes the song you woke up in your head with, but haven’t heard since the 1980s, comes on the radio.

The writer Colin Wilson found that when he was delving deep into some matter he was writing about, books would literally fall off shelves, often open at the page presenting some vital but previously unknown passage of knowledge that proved to be the key to understanding.

Such ‘book synchronicities’ seem to be common among people who have set out on a path to expand their understanding of the multi-layered reality we inhabit, and I have had several myself. For example, a few months ago I was eating some breakfast and reading an article posted online by the Irish writer Thomas Sheridan about the ancient Indo-European symbol known today as the swastika being carved into rocks across Britain. I’d never heard of this and wanted to find out more – but I didn’t have time to find out more as I had to go to work just then.

Shortly afterwards I was walking towards my office down the pedestrianised high street in the town where I live and found myself walking past a charity shop where someone had left a couple of bags of clothes, books and toys overnight. Clearly, someone had been rummaging in it and the contents were spilled out all over the step. A glossy coffee-table type book caught my eye and I went over to pick it up. It was called Celtic Britain and I opened it right on a page that featured – yep – stones carved with swastikas.

When it comes to book synchronicities it seems that some people are particularly adept at sparking synchronicities. (Greg Moffit is another one – on one of his podcast shows he once mentioned the different stages of spiritual development outlined in The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck – and I promptly found a copy of the same book fluttering in the breeze in a Tesco carpark later that same day – coincidence?)

And as for Anthony Peake’s The Daemon, which I read last summer in a town in Germany, that could only be described as a smorgasbord of synchronicities featuring Hermann Hesse, Goethe and even Joan of Arc!

These are just a few examples among numerous others, book related or otherwise. Generally speaking, I have only started to notice them in the last five years or so. In periods where my interest in the arcane has waned, or I have been too busy with other areas of my life, the synchronicities seem to have faded away, as if put on pause. When I rekindle my interest, they come back with a vengeance – to the point where I almost expect them, and almost regard them as standard operating procedure.

But what about coincidences that don’t seem to serve any particular purpose but are just so downright improbable that they make you question the basis of everything you have been led to believe about the ordering principles of the universe?

My friend, David Moore, who is himself a walking talking bag of synchronicities, thinks they may have some kind of evolutionary role in human consciousness. He thinks we should pay attention to them because they could be trying to teach us something.

Again, I have some examples I would like to share, and for which I can offer no rational explanation. Get this: twice, when I have set foot on another continent for the first time, the first person I have randomly met who was not an immigration official, taxi driver or hotel clerk, was someone I knew.

The first time this happened to me was in Australia in 1995. I had got off a night flight from Malaysia to Perth and was walking bleary-eyed around the airport at about 1am looking for some clue about where I could spend the night. I had spent the last three weeks seriously ill with an undiagnosed malaria-like virus, including a stint in a hospital in Penang, and had lost around a quarter of my body weight.

Happy to be somewhere more westernised, I found a large illuminated board with about fifty or sixty adverts for places to stay and I picked one pretty much at random simply because the name appealed to me (“The Lone Star Saloon Inn”). Then, I jumped into a taxi, which took me into Perth and my chosen hostel. I walked in and the half-asleep clerk said they didn’t have any rooms left but there was a space on a bunk in someone else’s room that I could have. He implied that the occupant hadn’t paid his bill and so couldn’t complain when someone else was lumped in with him.

Being very tired and sick I said okay, and made my way to the room. It was a mess, with clothes and bottles everywhere, but the occupant was not in. I climbed into the top bunk and immediately fell asleep. Some hours later my roommate returned. He was pretty drunk and crashed around for a while with the light on (seemingly not noticing me in the top bunk) so I kept my eyes closed and pretended to be asleep. Eventually he turned off the light and began to snore.

In the morning, sunlight lit up the room. I peered over the side of the bunk to take a look at the drunken oath who had, by now, stopped snoring (I planned to check out almost immediately and didn’t even want to wake him). That’s when coincidence No.1 happened. I looked down on him and, to my great surprise, he was wide awake and staring up at me. We both did a double-take, because the face I was looking at was the barman from my local pub in Solihull. Neither of us knew what to say.

The same thing, more or less, happened when I first visited South America in 2000 with my wife. I arrived on a Sunday in Quito and found out I couldn’t get any dollars to pay for anything as all the bureaus de change were closed and ATMs didn’t accept foreign cards. I called the place I had booked and they told me to get in a taxi and they would pay the driver – I would pay them back the following day when the banks opened. I did this but when I got there they said there had been a mistake and I needed to pay up front.

The taxi driver took pity on us and said he knew of another place we could stay. He drove us to this new place and dropped us off. By this point it was getting dark and, Quito being a hilly city, lights of houses began to twinkle around us rising up to meet the horizon. We checked in and had a short nap to get over our travel weariness before going into the hotel lounge. In this room there was a large open fire that was roaring nicely (it is always chilly in the evenings in Quito) and we could look out of some large windows onto the twinkling fairy lights outside. There was only one other person in the lounge – a guy of about my own age – and he was sitting quietly in a large leather armchair and reading a book. He looked kind of familiar but I couldn’t place him. After a few minutes I sensed he was looking at me and he suddenly said “Jason?”

It was Louis, a friend from my sixth form college days – and someone I used to meet up with in the same pub I had seen the barman from. I hadn’t seen him in a decade and he had lost most of his hair in the intervening period, which was perhaps why I didn’t immediately recognise him. He said he was an artist and living in Paris but had decided to come to South America for inspiration. We both agreed how bizarre it was that we should meet in this way.

I’ve told this story to numerous people over the years, and the severely rational tell me it’s just a case of coincidence, constructing elaborate justifications of how our whole lives are just a series of probabilities that either do or do not come to pass.

In case anyone thinks this all sounds too bizarre and I have embellished it in some way, it is and I haven't. In the second instance I have my wife to back it up, although my purpose isn’t simply to tell a good tale but to figure out why these remarkable coincidences happened to me. Could it be that the subconscious mind (or daemon) is a trickster, and uses improbable coincidences and synchronicities to shake us out of our complacency?

I remain puzzled, but I do think that synchronicities seem to happen when you put yourself ‘out there’ rather than just sitting at home and not speaking to anyone. I have come to think that they may be psychic nudges, and that if we learn to recognise them for what they are we can gain new understandings of non-material reality and our place within it.

If you have any strange examples of synchronicities you want to share then please do tell.

Staring at a Different Sea

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 23:12:00 +0000

Has it really been six years since my family and I uprooted ourselves from our lives in Copenhagen and moved lock, stock and barrel to Cornwall, down here at the far south western tip of the UK? How time flies.

Just before that move I wrote a post on this blog entitled Staring at the Sea in which I outlined my reasons for making it. Having re-read it the other day the thought naturally occurred to me to measure up the reality against the expectations, to see what I got right and what I got wrong.

In terms of a short summary: I’d been living in Copenhagen, Denmark, for about 12 years, with a three year gap in the middle where I tried my hand at running a newspaper and living off the grid in rural Spain. Having learned about the crisis of industrial civilisation in about 2009 I decided to try and do something to put my family and myself in a better place. And so we sold up and bought a fixer-upper house in a smallish market town in a rural area. I also bought a seven-acre woodland and taught myself permaculture and woodland management skills.

Generally speaking, it has to be said, I’m still pretty happy that the move was the right thing to do. Of course, industrial civilisation hasn’t hit the skids in the big cataclysmic fashion so many peak oilers were saying it would a decade ago … but few people could have predicted the extent to which governments and the financial system so willingly threw the future under a bus just to salvage a few more years of ‘normality’ – a normality with a short shelf life.

Anyway, in terms of moving back to the UK, which is where I’m from anyway, seemed like a reasonable move, all other things considered. After all, there’s no perfect ‘away’ in our globalised world, and if there were it’d soon be overrun with bunker-building billionaires and other dangerous mega-fauna.

So, revisiting my post, which by the way is my most-read post ever, how does it stack up six years down the road?

In terms of energy, six years ago I wrote:

The UK doesn’t really have a coherent energy policy. Sweeping pronouncements are periodically made by ministers but these usually run into problems before anything is implemented. With the windfall from oil and natural gas now winding down serious problems are now on the horizon and rolling blackouts are likely by 2015/16, according to no less an authority than the UK energy regulator Ofgem. The country has several ageing nuclear reactors and there is a strong nuclear lobby that favours building more, despite robust public opposition.

Yep, nothing to add there other than the fact that Ofgem obviously got the rolling blackouts dead wrong, partially due to a massive increase in wind power capacity (literally the only thing keeping the lights on during one storm last winter). Oil and gas is still coming out of the ground, albeit in ever decreasing quantities, and almost nothing has been added in terms of nuclear energy. In fact, companies are pulling out of building new nuclear power stations in the UK, and there have been warnings of ‘the lights going out’ yet again just in the past few weeks.

One thing that has kept the lights on have been shipments of liquid natural gas from the US and Qatar. America’s fracking bonanza – financed by Wall Street despite its huge costs and inability to turn a profit – has benefitted the UK. This no doubt won’t last much longer, however, with all the sweet spots drilled out and an environment of rising interest rates it can only be a matter of time before the shale ‘revolution’ comes to a grinding halt.

LNG tanker leaving Qatar - heading to the UK where it will be used to make electricity so I can write 22BillionEnergySlaves

By contrast Britain’s own fracking ‘revolution’ was dead before it was even born – for a number of reasons that would be obvious even to a bright four-year-old.

Transportation. Neither the UK nor Denmark are particularly large countries with land masses of 94,060 and 16,562 square miles respectively. Both have excellent transport links, with numerous roads, functioning rail lines and seaports. Denmark, famously, has an excellent infrastructure for cycling owing to policy decisions made after the 1970s’ oil shocks, and its relatively flat topography. At the city level around half of all trips are made on two wheels.

The UK is considerably less cycle friendly as the powerful motoring lobby has very effectively made sure that money is funnelled into road projects suited to cars rather than bicycles, and local councils have haphazardly implemented cycling infrastructure that in most cases doesn’t connect.

I have done some cycling since moving here, but it’s a very dangerous pursuit and was even worse than I expected. I even sold the cargo bike I used to ride in Copenhagen – it would just be too dangerous. The main reason, I think, is a kind of culture war between cyclists and drivers. There is a very aggressive attitude displayed by many car drivers, with the assumption that cyclists are some kind of self-identifying tribe of eco warriors. This doesn’t make for safe conditions for cyclists and I generally have to drive a car everywhere as a result.

Still, on a wider level, the train network is still pretty good, despite under investment by private companies, and the trains themselves are amongst the best I’ve been on anywhere in the world. I probably wouldn’t have such positive thoughts about them if I had to commute to work every day, however – with the rail network not enjoying such a high level of government subsidies as roads and cars, ticket prices have risen astronomically for peak travel times and people are often crammed in like sardines.

Getting on one of the fancy new trains at Bristol

Food security. Neither Denmark nor the UK has much in the way of food security. At present both countries rely on very long supply chains and just-in-time delivery systems to get food into shops. If both countries had to rely solely on what was available to them from their own soils and seas then mass starvation would quickly ensue. The last time Britain was tested in this respect was during the Second World War, when a mass mobilisation of the population to grow food just about managed to feed the nation (although many were away fighting in other countries). Then, there were around 30 million residents, whereas today there are over 63 million (Denmark has about a tenth of that number). Furthermore, it must be assumed that 70 years of mechanised farming has considerably reduced the capacity of the soils to grow food, and relentless overfishing has reduced fish stocks drastically as well. In terms of wild game, there is not much that would survive more than a few short years if the population was in a state of extreme hunger and short term crisis management.

The one bright spot in this otherwise dismal picture is the rise of organic farming and local food networks. These have grown enormously in recent years as people put less trust in the corporately-controlled food web and opt instead to eat more local and more healthily.

Denmark, similarly, has a food problem. Despite a much lower population, the relatively fertile soils cannot yield the heavily meat-based diet to which Danes have become used to. Technically, we are told, Denmark is a net food exporter, but in my local supermarket the only things I can find that are grown here are potatoes and apples, so I’m guessing that there is some statistical figure fiddling going on there.

We’ll probably get to find out more about food security in the coming months as Britain is due to leave the EU next month and the news sites are falling over themselves to insist that we will be hit by everything from a scarcity of Mars Bars to all-out famine.

I doubt this will be so but it’s sensible to take precautions whatever the case and since moving here I’ve been getting a lot of food from a local organic farm, and have even done voluntary work for them. I’ve also been growing food and have planted up an orchard and a forest garden. I’ve taught myself to shoot and prepare small game and have learned to forage in the wild areas around the abundant shorelines here. I’ve also got a sea fishing kayak and a range of friends who produce things like honey and cider: in short, I don’t lose sleep over not having enough food, although I do worry about other people who are inadequately prepared.

Governance and society. There are clear differences between the UK and Denmark when it comes to governance. For historical and cultural reasons Denmark is governed fairly well and the UK is governed ~~not quite so well~~ atrociously. Both are [supposedly] democratic societies hung on the framework of a monarchy, with the royals enjoying almost universal adoration in Denmark, as opposed to ‘only’ 82% in the UK [2019 edit: these number have changed since then, with the royals enjoying considerably less support in 2018]. Both countries have coalition governments, although only Denmark has radical factions representing parties founded on both Marxism and ultra-nationalism enjoying power.

Denmark is characterised by its homogenous native population and has sometimes been described as ‘more of a tribe than a nation’. There are few social strata within Denmark’s famously classless society (although I would question this assumption) and politicians must appease the entire nation, rather than one particular power group within it, and are held accountable as such. The social contract in Denmark is very strong and rigid and has been aptly described by the half-Norwegian novelist Aksel Sandemose as the ‘Jantelov’ – a set of unwritten codes of conservative behaviour by which Danish people unwittingly live out their lives. The codas are effectively anti-individualistic in nature, requiring that the common man or woman suppress their own personal desires and ego for the common good of the state.

The other side of the bargain is that rulers (political and monarchical) must be trusted to ensure the stability and survival of the state. Any digression from this bond of trust is treated with public opprobrium. As a result, Denmark has a very progressive tax system and it is said that ‘nobody is poor and nobody is rich’. This might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the fact remains that allowing everyone to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle, while enviable to liberals from less progressive countries, nevertheless rests on the assumption that there will be a continued abundance of cheap fossil fuels and favourable trade deals with poorer nations. In other words, it can’t last.

The UK, by contrast, has ~~something of a~~ vicious ~~class war~~ elite versus everyone else war going on. Although the old system of inherited caste privilege is dying out, a new breed of ultra-wealthy people sit at the top of the ladder and use the resources of the poor to further advance their wealth advantage, and in doing so hollow out the core of society and make it more prone to social upheavals. At the centre of this black hole is the hyper-power known as the City of London (not to be confused with the actual physical city of London), a vast Ponzi scheme that holds a large amount of power over the government. The City, which enjoys very little regulation, is said to be ‘too big to fail’ although its activities have caused the UK economy to be hugely unbalanced in favour of unproductive financial derivatives at the expense of the ‘real’ economy of goods and useful services.

I pasted this section almost in full. This has been the one area that has really been of concern over the past few years. In the UK we now have a government and media that openly lies about things and engages in endless propaganda. It seems, for example, that we are being ordered to hate Russia – and the lamentable Skripal affair – which has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese – is proof, if ever it were needed, that there is not a shred of honesty or decency left in the political class.

Incidentally, I’ve never met anyone who actually believes any of the stuff they put out, so it’s a bit like the situation in the last days of the Soviet Union where people listen to the news not to get the news, but to discover what the latest line is. ‘Nuff said.

George Orwell's Ingsoc from 1984: when it comes to the UK media, ignorance is strength

I then made a few points about housing, geopolitics and climate change, and don’t have much to add to them, before getting onto population. I wrote:

…’food’ both the UK and Denmark will eventually have to severely reduce numbers in order to live off the planet’s natural income as opposed to its energy inheritance. At present, people in both countries largely subsist on what William H. Catton calls ‘ghost acres’. These are invisible fields in far-off places where the food is artificially produced using oil – invisible to practically everyone who doesn’t want to contemplate them. As energy, the master resource, becomes less available, so will these ghost acres.

But before that happens we have to go through the next big financial shock, which could happen any month now. Nobody knows how long Europe’s politicians and bankers can keep shoving golden eggs down the goose’s throat, but when those same golden eggs stop appearing at the other end we can expect our standard of living to start resembling what ordinarily comes out of a goose’s backside. Many people will suddenly find themselves without the inclination to carry on and commit voluntary entropy, and some will achieve this semi-unwittingly with drink and drugs.

More still will end up shivering/sweating in the cold /heat and a failing medical care infrastructure will suddenly reverse the increased longevity that we have been led to expect. With social care systems collapsing we can expect to see the elderly being abandoned (some would argue that is already happening) as it becomes unaffordable for the system as a whole to look after them. Disease management systems will similarly be hit by cutbacks and viruses will have a field day.

Hmm, perhaps a bit bleak but this still sounds about right to me (‘commit voluntary entropy’ – did I really write that?). Actually, population is the thing that I got the most pushback about, with many people rightly pointing out that the UK cannot feed itself anything like the amount of calories it needs just to keep people alive. Still, international trade isn’t going to dry up overnight and there will be patches of the country that are better fed than others. As for the elderly being abandoned, that is certainly happening, as my wife (who works in community care) can testify.

In the end, human ecology is all that counts, but I see plenty of potential for local food production using intensive organic/biodynamic systems. The UK still has an awful lot of fertile farmland, and rainfall isn’t a problem. For this to happen though there would need to be a mass movement back to the land, which can’t currently happen as regular people are not generally permitted to live on the land and, in any case, the current attitude is that working with your hands in the soil is only for idiots. This will change.

Perhaps controversially I finished off on the topic of resilience and national character. I wrote that, in my view, people in the UK were of a tougher and more resilient nature than people in Denmark. After all, in Britain, the common man has suffered 1,000 years of being pushed around, and is perhaps of a more stoic nature than people used to being mollycoddled by the government and programmed to be happily conformist from birth. I wrote:

It is my steadfast belief that people in the UK – or perhaps I should say some people in the UK – are better prepared mentally and physically than their Danish equivalents. The Transition Towns movement grew from the UK, although in reality people have been practicing low impact sustainable living for decades, and despite the hollowing out of industry many small-scale artisans still remain below the radar. There is a growing web of food networks, local currencies and community energy projects and the assumption of many people in the UK is that they cannot trust the government to deliver vital services to them. This, ironically, is a strength when compared with Denmark, where people are less empowered to take over their own livelihoods, and act timidly when it comes to going against the system. The assumption here is that the government always has their best interests at heart and that all solutions come down from the top. Have you ever heard of Occupy Denmark? No, I thought not.

In the UK there is strong grassroots opposition to the coalition government and its suicidal plans to build more roads, airports, nuclear power stations and fracking wells. Overcrowded Britain, for better or worse, is a country of NIMBYs, making any new capital project that is perceived to be dangerous or ugly (or both) difficult or downright impossible.

Whenever disaster strikes we tend to stop grumbling about one another and pull together to get through it as best as we can. It takes practice to stiffen that upper lip. We have developed a warped sense of humour as a safety valve for life’s absurdities and horrors, and despite decades of media scare stories about the dangers of strangers the country is still packed to the gunwales with good Samaritans the charitable folk. Furthermore, there’s a growing sense of reverence for the natural world, a stirring of the spirit that urges us to protect the Earth in all of its diversity. Is this part of something bigger? We will have to wait and see on that one.

I still think this is true – especially the last part. What I didn’t/couldn’t foresee was the rise in identity politics and the psychic battleground of Brexit that has done so much to pit friends and neighbours against one another. It has spread like a wildfire throughout practically every local group, making it almost impossible for many of them to function. A terrifying ‘groupthink’ has taken hold where free thought is not allowed and divergent opinions are treated with intolerance.

The Transition Towns movement never really managed to escape the confines of its middle-class well-to-do background, even though it launched some good ideas and practical solutions for our predicament. Most of the people I know who used to be involved in it now spend their days screaming into echo chambers on Facebook about how much they dislike capitalism/Donald Trump/Brexit, while outside their gardens turn to weeds …

So, to conclude, I’m generally pretty satisfied that we made the move, albeit with some reservations. Society is fraying around us, and the streets are increasingly filled with drunks, druggies and the shambolic forms of the homeless. The government and media are unfixable messes, everyone and everything is in debt, and many people are driving themselves into a state of insanity with their rigidly fixed political beliefs. Yep, things are in a mess alright.

As I stated at the beginning, I don’t believe there is any ‘perfect’ place to be, and everywhere has its pros and cons. Perhaps it’s even a fool’s game to think we have any control over our future circumstances given the chaotic nature of the way things are unravelling as one institution after another is led into the slaughterhouse and the glue that used to hold our societies together becomes unstuck. Still, I’d be interested to hear any thoughts you might have on the topic and if you have moved somewhere, or are considering it, and why.

In the meantime...

Always look on the bright side of life

Brexit: No Reverse Gear for the EU

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Sun, 20 Jan 2019 12:41:00 +0000

The daily Brexit spectacle in this country grows ever more surreal. Since Theresa May had her EU leaving agreement ground into the tarmac like a discarded cigarette butt by MPs last week, and then narrowly avoided a vote of no-confidence launched by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the complexity of the situation has exploded exponentially.

Politicians have had the best part of two years to find a solution to walking away from the European Union, which is what a majority of people voted to do, but now find themselves set back to square one. This time however there’s only 10 weeks left on the clock, which perhaps explains all the headless chickens running around.

Politics at the national level is usually mostly froth and can be safely ignored while more interesting pursuits are followed – after all, during the good times, aren’t politicians merely surfers catching the waves of popular opinion? Remember, these are the good times, for now.

But then there are times when serious underlying stresses in society and the economy have built up to a point where they threaten to cause devastating earthquakes. This is when politicians are put to the test – and usually found wanting. You expect them to solve serious national problems, but all they can do is spout platitudes and sound bites. It’s as if they are simply not designed to do the right job – like buying a dishwasher and expecting it to heat your dinner; what you get instead is a blocked outlet pipe and no dinner.

The political and social phenomena that arise at these times of stress have two aspects, that is they are both important and unimportant at the same time. I see them as being ‘unportent’.

Brexit, for example, is unimportant at face value. It is simply a country reconfiguring its trading arrangements into a more efficient format from the point of view of its people. True, there will likely be a period of adjustment when some prices of goods will be higher and some services could be unavailable, but demand and supply will iron out these problems in the medium term, like they always do. These are minor issues; Europe isn’t physically going anywhere, Britain isn’t going anywhere either, we’ll still be able to drink French wine and eat Italian cheese and go on holiday to the Alps … what’s the problem?

In fact, compared to the real crises of out time, such as the insect apocalypse, decaying infrastructure, mass mental breakdown etc. Brexit is hardly even worthy of consideration. Of course, the media have ways of amplifying the trivial and ignoring the important, so the whole situation may seem like a catastrophe if you get your information from those sources, but that doesn’t actually make it so.

At the same time, while it may not be important from a whole systems point of view, it can be important to the people within the system affected. For instance, given that the EU is both undemocratic when it comes to the important policy decisions, and a consolidator of centralised power, it matters a great deal to Brits whether or not their children will be conscripted into some future Euro army and forced to fight Russia for its resources at the behest of ‘chicken hawk’ politicians in Brussels, Paris and Washington.

Thus the whole Brexit saga is both unimportant and important at the same time i.e. unportent. I suspect unportent things will crop up with greater regularity as humanity continues to slide down the depletion curve of easy-to-get at energy sources.

Governing parties not fit for purpose?

It’s curious that Europe has seen the rise of a wave of new populist parties either swept into power, or finding themselves in prominent positions in coalitions over the last handful of years, and yet Britain still clings to the two-party tribal warfare system.

Italy has the 5 Star Movement, which is now forms a partner in government, and Germany has the AfD (Alternative for Germany) which has stolen support away from Angela Merkel, while Sweden has the Sweden Democrats, which were just yesterday denied a place in central government despite coming within a whisker of doing so. All of these so-called populist parties are derided in the mainstream media and described in varying tones of invective.

It’s true that most of them are right-wing, driven primarily by concerns about unchecked immigration, but there’s no particular reason why they couldn’t be left-wing populists (apart from the fact that left-wing parties are currently preoccupied by issues of ‘social justice’ and are unable to coherently formulate policies that people might vote for).

Britain, of course, has UKIP (the United Kingdom Independence Party) whose raison d'être was to force a vote on leaving the EU – something it can be said to have achieved. But due to the ‘winner takes it all’ system of democracy over here it was never destined to achieve great power. Instead it merely managed to exert enough political leverage to shift the Conservatives away from their cosy relationship with big business and extract the promise of a referendum. The fact that David Cameron thought British voters could be railroaded into voting to remain in the EU turned out to be a critical error on his part.

But, for the main part, British people are either Labour or Conservative voters, and these two parties have enjoyed a joint monopoly on power for over a hundred years, if you set aside the National Government of the inter-war years.

America is in a similar situation, with the Republicans and the Democrats the only two parties worthy of consideration for the majority of voters. While the two-party system gives an advantage in terms of stability, it is looking less suitable in the modern age with all its myriad power struggles and fragmented constituencies. Indeed, perhaps there's some kind of Anglo Saxon ‘two tribes’ mentality playing out here.

So what gives? Both parties in both countries are internally conflicted, with the neoliberal element in each having had the upper hand for the past four decades, which coincidentally I’m sure, is the same time period over which the financialisation and globalisation of the world economy took place.

During this period, money has dominated politics, because parties could woo big business with the promise of rewards in the form of contracts, reduced regulation and a lower tax burden … just as soon as they got into power. They could easily do this because, once in power, governments in industrialised countries have had the privilege of being able to create money out of thin air without somehow having to earn it.

This worked well, up to a point. After conventional oil production peaked in 2005 and the real economy stopped growing, it became an awful lot harder to service all the debt that had been built up, leading to the financial heart attack of 2008. Since then, the global economy has been kept alive as ‘first responder’ central bankers performed CPR and mainlined dizzying amounts of ‘money’, i.e. debt, into the languid white arm of the economy in the hope that the corpse would get up off the floor and start walking again. So far, apart from a few twitches and convulsions, it’s still lying there.

With dismal growth, the spoils of financialisation and globalism have become a lot scarcer. Those with access to what remains are fleeing to their citadels and pulling up the drawbridge behind them, while the vast majority of us are left as ‘tax donkeys’, working two or three jobs and dealing with hidden inflation, punitive regulations and reduced prospects. Life just ain’t the same as it used to be.

Instead of an easy life we get Donald Trump, Brexit and the Gilets Jaunes – all manifestations of ‘the people’ of industrialised countries trying to claw back some of the wealth and resources they feel are theirs. Can't we just back up a little and go back to simpler systems that redistribute the wealth a bit more evenly?

It turns out, however, that there is no reverse gear in over-developed financialised economies. They are built on the concept of exponentially expanding economic growth – something that is neither possible nor, arguably, desirable. To stop growing is to die and consolidation of financial power is a one-way kind of thing.

Perhaps this is why the political classes are doing everything in their power to overturn Brexit and to impeach Trump and fob off the Gilets Jaunes with delays to tax hikes. They may well be successful in all of their attempts but it doesn’t change the dynamic forces behind the scenes that led to the popular rebellions in the first place. As one Gilet Jaune protester succinctly put it "We don't want Macron's crumbs, we want the whole baguette."

But are ‘the people’ right?

Most people in these damp islands have a vague and confused idea about the EU. Like Marmite, you are supposed to either love it or hate it. Those in favour of it generally have a ‘rainbows and unicorns’ vision of a benign distant force for good that occasionally arrives on our shores to disgorge its cornucopia of cash, and give our crooked politicians a well-deserved kick up the backside. Others have the polar opposite view, imagining Brussels to be a nest of villainous meddlers who spend day and night concocting schemes to straighten bananas, ban toasters and forbid the use of feet and inches.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, the EU has had some success in forcing Britain to clean up its beaches and make it easier to study abroad, and the last time I checked there were still bent bananas in my local grocery store being sold by the pound.

Fans of the EU also like to point to various initiatives and projects that are funded by the bloc, claiming that these would never have been undertaken without EU funding. While this may be true, many of these projects could be considered ‘white elephants’. Not long after the EU has built them, cut the ribbon, erected their large blue “This project was funded by the EU” signs and buggered off, it’s usually the local community that is forced to pay for their upkeep and eventual decommisioning with their local taxes.

One such example is an industrial heritage mining site near where I live in Cornwall that was part-funded by the EU and given World Heritage status when it opened in 2012. Not only have I never visited it, I’ve never even heard of anyone visiting it, and looking at its website today the ‘Latest Happenings’ section hasn’t been updated in nine months. Its Wikipedia page is four sentences long (by comparison, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat entry has 8,000 words) – to be honest, it’s not even very good at being a white elephant.

However, mention the EU to some of the locals around here and they won’t talk about prestige projects like the Heartlands Heritage Mining Centre, they’ll talk about how Brussels devastated the local fishing industry and destroyed their children’s future. They will tell you how an army of trucks awaits at the docks at dawn each morning to load up the contents of the fishing boats and immediately ship it off to continental Europe, while their own families are forced to shop at Poundland and eat frozen fish fingers. It’s narratives like this that may have had a hand in Cornwall’s decision to vote ‘No’ in the referendum, although they were roundly mocked for doing so, called ‘stupid’ and other less than pleasant names.

The kind of disconnect between two entirely different versions of reality throws a sharp light on the struggle between the winners and losers in the globalised economy.

As I finish off writing this, it’s Sunday morning and the newspapers are saying that a group of MPs is planning either to sabotage the Brexit process and keep the UK in the EU, or to push through some kind of dismal deal that will effectively sell off the country for a fistful of euros. It would be a mistake to do so. The forces that have been unleashed are not about to meekly get back into Pandora’s box and agree to shut up.

EU elections are coming up in May that will likely see a populist right-wing ‘anti EU’ bloc forming at the very centre of political-power, and with Eurozone industrial production and growth plummeting it won’t be long before Europe enters a steep recession – and by then it won’t be just France that goes up in flames. To try and prevent this, ECB president Mario Draghi is doing the only thing he knows how to do – cranking up the money printing press – just in time to feed the thousands of moribund ‘zombie’ corporations dotted across Europe that can only survive if free money is hosed their way.

The banking industry isn’t looking too stable either, with German banks – led by Deutsch – losing most of their value, Italian ones already starting to implode and Denmark’s biggest bank implicated in one of the biggest money laundering scandals in banking history …

Meanwhile, EU figureheads Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are both spent political forces, the latter unable to show his boyish face in public, preferring instead to address the hordes of angry left-behinds from his golden Élysée Palace. Italy’s deputy PM, Matteo Salvini, is openly trolling permadrunk EC President Jean Claude Juncker, and Hungarian pariah PM Viktor Orban is the kind of political ghoul who must give the Euro power elite nightmares.

Will the UK be able to break away from this sinking ship in time before the acrid smell of smoke from burning capitals wafts across the English Channel to London, polluting the rarefied air of the political bubble in Westminster? Perhaps the smell will simultaneously put the virtue-signalling Islington Guardianistas off their flat whites and the money-grubbing City speculators off their glasses of Chablis?

Who knows, stranger things have happened.

Lurching Towards a Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 22:29:00 +0000

It’s been more than a while since I last wrote anything here, so it’s high time I corrected that. In the past year I’ve been busy with one thing or another and – well – updating 22 Billion Energy Slaves somehow managed to slip down the list of priorities. It’s not that I’ve been up to anything particularly interesting outside the usual earning a crust, raising kids, fixing up the house, working in the woods etc. so please accept my apologies.

Right, where were we? Well, when I last wrote anything here the UK was in the grip of the so-called ‘Beast from the East’ a high pressure system of cold air that had moved down over the UK from Siberia, that was met head-on with a winter storm that brought snow to most of the country, including down here in Cornwall where I live.

Although this wasn’t a particularly remarkable weather event it still managed to cause its fair share of disruption and destruction, with just-in-time deliver systems fouling up and perhaps reminding a few people how ill-prepared they are for such things in their lives.

Following the ‘Beast’ we had a very long dry spell, as an unusually hot summer saw grassy parks everywhere turn a dun brown colour, with older people reminiscing about 1976, the last time when something similar had happened.

Regular readers, if I have any, might remember that I am custodian of a piece of land that is mostly given over to coppice woodland, orchards and a small forest garden. I’m pleased to report that this suffered almost no damage from the hot, dry weather, other than the loss of a few young saplings (easily replaced) and the water level in my hand-dug pond sinking low enough to worry the resident newts. If anything the land, which I try to leave as ‘natural’ as possible, proved remarkably resilient, and for the first time ever I got a bumper crop of apples from the young trees (well, about 300, but it’s a start).

Summer also afforded myself and my family the chance to get away for a while. Instead of being sensible and going somewhere to cool off, we opted to go to Greece, which was a bit like stepping out of the frying pan into the fire. Nevertheless, not being one to miss an opportunity to practice simpler living, I booked us a couple of pleasant weeks in a shepherd’s stone hut in isolated rural splendour on the island of Crete – it’s amazing what you can find on Airbnb these days.

With temperatures in the upper 30s (C), and no air conditioning except for one small room where the children slept, it was uncomfortable but bearable. The immense stone walls kept the worst of the sun out during the day, and by shutting all the doors and windows until after sunset it was possible to keep the indoor temperatures within a reasonably tolerable range. This was presumably not the case for the poor wretches in some nearby newly-built modern ‘villas’, who relied on the air-con being constantly on – something that wasn’t possible during the regular power cuts the island seemed to be experiencing.

It had been a few years since I had last travelled in Greece, and things didn’t seem to have improved much, despite the touted ‘recovery’ there. Driving around was a particular problem as the paint markings had been worn off roads and not replaced by the municipal authorities, and road signs were often rusted or vandalised. Away from the finely manicured historic centres in the cities, the conditions were bordering on the third world, with the requisite piles of rotting garbage, abandoned shells of cars and scavenging cats and dogs being strangely absent from any of the holiday brochures I’d seen before arriving. Still, Greece seemed to be hanging together, like it always manages to, and there was plenty of luxury on display amongst the decay.

Speaking of decay, this brings me to what I wanted to write about in this shortish update. Coming back from Greece and travelling through the English countryside on a sleek new train, I was gazing out of the window and marvelling at how lush and wealthy it all looked in comparison. The cows and sheep were healthy and fat – quite unlike the ragged and mangy livestock, mostly goats, we had seen wandering around the barren, litter strewn hills of Crete – the cars were shiny and mostly new, and the landscape was not littered with half-built but abandoned concrete shells covered in graffiti, which had been an all-too common sight in Greece. All in all, my country looked pretty wealthy, fertile and healthy.

This impression was confirmed by a couple of trips to London I took. The first one took me to Knightsbridge and Belgravia, in which I was shocked to find myself walking up a boutique-lined street where handy-looking security men stood just inside each store, only granting entry to those wealthy-looking enough to come in (i.e. certainly not me). And there were plenty of them. Even during my brief foray I saw wealthy Arabs and Chinese women pull up in limousines and enter these boutiques for a spot of exclusive shopping. I was later told that some of them might even have flown over just to buy a single million-pound handbag.

Ferraris tore up and down Sloane Street, racing one another at stoplights, while women with fur coats and dainty little dogs passed me by on the pavement. It was the kind of place where the term ‘obscene wealth’ seemed apt.

My impression, however shallow, of Britain being a very wealthy place was only confirmed by several other trips around the country, most recently to the Midlands town where I spent my teenage years: Solihull. Now merely part of the urban sprawl of Birmingham, Solihull has changed a lot since I lived there in the 1980s. Back then it was a dull but fairly prosperous place – a good small town in which to bring up a family, perhaps. And now? Now it seems like every building has been turned into a wine bar, a department store, a fancy eatery or a café (just how many hipster cafés does one town need?). Every other car is a BMW or Audi or a pumped-up SUV, and – to my horror – the pub where I misspent much of my youth – where we used to play Motorhead’s The Ace of Spades on the jukebox at Volume 11 – has been turned into an upmarket bistro.

Trips to other places around the country offered me a similar view. So, there is plenty of wealth on display, but how much of it is real and how much of it is a mirage?

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear me say that the vast majority is a mirage, mostly paid for by debt that can never be returned. Because every glowing jewel of wealth is swamped in a landscape populated with people drowning in debt and finding that every month their wages or benefits seem to buy just a little bit less than the last month. Dilapidated housing estates are filled with food banks and addiction and mental health therapy services, while a ragged and growing army of homeless people populates the streets even in wealthy towns.

Britain really has turned into a ‘tale of two countries’, with the shining metropolitan elite and the wealthy upper middle classes who are able to earn a salary from globalised business on one side of the scales, and everyone else on the other. Unlike in America, it is still theoretically possible in Britain to work a minimum wage job and just about scrape by on the rent, the utilities and the food bill, but only if you have access to some state-provided benefits and don’t have any expensive tastes or addictions. Nevertheless, one unexpected bill or unforeseen expenditure, such as a boiler failure or a car breaking down, can throw you into debt – debt that you may then struggle to break free from. More and more people say they are skating on thin ice.

But then many people don’t even have the luxury of a minimum wage job, and are instead forced to work in the gig economy or an a zero-hour contract where they must make themselves available for work yet perhaps only be allocated one hour or more a day. One only has to join a money savings tips or debt advice group on social media to read daily tales of woe from ordinary people who just can’t figure out how they have fallen through the cracks or haul themselves back out again.

On the subject of cracks, the biggest crack of all is the one that has opened up politically between the haves and the have-nots – being played out in real time in the proxy war of Brexit. Most people don’t recognise Brexit for what it is: a fumbling attempt by the ordinary working people of Britain to plunge a dagger into the dark heart of their own elites. The standard official explanation promulgated by the mainstream is that Brexit was a horrendous error of judgement on the part of former prime minister David Cameron, whereby he allowed the (racist, xenophobic, unwashed) population a chance to exercise their ill-informed judgement on a matter of great importance, namely whether the UK should leave the EU.

Following a period of intense state propaganda to coerce people to vote ‘the right way’ a 52% majority responded that they would vote for the exact opposite of whatever the bunch of celebrities and suits was telling them to do. The fallout from this has been nothing less than spectacular. In some cases, long term friends became overnight enemies, people found themselves ostracised by their families and the liberal (i.e. globalist) media has become a kind of video loop that simply repeats “We’re doomed, you stupid fools” over and over.

What’s more, long-standing political parties are tearing themselves asunder over the issue, with both the Conservatives and Labour endlessly trying to figure out whether to fight one other or amongst themselves, or both. The result is a kind of Bird Box Kabuki theatre of blindfolded politicians wandering around on a stage randomly stabbing one another.

The elected politicians, of course, know that it’s their job to defend the status quo, which at the moment means defending the interests of globe-spanning corporations, over the will of the people ,while spouting fine words and making a show of ‘democracy’. And yet those cussed voters (52% of them) won’t be quiet about demanding that their elected representatives bow to their will.

And while it might be amusing to sit back and watch this absurd display of political theatrics, the fact of the matter is that it is less than three months before the official date when the UK leaves the EU and nobody seems to have the faintest idea of what will happen because they are all too busy arguing.

Is this the sign of a stable country that is confident about its place in the world, unified as a whole and willing to make short-term sacrifices for a longer-term common goal? I think not. One could only imagine if someone of the calibre of, say, Winston Churchill was still prime minister. He would no doubt go to Brussels blow cigar smoke in the faces of Donald Tusk and Jean Claude Juncker, slam his fist down on the desk and lay down the law to the snivelling bureaucrats. He’s then walk outside the European Parliament, give his famous victory sign and make a speech about all the glories that will lie ahead, without neglecting to mention the shared hardships we’d have to go through first.

Instead, we have Theresa May; a vacillating, automaton-like career politician with no discernable moral credo; someone who actually campaigned against Brexit in the first place but now, unconvincingly, claims to own it. The suspicion, of course, is that she stitching the nation up, selling out its interests and handing over sovereign power instead of retaining it.

I’m no fan of Churchill, but you get the point, I hope.

Anyway, the idea I’m trying to convey here as I get back on track with this blog, is that we are reaching limits, both nationally and internationally. The bad choices made over the last 50 or 60 years are coming back to haunt us, and they are playing out through the systems of society and economy in complex and unexpected ways.

In the UK we’ve got ‘Brexit’, in France it’s the ‘Yellow Vests’ and in the US it’s Donald Trump. All of these so-called populist uprisings represent dissatisfaction with the status quo – a cohort of people in each place who have seen themselves and their families and towns become ever more disenfranchised, broken and dispirited, while all the time the media cheerleaders insist that they are mistaken.

For the most part, the people don’t yet recognise the tectonic shifts that have taken place in the realm of energy availability that has led them up this blind alley, or the over-financialisation of their economies that has got them to this point, instead they still think political and technological solutions exist that will allow the problems of our age to be dealt with.

Unfortunately, unless the Chinese discover the dark side of the Moon is covered in a vast black sea of crude oil, they are in for a rude awakening. Alas, it will be a messy and confused time if and when this realisation kicks in. Interesting times indeed.

Fragility: a Reminder

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 10:32:00 +0000

Greetings readers. You might be wondering why I’ve gone a little quiet here. Do not fear - apart from a few disruptions to my everyday normality, everything is fine here. I simply haven’t had much time to do any writing lately as I’ve … been doing a lot of writing. Yes, in a strange twist of irony, writing my posts about financial resilience somehow enabled me to land in a job where I write and edit finance articles for a living.

So, working full-time with a group of other financial journalists hasn’t left me with too much spare time on my hands of late.

It’s a bit unusual working in an office again, having spent the last five years doing a selection of jobs that have included being an outdoor woodsman, a builder’s labourer and a wine waiter/barman in a swanky hotel.

Luckily, the job came just in time. In the last few months we’ve had a run of bad financial luck, with numerous things breaking down and requiring costly repair, as well as being hit with various unexpected charges. To top it all, my wife lost her job when the care home she worked in dramatically closed down when it was revealed the owner had been embezzling funds for the past 14 years.

As a result of this we’ve been living somewhat constrained lives so far this year, which is certainly good practice for the future. In fact, I would say, by building resiliency into our lives we haven’t really broken a sweat over these recent interruptions. So, all in all, it’s ongoing good practice, and my wife has just (today) been offered a new job that pay better than the last one, so something positive came out of it.

In other news, you may have heard that the UK experienced some cold and snowy weather last week. The so-called ‘Beast from the East’ mass of cold Siberian air moved over the British Isles, where it was met by Storm Emma moving up from the south. Most places got a fair covering of snow, including where I live in Cornwall, which hasn’t seen so much of the stuff since the mid-1970s.

Predictably, chaos ensued.

Drivers, not knowing how to handle their vehicles in snow, crashed cars all over the place, with hundreds stuck on motorways overnight in freezing conditions and without blankets to keep them warm. The country came within a whisker of running out of natural gas, and was only saved by burning epic amounts of coal in power stations. Schools and shops closed, people panic-bought bread and milk, and a handful of people died.

And then, after a day or two of fun, the snow melted and everyone was forced to go back to work.

Despite this, there has been a huge knock-on effect on the food distribution system in the country. When I went to my local supermarket two days ago the shelves were still more or less empty of fresh food. There was zero milk, bread or meat to be had, and only a few bits of cheese and yogurt and ready meals left. On the other hand, there were plenty of vegetables and fruit and tonnes of snacks and junk food.

The fact the shelves were still bare almost an entire week after the snow had cleared just goes to show how fragile and vulnerable the food distribution network in the UK is. Hopefully a few people will have seen this as a wake-up call to increase their food stocks at home, and perhaps even learn to bake bread and make other food from fresh ingredients. This time we got off lightly, next time we may not be so lucky.

Mental Capital: Not Losing your Marbles

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Sun, 14 Jan 2018 12:21:00 +0000

Do you ever get the feeling that society is losing its marbles? Have some of your friends gone mad and can now only talk stridently about transgender bathrooms, Brexit and the latest presidential Tweet? Do you want to avoid the same fate? Then read on ...

An essential aspect of Holistic Resilience is mental capital. As I outlined previously, Holistic Resilience means taking account of all your different forms of useful and available capital and treating them as essential components that make up a larger whole. But mental capital is an especially important one, because you can get by for a while without some of the other forms of capital, but you won’t last long at all without any mental capital. But what is it?

Mental capital is that weightless, difficult-to-quantify stuff that is stored within the bony attic of your skull. It encompasses your intelligence, skills, charisma, philosophical outlook and – with a bit of luck – some common sense and a sense of humour.

[Note: actually, nobody is able to prove these things reside within the brain, and there’s a growing amount of research into the idea the brain is simply a transceiver that accesses information from other realms, but for the intents and purposes of this piece we’ll just assume that your brain is the storeroom of your mental capital. Oh, and another thing, you have two brains as opposed to the standardly assumed one, but that’s not really relevant here.]

Thus, without looking after your mental capital you would not only be very dull and uninteresting, but also functionally dead. This may account for the popularity of all those zombie movies. Those shambolic, brain-gobbling walking corpses are they really just an uncomfortable metaphor for those who haven't managed to hold onto their mental capital and, on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, have reverted to the undead.

It might surprise some people to learn that being an undead zombie type of person, far from being an unsatisfactory situation, is actually considered the ideal when it comes to being resident in a Western country. An ideal —that is —from the point of view of those who stand to benefit from such a state of affairs. In the minds of politicians and business tycoons, having control over a population who have let their mental capital dwindle to apocalyptically low levels, must be a bit like how a shepherd feels with a couple of well trained border collies at his command able to make the flock of sheep go exactly where he wants just by whistling.

How did it get to be like this?

The industrialisation of our technocratic societies has given our handlers some great new tools to exploit us. They can easily make us do things that are against our self-interest, such as buy a product (no matter how shoddily made) or inject our minds with an ideology (no matter how half-baked) almost at the push of a button. This is achieved through an elaborate mind control system called the media, and the clever part is we think all the stuff that appears in our heads was our own idea!

Thus, if you ever find yourself buying a brand new car on credit even though your other one works just fine, or if you catch a reflected glimpse of yourself marching around the streets wearing a pussy hat and demanding that millions of people from alien cultures be allowed to flood your homeland and make those same streets unsafe for you, then you might want to stop and think for a moment. A good question to ask yourself in such a situation is: who stands to gain from this?

If you think like this for long enough you'll probably start to suspect that powerful forces are — you know — toying with you. And that's not a good thing. You may feel that the whole thing is a bit ... sinister.

Ever get the feeling that ...

We now live in a world where the president of the United States can type 140 characters into Twitter on his iPhone and, within minutes, cause hundreds of millions of people around the world to descend into a state frenzy and lose their minds. It’s an enviable amount of power that would make even a grand wizard in an epic fantasy novel jealous, but he — and others at that end of the food chain —only have that power because people willingly give it to them. So, given that any degree of resilience would necessitate protecting oneself against such intrusions on your valuable mental resources, how best to put up a firewall?

Intelligence

We all like to think we possess some degree of intelligence. We might not think of ourselves as being a genius per se, but we at least like to think of ourselves as more intelligent than them (with them being those stupid dunderhead ignoramuses who just won’t listen to reason). But what is intelligence?

Some people say you are born with intelligence and some say it's a question of nurturing. Whatever, we’ll probably never know because, ironically, we’re not intelligent enough to truly understand it and measure it. Still, one way NOT to measure it is by using IQ tests. These can be gamed, as has been proven i.e. you can get better at them by anticipating the types of answers required and seeing through the underlying logic. IQ tests measure a person’s ability to do IQ tests.

Perhaps a better way of understanding intelligence is to assume there are many different categories of it, and that everyone has varying levels of each. In the 1980s the American psychologist Howard Gardner identified nine different types of intelligence, including categories such as existential, natural, musical and bodily-kinesthetic. We intuitively know this to be true (intuition being another type of intelligence our ancestors used, yet has fallen out of use since the Enlightenment). Everybody is clever in certain ways, and our current obsession with measurable and narrowly-defined notions of intelligence have got us into the fix we’re in today.

From a personal perspective it pays to figure out where your gods-given talents lie, and make use of them accordingly. It also pays to build up your knowledge and improve your theoretical model of the world and how it works, because this is probably the best survival tool you’ll ever possess. A standard school education doesn't really do this as, like IQ tests, the focus there is on getting a good score. So how does one build up intelligence?

Reading a lot of books is a good start, especially if they are challenging, offer different viewpoints and span a number of eras to illustrate how ideas wax and wane over the ages. But this is perhaps not for everyone (especially if you are more oriented towards interpersonal methods of intelligence and learning), so in this case you may learn more from watching videos on YouTube and attending talks.

“But who can I trust? Who is right and who is wrong?” goes the cry. The answer to that is that there is no answer. You’ll just have to figure it out yourself. Saying that, there are a few red flags that indicate the person on YouTube from whom you are trying to download intelligent ideas is shovelling smoke:

They have large staring eyes (or narrow dead ones) and they never smile. It is easy to imagine these idealogues holding a knife dripping in blood or ordering the execution of people who disagree with them
The production quality of their videos is too good for an amateur production (indicating they are probably being funded by some billionaire somewhere)
They believe the Earth is flat or that we are being controlled by Lizards in human meat suits
They have a made up name (indicating they have likely been convicted of something and done time inside)
They claim to know and speak “The Truth”
Their every utterance is dripping in sarcasm
They begin their TedX presentation with a slide of planet Earth

Simply put, if you cannot imagine having a long and engaging conversation with them over a cold beer beside a fire, then they are probably not worth listening to.

Skills

Everyone has some skills, but not many people have any useful ones outside the narrow area of specialisation they have ended up working in. Skills are a strange thing because you can’t tell who has them simply by looking. That person sweeping the street with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip might be the next Jimi Hendrix, and the woman handing you your change in the supermarket might be a talented artist destined to be known down the generations.

These kinds of skills are great for the upper realms of human experience, but could they truly be considered useful? In terms of resilience, perhaps it’s time to get back to basics with some foundation skills that will make life a lot easier for you as the service industries made available by cheap oil go the way of the dodo. Any list is likely to be a long one, but at the very least, some competence should be sought in:

Cooking. You should be able to cook a basic meal from scratch using whatever ingredients are available. Storing food is also a valuable skill
Harvesting food from nature. Aside from fishing and hunting, this means learning to forage for edible plants and also growing your own vegetables/fruits/nuts
Self defence. Being able to protect yourself and your family from attack
Mending things. This could include sewing worn clothes, fixing broken electrical appliances or stopping the leak in your roof
Education/story telling. Passing on your knowledge, traditions and cultural norms to your children or the children of others

Telling stories around a camp fire is a useful skill

Character and charisma

Your character is made up of the personality traits that define you as a person. Good character has to be worked at and is not simply a case of writing virtue signalling platitudes on Facebook. However, like intelligence, good character is anathema to modern society because it shows a certain level of resistance to accepting the norms handed down by social engineers. Given that our societies are now in an advanced stage of psychotic breakdown, having the strength of character to resist the tide of half-baked pseudo ideologies, such as cultural Marxism, can make you stand out from the herd.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about this beyond living with honour and sticking to your guns. Remembering that your duty is to your kin – meaning your family and your community (in the absence of a tribe) – is what gives you honour, and is where you will draw strength.

Charisma is slightly different. Some people seem to have it and some people don’t. It’s that indefinable quality that makes other people want to be around and listen to another. Unfortunately, a lot of people with charisma are not necessarily worth being around, and some are downright psychopaths. And charismatic psychopaths, from a personal resilience perspective, should be avoided at all costs as they will suck the life right out of you like a vampire. In past times, when people lived in small clans of no more than 150, psychopaths were identified and disposed of before they could inflict much damage. Quite often this would be disguised as a hunting accident (“Yeah, Quarg just kind of slipped off the cliff and fell onto his spear when we were chasing the bear.”) or they would have their throats slit and their bodies tossed into bogs so that they couldn’t reincarnate.

In the modern world it is illegal to slit people’s throats and toss them into bogs, so psychopaths are now permitted to rise to prominent positions in business and government, where they able to inflict the most damage. If you suspect a psychopath is feeding off your own mental capital the best thing to do is ghost them. This means you completely block them out and never have contact with them ever again. Being glib, vain and shameless creatures, they will come crawling back to you with flattering remarks and gifts, but you should never let them near you again.

A European bog body - a tradition of getting rid of psychopaths that is no longer allowed

Mental stability

Assuming you’re a regular type of person with no overwhelming pathological mental health conditions, there are certain things you can do to help keep your peace of mind in an increasingly insane world. These things are often remarkably simple, some suggestions include:

Alcohol and recreational drugs. Alcohol is a depressant, marijuana eats away at your character and psychedelics can open your mind so much your brain falls out. Moderation is the key here.
Sleep. Getting enough good quality sleep is super important to mental welfare. A lack of either triggers a whole host of reactions by your body, including feelings of depression and stress, and your immune system suffers too. Conversely, a good night’s sleep (or several; many of us are so sleep-deprived we need up to a week to fully recover) will have you feeling clear and sharp. Incidentally, alcohol disrupts sleep patterns and prevents REM, which is one reason why you wake up feeling so lousy after hitting the bottle.
Nature. The modern world has isolated most of us from nature and this is making us extremely unwell and depressed. It is very hard to be depressed when you are surrounded by wildness and nature.
Exercise and diet. Vigorous exercise triggers the release of endorphins, which give you a feeling of wellbeing. Also, following a healthy diet with all the right vitamins and minerals (preferably from wild plants or biodynamically grown food) means your body will be stronger. Avoid putting glyphosate into your body, which causes inflammations and cancer, and is most readily found in non-organic wheat, lentils and dried pulses.
Trolling. Don’t be a troll. If you find yourself hammering away of your keyboard late into the night passive-aggressively hurling insults at strangers over some cause du jour, this means your mental health is slipping.
Digital crack. Similarly, limit or exclude from your life Facebook, porn, computer games and mainstream news as these will all rot your brain and turn you into a gibbering, salivating digital untermensch.
Annoyances. Eliminate those little niggly things. Do you need a filling in one of your teeth but have been putting it off? Have you relegated that important paperwork to the bottom of the pile? Are there a dozen annoying things that need fixing around the house that you never seem to get round to? Get all these things fixed and you’ll feel a lot better.
Clutter. Also, get rid of everything in your living space that doesn’t belong there. Make everything tidy and clean and you’ll feel like a weight has been removed.

But most of all, stop allowing unfettered access to your mind by the parasites who benefit from feeding off it. Instead, simply ignore them and do something creative instead. Play the guitar, paint a picture, create a garden, design a role playing adventure ... all of these things exercise your creative capacities, meaning you have added something of value to the world, rather than responded negatively to something of no value.

Common sense

This, unfortunately, is not as common as it once was and should perhaps be renamed. It is yet one more thing that is being taken away from us and preventing us from living as authentic and individual human beings. Wikipedia defines it as:

“[the] sound practical judgment concerning everyday matters, or a basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge that is shared by ("common to") nearly all people.”

Given there’s no way to teach this there’s very little to be said about it other than that it’ll probably be a long hard slog before it resurfaces.

A sense of humour

Finally, having some sense of humour is an important aspect of mental resilience. Some of the funniest and seemingly light-hearted people you’ll ever meet are those who have been through the worst times. Call it “dark” or “gallows humour” if you like, but being able to laugh in the face of existential adversity is a human attribute of the highest order. [Just remember, there's a fine line between gallows humour and outright nihilistic cynicism; don't walk on the wrong side of the line.]

Following the much-quoted Kubler Ross model of change (a euphemism for "grief") will inevitably eject you out its backside as a changed person at the “acceptance” level. Congratulations, you’ve survived!

Now, how do you react to the feeling of impending doom that has been instilled in you?

Hopefully, with your new Stoic outlook on life, you'll decide to make the best of it and lighten up a little. After all, there’s literally no point moping around complaining you were born, and dramatically screaming “Why me?” at the sky as rain pours down and lightning flashes around you.

Get on with your life in the best way possible. Be thankful that you’ve been jolted awake rather than face living the rest of your life cocooned in some blandly cosy yet false notion that everything is awesome and you’re in control.

And then make some jokes about it.

A Tour of Fox Wood

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Fri, 05 Jan 2018 20:20:00 +0000

Greetings all and happy New Year. Hope you all had a good one — I've been working in my woodland this week and thought I'd make a little video to show people what I'm up to. It came out a little bit longer than I anticipated, so it's probably best to watch it with a cup of tea.

This is my first YouTube video, although there will be more, so please don't be too harsh in your judgement of my efforts.

Normal writing schedule will recommence shortly.

Hard Goods

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 12:08:00 +0000

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about the idea of having a range of types of capital to foster resilience. I started off talking about financial capital, because that is the form that first springs to mind for most people when they consider planning for the future, but it’s only one of ten different forms I outlined.

The next one I want to write about is hard capital. When I talk about hard capital I’m talking about physical objects that you can put your hand on. These are things that come under your orbit of control that you can put to good use in order to achieve your primary aim. What is your primary aim? It is, I would suggest, to stack the odds in your favour of living a good productive, healthy and happy life for as long as possible, and to resist being sucked into a chaotic void. Sound reasonable and realistic to achieve?

Many people these days have unrealistic aims. They want to do things like save the world from global warming, or push humanity onto a higher level of vibrational consciousness, or smash the patriarchy (whatever that is). As such, they are set up for failure, and the void stretches before them. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with aligning your life with your values and hoping for the best, but making an unachievable aim the major focus of your life will drain your energy faster than a solar battery on a cloudy day.

Instead, a wiser course of action would be to focus on things you can achieve within your own life. Once you’ve got your own house in order you’ll be of greater use to your family, your friends and your local community. Who knows, you may even have some energy left over to dedicate to achieving world peace.

The Brooklyn-born psychologist Abraham Maslow had a great deal to say on this matter. Maslow thought that the aim of life was to achieve “self-actualisation”. By that he meant climbing upwards and away from the drudgery of day-to-day existence, and achieving something truly remarkable with your life. To him a self-actualised person is:

“A person who makes full use of and exploits his talents, potentialities, and capacities. Such a person seems to be fulfilling himself and doing the best he is capable of doing. The self-actualized person must find in his life those qualities that make his living rich and rewarding. He must find meaningfulness, self-sufficiency, effortlessness, playfulness, richness, simplicity, completion, necessity, perfection, individuality, beauty, and truth.” Abraham Maslow

To this end, Maslow then went on to create his famous “hierarchy of needs” triangle, which sets out human needs, from the most basic to the most refined, with the implicit suggestion that we must all set out on a journey to climb our own personal pyramids.

Looking at the triangle, you may notice that, moving from the bottom to the top, is roughly equivalent of moving through the ten forms of capital needed for resilience which I outlined (financial, hard goods, mental, social, health, employment, bio, time, emotional and spiritual). That is to say, one level needs to rest on the base of the one below in order to move up to the next level, with each level becoming narrower and more refined as you ascend. The pinnacle of the pyramid is the state of self-actualisation, and it rests on the firm base of the other states below it.

So, with the ideal of achieving our highest form of human experience, the next level of capital we’ll need to develop is the hard stuff. And the biggest piece of hard capital most people will need, and also something that appears very low down (i.e. of fundamental importance) in Maslow’s hierarchy, is a building in which to live. A home can take many forms, but it needs to provide shelter and safety at the very least. Ideally you will own your home and have the security of knowing that it’s yours and cannot be taken off you except in the most extreme of circumstances. Alas, housing across the industrialised world is a traditional favourite for speculative investors, meaning the price bears no relation to the materials involved in its creation. This puts home ownership out of reach of many people, forcing them into a life of renting or being shunted around from one social housing project to the next. And for now, strict zoning laws and obstructive planning rules keep it this way. Despite this, many people have found their own creative solutions. These include:

Tiny homes. Often the size of a garden shed, and sometimes on wheels to get round planning laws, tiny homes still provide the function of protection (from the elements), a safe place to sleep, a physical address and a store (however small) for other hard goods such as clothing and cooking wares. Pros: affordable: Cons: may fall foul of planning laws, not much space for anything except living
Earth sheltered buildings/hobbit holes. Increasingly common in northern Europe, these are partially dug out of the ground and usually hidden from view. Being constructed of natural materials and scavenged waste, they are very cheap to construct and are often situated on land deemed agricultural. Pros: cheap to build, close to nature: Cons: usually illegal, prone to demolition if discovered
“Wheel estate”. Living in a car, camper van (RV) or caravan is increasingly common, especially for people in the generations either side of the baby boomers. In the US there are now entire ‘communities’ of elderly workers living in these conditions and working for companies such as Amazon. Pros: very cheap, usually legal, mobile: Cons: little security, prone to breakdown/devaluation
Squats. Taking over unused buildings is not a new phenomenon but it is increasingly common in large cities. Pros: free: Cons: illegal, unsafe

If you’re one of the lucky few who can afford to own a regular house with a bit of land attached in the form of a garden, you should count yourself very lucky. However, there are pitfalls even here. We are told, and most people assume it to be an absolute truth, that houses are an asset. It’s an article of faith that they always rise in price over the long run, leading to the maxim “safe as houses.” But a house is not just an asset, it’s also a liability. Once you own a property that is legally registered in your name you are on the hook for whatever local taxes the increasingly cash-strapped municipal authorities decide to throw at you. Can you decide you don’t want to pay these taxes? Not without landing yourself in court — and if you still won’t pay, you may end up in prison (which is the ‘housing solution’ of last resort).

What’s more, houses decay. Roof tiles fall off and let water into the loft space. Damp spreads up walls from basements. Window frames rot and need replacing. Heating and cooling systems break down and cost a fortune to get repaired. The list goes on …

The aim of the game is to make your house more of an asset than a liability. You can do this by choosing to live in an area with low property taxes, running a business from home, making sure it is insulated properly so that it doesn’t waste energy, setting it up to run on renewable power, renting out a room (or even the whole house if you live in a touristy area), making use of outdoor space to grow food — again, the list of what you CAN do is long.

So, if you find yourself in the fortunate position of being able to buy a house, choose wisely. Get one that has a proven track record of standing up — newer houses (at least in the UK, and, I suspect, elsewhere) are made of cheap and shoddy materials that — even by the builders’ own admission — are not designed to last more than four or five decades.

Aside from housing, land is another eminently sensible physical thing to own. Whenever people ask me what I’d do if I won the national lottery (which is a pure thought experiment as I don’t buy tickets) I always answer that I’d buy land. As much of it as I could afford. Wherever I saw a field or a woodland or a degraded piece of scrubland, I’d buy it. I’d then get as many people as possible living and working on this land, restoring it to ecological health, growing food and generally being an example to others of what can be done.

Even if you don’t own any land, you’re still going to need some tools to ensure you can make some form of living. I have three main tools: a car, a laptop and a chainsaw. My car allows me and my family to get around and to move things that would be very difficult if we had to rely on muscle power alone. My laptop enables me to gather information, communicate, organise my life, apply for jobs, write blogs and books and a host of other things too. My chainsaw allows me to cut down trees and then butcher them up into small chunks in order to produce firewood, building materials and charcoal — something that would be very difficult to do if I had to rely on hand saws alone.

It's probably a good idea to get hold of any tools you think you might need in the future. The time to buy them is now, when all it takes is the click of a mouse button to have a diesel powered delivery van roll up outside your house a day or two later. Sites such as eBay are a great place to find old hand tools. And old hand tools tend to be better than modern ones as the quality of metal ores used to be far higher than they are today. I have hammers that are probably 70 years old and still in great shape, and hammers that I’ve had only a year or two but are damaged after only light use.

Other hard goods that will improve your basic resilience in this category include:

- Food and water. You should have enough food to hand to last you and your family through several months of disruption to supply. Most people operate a ‘just in time’ mode of living, going to the supermarket every day and having mostly empty shelves. This is an efficient way of operating, but it is hardly resilient. It’s best to build up a basic store of things that keep a long time, such as rice, dry beans and pasta, and then build of a store of canned goods, sauces, stock cubes and other items that will make consuming your bland basics a little more interesting. If you have somewhere to grow food, make sure you also have enough seeds in store. Always buy non-GMO heirloom varieties.

Clothing. Make sure you have enough clothing to last you a long time. If I had enough money, I would buy several pairs of really good boots, dozens of thick socks, several rainproof coats and hardwearing overalls, and I’d store them away for future use. Here’s an anecdote: my wife’s grandfather was a policeman in Denmark during WWII. One day the Nazis invaded and arrested all the police, but he managed to escape. For the next three years he lived rough in a forest, working with the resistance and enduring unbearably cold winters — an experience he never forgot. In 2002, just before he died it was found out that he had been saving in the attic all the socks, gloves and hats he’d been given over the years — “You never know when the hard times might come again,” he said.

Quality stuff. Despite the cornucopian abundance we enjoy at present, almost everything produced for consumers these days is cheap and shoddy. Unfortunately, for people on a low or average income, these are the only affordable options. Nevertheless, it pays to seek out quality things that will last a long time, and these can be cheaper than you think. Flea markets and charity shops are great places for the discerning scavenger to pick up quality objects. I have bought cast iron frying pans, ceramic pots and high grade ore tools very cheaply from these places. eBay is great for this too (just this week I purchased a hard wearing wax jacket for £40 that would have been £260 new – the reason being there was a small hole in one of the pockets.) If you can afford it, buy quality new things too. It might be painful to fork out the extra in the short term, but if it means you won’t ever have to buy said item again it will have been worth it.

Books and manuals. Again, these are very cheap at present and easy to obtain, so you may as well stock up if you have the space. “How to” manuals will be worth their weight in gold in the future as the internet becomes less and less useful as an information source, as will good quality fiction and non-fiction. Now is the time to build up your personal library.

Things of beauty. Okay, so not strictly ‘necessary’, but they will add value to your life. I don’t want anything in my house that isn’t either useful or beautiful, and some of the things I own perform dual roles. I’ve bought oil lamps from antique shops that look nice on my table now but will give light in the event of a grid interruption, artwork handing on the walls created by friends, furniture upcycled by my wife and old oak chests with beautiful painted artwork that I picked up for a song as they no longer fitted with people’s contemporary ideas of interior design.

I’m firmly convinced that if you live in a modern industrialised nation you can get hold of most of what you need to furnish your home either for free, or almost free. After all, this is exactly what I did in the very first blog post I ever wrote on here, seven years ago when I had no money.

So, anyway, there were some thoughts on getting hold of the hard goods you’ll need to build up that level of resilience in order to move onwards and upwards towards your aim of living the best life possible under the circumstances you are presented with.

I’ll be taking a break for a few weeks in this series as I’m between jobs and focusing on getting the next instalment of my sci-fi book series written — the next in the series is called Neptune Rising — so have a great Yule/Christmas and see you in the New Year!

Staying Afloat: Financial Capital

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 13:21:00 +0000

Last week I wrote about personal and family resilience and outlined ten different types of capital. I defined capital loosely as a useful resource that you have some control over in order to comfortably get you through increasingly uncertain times. The first one of those—which also happens to be the one that most people associate the term capital with—is financial capital. Yes, we're talking about money derived wealth. I'm not going to cover this in any great depth—it is, after all, a blog post—as it is such a huge topic. Instead, see this as a prod for further contemplation, or maybe just as a reminder.

Rich man, poor man

It is commonly accepted that if you have a large enough pile of cash, you'll not only be able to secure your future, but you'll be happy too. We are told that having a high income and stash of other easily converted quasi-financial assets, such as stocks, shares, Bitcoins and a gold-plated pension will make you deliriously happy. However, this is not so. The best way to disavow yourself of this illusion is to stand during rush hour at a commuter station in the heart of London's City district or Wall Street in New York, and observe your fellow human beings as they swarm past. Not only do they not look happy, many of them look downright stressed and angry as they scurry back to their multi million dollar apartments and country mansions. Frankly, some of these stuffed suits look like they are about to burst a blood vessel.

But these are merely the working wealthy. What about people who have already accrued wealth beyond their wildest dreams? To see how well these are doing one only has to open a newspaper or read a biography or two. The former are filled with lurid stories of celebrities, lottery winners and sports stars ruining their lives with cash-fuelled hedonistic behaviour, and in the latter, you will often read of egotistical self-sacrifice, power struggles, lifetime-long legal battles with detractors and an eventual sad and lonely death followed by a drawn-out family squabble as lawyers pick over the will like vultures on a carcass.

Personally this kind of fate doesn't appeal too much to me.

So, if having too much wealth can be a curse, does it follow that having very little wealth will make you happy? Well, of course not. Unless you are Mark Boyle (the 'Moneyless Man') you're going to need to have access to some cash in order to survive, and for most people that means having a job. Now, having a job, in itself, might not make you happy, but at least it allows you to access a flow of money which you will need to get through life. Periodically, however, you may find yourself without the means of making money flow into your pocket, meaning you will suddenly find yourself with no money at all.

Having no money, or not enough to live off, is neither pleasant nor resilience building. If you find yourself in the position where you do not have enough money to support yourself or your family then you will immediately find yourself cannibalising your other forms of capital. You may be forced to sell off valuable items, such as your car. If you sell your car then you may find your scope for travelling to and from work is diminished, making it harder still to find a replacement job. This is the kind of negative feedback loop that is put into effect by a personal financial crisis. Next, you may raid your savings if you have any, just to buy the basic necessities. Perhaps you will similarly turn to credit cards or other form of predatory lending simply to put food on the table and pay the bills.

As time goes by and your situation has not improved you will be increasingly stressed and worried. When you get stressed your body and mind put themselves into an elevated threat mode. And as they don't know the nature of the threat, they prepare for every eventuality, which is why being stressed is so draining. Because of this your health capital will suffer. You may lose your appetite, you won't be able to sleep properly, and any addictions you have may spiral out of control. You may even develop new addictions — such as sleeping pills or prescribed opiates — as you desperately try to stop the stress from draining your life force. Eventually, if this continues, you may end up falling out with your partner, getting thrown out of your home and end up staring into the abyss thinking "What happened?"

Once the financial rug has been pulled out from beneath your feet a system of negative feedback loops will rapidly assert itself and trying to get back on your feet can feel like attempting to haul yourself out onto dry land from the set of rapids you've just fallen into. It is really quite a terrifying situation to be in, and one that is best avoided at all costs (as I can personally testify).

Yet this, unfortunately, is the scenario that more and more people are facing as our economies become increasingly threadbare. Today's economic reality is that more and more wealth is concentrated at the top rather than distributed more equitably, and at the same time the apparatus and mighty institutions of health, social security and state-backed pension provision that were put into place during an era of great prosperity during the second half of the 20th century are staring at bankruptcy.

Given these realities, any rational person would not want to be placed at either end of the financial wealth spectrum, and would instead opt for a happy medium. And given that not too many of us are likely to find ourselves accidentally falling into the most wealthy 1%, we only have to worry about being relegated to the status of financial non-entity class. Once you are relegated to this economic sub-class, where the best job you can hope to find is a zero hours contract on minimum wage, and any downward adjustment in your government allocated wage support will have a cataclysmic effect of you and your family, you are going to find it almost impossible to pull yourself out of it again. And given that this sub-class is rapidly swelling in size across the industrialised world and gobbling up people as if Godzilla and his extended family were at an all-you-can-eat buffet, what can you really do to avoid being a victim?

Control

Chaos and stress occur when you are not in control. To get control of your financial capital you first need to do an appraisal. If you're familiar with using spreadsheets then great, but a piece of paper and a pencil will also suffice. Make a note of all your income and all your outgoings on a monthly basis. If you don't know some of the figures then make a realistic estimate but brutal honesty with oneself is required in this exercise. Do the calculations to account for a few months, or even a year.

What is revealed? Do you spend more than you earn, or do you have a nice sum left over each month? If it's the former then you are going to have to find ways to either cut your outgoings or increase your income. Obviously, some of your costs will be fixed, but perhaps they can be reduced? It pays to think carefully abut what you are paying for both your fixed costs and your variable ones, and make actionable changes accordingly. There are many, many ways in which you can reduce your variable costs—and there are many websites and books out there packed with tips—so I'll just mention a few to get the thought processes rolling although, of course, everyones' circumstances are different. You could, for example:

- Cancel any entertainment packages you are signed up to and do something less passive instead
- Buy ingredients in bulk and make large pots of food, freezing individual portions for later eating
- Search around for cheaper utility deals and try to cut your energy and water usage
- Swap your car for a bicycle, or at least go by bike more often
- Forego a vacation rental and instead do a house swap

On the income side of the scale you could, for example:

- Take on an extra part time job
- Make art or crafts and sell them online
- Make value added products from your garden, such as chutneys or marmalade, and sell them at farmers markets
- Get a higher paying job
- Rent out a room in your house

The object of the game is always to live below your means. If you are able to live below your means you can use the excess money to invest in other forms of capital and increase your resilience. You could, for example, spend your spare money on buying fruit trees (bio capital), cooking a huge feast and inviting your neighbours round to eat it (social capital), picking up some quality hand tools from eBay (hard capital) — or you could store it as cash savings, thus increasing your emergency fund (keeping it in the realm of financial capital). Thus by becoming more frugal you can become richer in a more rounded sense.

Speaking of this, one of the first things you will need to do to build financial capital resilience once you have got your income and outgoings tuned, is to build up a savings fund. There are shocking figures circulating that almost 7 out of 10 adults in America cannot put their hands on $500 to cover an unexpected emergency. I'm sure the figures will be similar for Britain and other first world nations, especially if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. The fact is that most people are living wage slip to wage slip, or from one government handout to the next. Your immediate aim should be to ensure you are not one of them. A good target to aim at would be to have enough cash saved up to cover six months of expenditures for you and your dependents. Of course, this is just a target—any money at all that you can put aside will make you just that bit more resilient in the financial stakes. If six months seems somewhat extreme and unattainable, start with one month.

And when I say cash, I mean actual notes that you can put in your pocket. Any money that you have stored in a bank account is not technically yours at all, but the bank's. As all banks operate on a fractional reserve basis (that is, they only have something like 1/10 of the money that is on their balance sheet at any one time, the rest being all manner of convoluted investments, derivatives and loans), they will not be able to give it back to you if sufficient numbers of other people also ask for theirs back at the same time. This is called a bank run, and legislation is already here in Europe to protect banks against this happening by limiting the amount of liability they have with regard to your savings.

It is important to consider financial capital first because, with the exception of every other form of capital (except perhaps health), a financial disaster has the ability to bring down your carefully constructed house of cards. To that end we should first consider ...

Debt

We are riding high on the biggest debt bubble in history. This should terrify most people, and yet it rarely gets a mention. In fact, many younger people—including some economists—who have grown up in this debt bubble simply see it as 'normal' and assume it will continue to inflate forever. History tells us otherwise.

The fastest growing form of debt in the UK is consumer debt. We are bombarded with enticements to buy new stuff, to upgrade cars and phones and to splash out on holidays and computer games and a million other things.

But debt, in actual fact, must be repaid, otherwise it would never be lent in the first place. And so you must ask yourself before you take on any debt whether it is likely to increase your resilience or not. Not all debt is bad, just as not all savings are good, but think very carefully about taking on debt and always try to avoid it if you can. Because taking on a debt means handing over a portion of your future security to a faceless entity that does not care about you or your wellbeing: all it cares about is getting its money back, with interest.

At the very least, you should never take on debt to purchase consumer products or services. I know it's easy to be tempted, and we all have our weaknesses, but consumer debt can be an Achilles heel for many. Whenever I forget this simple fact I sit down and watch one of the many popular debt-collection TV shows and imagine it's my front door that the dull-eyed jobsworth debt collectors are kicking down at dawn, and my family they are forcing out onto the street. Because being in debt and finding you are unable to make payments is a sure fire way to set you on the road to financial oblivion.

So, if you have much unsecured debt, make it a priority to reduce and eliminate it. If you have a large amount of "secure" debt (in quotes because no debt is secure, from your point of view), such as a mortgage, also consider how you might reduce that, perhaps by moving to a smaller or cheaper property, or making increased monthly payments. The less debt you have, the less you'll have to worry about if/when there is a prolonged economic seizure.

Stocks and bonds

Known as 'paper wealth' stocks and bonds are certificates that purport to represent the value of a company or government or other real-world entity. Their price is determined by both the yield that they pay out (i.e. a sum of money paid periodically to the owner of the certificate) and the market's take on its true value based on its riskiness. Shares, generally, tend to be riskier than bonds, as bonds are underwritten by the central banks of national governments and are therefore deemed "safe".

But remember, no form of investment is "safe". Like other forms of paper wealth (futures, derivatives, hedge funds etc), stocks, shares and bonds are only an abstract representation of an underlying reality in the physical world, and their value can plummet to zero overnight. In fact, with the advent of high-speed computer trading, their value can plummet to zero in nanoseconds.

At present, stock markets around the world seem to be rising inexorably. The main reason for this is the huge amounts of financial stimulus being pumped into financial markets in the wake of the last crisis ten years ago. We are long overdue for a massive correction in this regard.

Gold and precious metals

It's common to see articles about financial planning and resilience end up by recommending readers buy gold as a means of securing their wealth (with a handy link to the author's favourite bullion merchant). I'm not going to do that. I don't believe that buying gold will do you an awful lot of good, unless you are extremely wealthy and really cannot sleep at night without thinking your future security is stored in a lump of yellow metal in a Swiss vault. The reason I don't believe that buying gold bars is a good idea is several-fold.

Firstly, they are eminently worthless unless you are able to liquidate their value in a safe manner. Given that gold is a safe haven, it has a consistently high value. It's very stealable. Should a financial collapse occur and word gets out that you have some gold buried somewhere then it's just a matter of time before you and your family receive a night visit from a group of gentlemen carrying duct tape, cable wire and garden secateurs. This exact scenario was very common in Argentina following their financial crisis in 1998. And given that it's impossible to sell physical gold without telling someone that you own it, there's no way around this scenario. If you own it, you take this risk of someone else finding out you own it, and wanting it.

Secondly, gold is useless. Okay, so it has a few minor uses, such as tooth fillings and fountain pen nibs, but beyond that it has little immediate use. If you really must own some precious metal then silver might be a better bet as it has a host of industrial and non-industrial uses, meaning it will always likely retain some value based on this. And it is less likely to get you in trouble.

And thirdly, gold mining is one of the most environmentally damaging things mankind has ever devised. I'm amazed at the sheer number of articles out there which spend several paragraphs outlining why we need to look after Mamma Gaia, and then go onto recommend buying gold to hedge the future.

Are there any situations where it might be a good idea to hold gold? Sure. Buying a few coins, for example, or holding onto family jewellery or gold ornaments will give you a bit of psychological and financial security without making you such a target. Generally speaking, however, a far better investment would be in hard goods and land. These are the kinds of things that will keep you alive in a prolonged state of emergency in ways that a lump of metal cannot.

Cryptocurrencies

A recent alternative to holding gold or cash, and something that everyone is talking about at the moment, is cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. I'll be honest and say that I don't know enough about them to have a fully informed opinion here. When they first appeared my first instinct was "snake oil" — and this has been bolstered by all the overblown claims I have seen lately, usually made by baby-faced millennials who have very little conception of the wider systems in which they operate.

My second thought was that they will clearly be unviable as energy constraints assert themselves — after all, if you have no access to your "wallet" on a smartphone or computer, then you have no access to your money. And then theres the huge amount of energy used by computers to "mine" the data that allows each unit to claim its uniqueness ...

However, several clever people whom I trust and respect have said they see some potential in cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies as a form of decentralised cash, so I shall research more and develop a more informed view over time.

Anyway, that wraps up this short summary of financial capital as it relates to personal resilience. Next week I'll talk a little about a non-abstract form of capital — hard goods.

I'll end with what I consider to be the seven most important points to consider when building up your financial capital resilience:

1) Live within your means and invest any surplus in other forms of capital
2) Get out of debt as soon as you can — especially if it is non-productive debt
3) Build up an emergency cash fund to last you a good few months
4) Don't rely on paper wealth being a good store of value
5) Don't be a goldbug
6) Don't think you are going to receive much of a pension
7) Don't invest in cryptocurrencies unless you are 100% sure you understand them (nobody 100% understands them ...)

Holistic Resilience

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 15:24:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about resilience lately, and what that word means to people. According to my Concise Oxford Dictionary, the word resilient is defined as:

1. (of an object) Able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or compressing 2. (of a person or animal) able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

As our supply of cheap, concentrated fossil fuels stutters and dwindles, and the industrial age that has ridden on its back for so long enters its twilight years, it is a certainly that most of us will find ourselves experiencing great change. Despite all the bluster and inflated claims of a new ‘green’ era in which people will be able to continue their high consumption lifestyles and enjoy all the benefits accorded by globalised supply chains, the facts — as I’ve been researching and writing about for the past eight years — simply don’t stand up to any meaningful analysis of this possibility.

A minority of critically thinking people have accepted this and recognised the likelihood that their lives are going to take a turn for the materially poorer in the immediate future. A smaller minority still have decided to actually take action in preparation for this. These people have seen that all is not well in the three major ‘E’ realms of energy, environment and economy, and are concerned about what it means for them and their families. They may hold differing opinions on what the trigger point will be — ranging from economic collapse and global war, to rampant virus outbreaks and civil strife — but they share the same feeling that things are more delicate than the mainstream media would have them believe, and that the best way of ensuring one’s welfare is to prepare for an era of disruption and dramatic change.

These people can count themselves as among the lucky few, because preparation and proactive behaviour is always better than unpreparedness and reactive behaviour. Once they have got over the psychic shock that usually accompanies a realisation of an uncomfortable truth, and then proceeded through the standard stages of the Kübler-Ross Change Curve (also known as the Five Stages of Grief Model), they will find themselves at the ‘acceptance’ or ‘integration’ end of the process. This is the point where they decide to do something useful about the predicament they find themselves in.

Not everyone, however, makes it as far as the acceptance stage. Many get caught up in the ‘frustration’ and the ‘depression’ stage of the process, and find they cannot escape. These people see little or no point in continuing, and often they adopt a nihilistic outlook as a coping mechanism. It is as if they are being pulled into a black hole. And yet if they can pull themselves away from the gravitational well of despair and make a commitment to moving forwards to acceptance then they can be said to be demonstrating resilience. Resilience, in this case, is a dogged determination to make the best of the scenario you find yourself in, despite the fact that you have no control over the wider situation. It is the conscious decision to take control and do something useful.

“Something useful” is often manifested in the form of stockpiling food and other items that will be valuable to have around if they are suddenly no longer available. This is a natural and worthy start, but it is only the beginning of a much wider transformation on the path to resilience. Now that the internal reality model you were brought up with has fractured and is no longer useful, you may begin to frantically hunt for new information and make connection with like-minded people who have been through the same transformative process as yourself.

Plenty has been written on the subject of resilience in the past, and the focus is usually on the preservation of one or more forms of capital. This may be because people are generally, and understandably, concerned with losing what they already have. This has led to a lot of talk about how to secure one’s financial capital (wealth) and property. Ranked higher still is how to preserve one’s corporeal presence on the planet i.e. how to stay alive if the food trucks stop turning up at your local supermarket. In other words, resilience has come to mean protecting and holding onto ones capital.

But capital is an oft-misunderstood word, usually meant only to mean material assets or the means with which to produce wealth — hence its association with capitalism. But the concept of capital goes far wider when considered in the personal sense. Everybody — no matter how materially poor they are — has various forms of personal capital. It could be considered the summation of the resources that we value and have some form of control over. Logic then tells us that if we want to be happy (and who doesn’t?) we should build up our capital.

Having personal capital that we can use to our benefit and control can be translated as empowerment. Being lost in the ‘depression’ stage of the Kübler-Ross Change Curve is a failure to recognise one’s personal capital twinned with a self-defeating outlook that says “there is no way out of here – I should give up now.” This is not a recipe for happiness and empowerment, so the first step to figuring out how to become resilient is identifying our capital in order to build upon it. These are the broad forms of personal capital to recognise and identify in your own life:

1. Financial capital. Let’s start off with the simplest and most easily recognisable one. Your wealth includes all the money you have in your bank account or stuffed in your mattress. It includes any assets that can be easily liquidated (i.e. sold off), such as a house or car, as well as share certificates, gold bars and antiques hidden in your attic. When considering wealth, you must deduct debts. In our modern world, many people look wealthy, but often they are very highly leveraged and have a negative net worth. As Mark Twain once quipped on becoming wealthy “I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.”

2. Hard capital. This is the stuff that you own. It includes everything that is in some way useful. Books, lawnmowers, furniture, fishing rods, guitars and that drawer of old nails and bolts in the basement. It could also include articles that are beautiful, but otherwise useless — as long as it adds value to your life in some way it can be considered part of your capital. If it isn’t useful or beautiful and it has no monetary value you should probably get rid of it.

3. Mental capital. Your mental capital includes everything that you use your brain for. We’re talking knowledge and education (specifically, education that is useful in some way), language skills, other skills (cooking, fishing, sewing etc.), musical abilities, all the books you have stored in your head and a sense of humour. Yes – all of these are assets that are at your disposal to help ease your way through life and make it productive and enjoyable. Mental capital could also include mental health capital and — crucially — your outlook on life.

4. Social capital. No man is an island, they say, and your family and friends are of potentially immeasurable value to you. There are zero instances in history of successful societies comprised of individual loners, so it’s a good bet to build up your network of trustworthy and sympathetic people who will accompany you into whatever the future holds. Do you invest time in your relatives and children? Are you the kind of approachable person people turn to for help? Do others see value in having you around? This holds too for any groups you are a member of.

5. Health capital. Your body is the most important asset you own. Without it you are literally dead, and so it makes sense to look after it. Good nutrition, exercise and an avoidance of harmful addictions mean that your reliance on the failing industrial healthcare system will likely be minimised. What’s more, having a healthy body means you will enjoy life more and can undertake a wider range of types of work, which leads to …

6. Employment capital. What do you do for a living? Do you enjoy your job or are you merely doing it to keep afloat, even though you dislike it? How many marketable skills do you possess? Do you have more than one way of making money and multiple income streams, or are you so specialised that if your job vanished you would have no way of supporting yourself? Admittedly hard to quantify, these are some of the questions to ask when considering the kind of work you do, how it benefits you (and the wider community), and how resilient to shocks it is.

7. Bio-capital. This is the environment you live in. If you are a millionaire living in a polluted inner city with no trees or plants then your bio-capital will arguably be lower than a penniless hermit living in a wilderness zone in the mountains. Interactions with the living natural world are crucial for human wellbeing, and the fact that so many people now have very little contact with wild animals and plants is not just a sad reflection of modern life but also a threat to the sustainability of our ecosystems. As organisms, we humans depend entirely upon the natural capital provided for free by Mother Earth. Treating ecosystems recklessly and exploiting them for short-term gain is like sawing off the branch we are sitting on.

In terms of personal bio-capital, think about what you have access to or control over. Do you own a garden that could be planted up with insect friendly plants, fruit trees and organic vegetables? Maybe you don’t, and all you have are a couple of window boxes and some shelf space. This is still bio-capital — you can grow a few small plants such as tomatoes or chillies, and you can sprout beans and pulses on the shelves. Maybe you don’t even have that, and yet you can still be a guerrilla gardener or grafter (planting and grafting in communal spaces), or you could help out at a local nature reserve or organic farm, clean litter from the beach or canal you live next to … the possibilities are many.

8. Time capital. How much time do you have? A lot? A little? Many people these days are afflicted with a disease called busy-ness. They are always busy and have no time for anything! When you haven’t seen them for a while and you ask them what they have been doing they invariable respond that they have been “oh, you know, busy!” So consider how much time you have available to you. How can you make better use of the time given to you? Time, we know, is subjective: it can speed up or slow down depending on who is experiencing it and when. You can ‘time hack’ your life using methods such as meditation and contemplation, and you can strip things out of your life that are unnecessary and time-consuming. Furthermore you can become efficient at planning and executing tasks so that you have time spare to do enjoyable things. Balance is key.

9. Emotional capital. How much control do you have over your emotions? Do they control you or is it the other way around? Do you live a fearful life full of angst and worry, or do you adopt a contemplative or Stoic approach to existence? To some extent we are not able to control the emotions we are born with, but we do have a choice in how we respond to external events. Gaining a solid bedrock of emotional security is a crucial form of capital that is often overlooked.

10. Spiritual capital. Finally, we have spiritual capital. By this we mean how we relate as individuals to the wider cosmos. Since the Enlightenment, people brought up in the Western world have been taught that they are inconsequential cogs in a vast machine called the Universe. There is no meaning in life, they say, and the whole of existence is an interstellar game of billiard balls played with atoms. Needless to say, this bleak outlook represents a break not just with tradition, but also with every other human society that has ever existed. People, they say, are merely meat sacks of DNA, programmed like robots and only self-interested. Love is a chemical reaction that will one day be produced in a test tube, and consciousness is merely data on an organic chip stored in your head.

Thankfully, more people are beginning to question this view. At the same time they are turning away from the major religions — which have claimed hegemonic control over the spiritual dimension for millennia — and are awakening to the personal spark of potential within themselves. A good spiritual grounding is an empowering phenomenon, and therefore a very valuable form of capital.

Each of these ten forms of capital are present to a greater or lesser extent in everyone’s lives. They do not exist independently from one another, and they will usually grow in symbiosis with one another, as long as no single one becomes outsized compared to the others.

Combining these ten form of personal capital are what I am going to be writing about over the coming months. It’s a process I’m calling holistic resilience i.e. considering ways in which to withstand or recover from difficult situations using a synthesis of personal capital. I’m looking forward to expanding on each of these ten forms, as well as delving deeper into the meaning of resilience and why people should be developing it. Along the way I hope to include many examples and introduce new concepts from different areas of thought.

Three key assumptions throughout will be that:

1 – The industrial age is coming to a messy end due to diminishing energy returns

2 – We have free will and are willing to use it

3 – There are no guaranteed outcomes in life

Still Here

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 10:59:00 +0000

Well, here I am. I didn't mean to go silent for so long but I've simply been overwhelmed with various jobs and the whole blog-writing thing has been pushed to near the back of the pile in terms of priorities.

First off, I apologise but the anthology of stories will not be going ahead. I've contacted some of you directly about this, but not all of you. The reason it isn't going ahead is because there was not enough material. I thought I had enough but then a couple of the authors have proved uncontactable and others were unreceptive to feedback about their stories. So, what I was left with would have filled a very slender volume. It's a pity, but there we are. If you would still like to see your story published then contact Joel Carris at Into the Ruins, who will I'm sure consider it.

Anyway, I'm currently sat here in a very blustery (but, so far, sunny) west Cornwall, awaiting ex-huricane Ophelia. It's not expected to strike Cornwall in any big way, but there will likely be a lot of rain and wind damage, so I'm half expecting the lights to go out at some point later today. Ireland will likely receive the full brunt of it, so if you're in Ireland and reading this, please take care.

I hope to be back to blogging shortly, and am reconsidering the best way to breathe life back into it. Since I started this blog a few years back, my personal interests have shifted somewhat. Yammering on about collapse has proved to be mostly ineffective in terms of shifting the issue into any kind of media spotlight, and so now it appears that we are going to be hitting the brick wall of reality headfirst anyway. I hope you are all wearing crash helmets.

To that end, I'm thinking about focusing my writings mainly on resilience. What can we do to make the best of our situations? How can we help one another by building networks and making our individual nodes more resilient? I've been working on future-proofing myself (as much as is reasonably possible) for these last few years, and so I'd like to share my thoughts on this and open up the conversation a little. Becoming personally resilient, I have discovered, is an iterative process and can only be part-learned from books and blogs. What's more there are many aspects to it and many weak links in the chain that can trip you up.

Bye for now.

S is for Short Story Update

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Wed, 05 Jul 2017 12:41:00 +0000

Phew - apologies for the delay but I have now selected which pieces will appear in the forthcoming short story anthology of post-industrial fiction I have been putting together. This took a bit longer than anticipated as the entries were slow to come in at first, and then I have been extremely busy over the last month working a new job which usually has me finishing at midnight most nights.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to write stories and submit them to me. I have, I think, selected the ones for publication on the basis of the criteria I laid down in the original post, as well as how they fit in with the general feel of the anthology. If you sent me a story and you are not listed below then please don't feel too bad as all the entries were great and it was probably just a stylistic thing.

The following authors will be contacted shortly and sent a publishing contract. I have also written a story that will be included.

Angela Corbet - Inside Out
Damian Macrae - The Last Farang
Catherine McGuire - Shifting Gears
Charles Tolver - A New World
Matthew Griffiths - The Island
Faze Al - After the Pause
Genna Rae - The Gift
Didier Pasqual - Soul Traveller
Jason Heppenstall - The Amnesiac

The book will provisionally be titled "The Spreading Silence: a collection of tales from the world after oil" and I'm looking around for cover artwork at present. I'm hoping to get it edited, proofread and typeset as soon as I can, but I'll continue to be busy for the next month and am then heading off to Germany, so please bear with me.

Once again, many thanks to all those who entered the competition - if you are on the list above I'll be in touch via email.

R is for Revolting Beasts

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Thu, 22 Jun 2017 10:44:00 +0000

There's something afoot in Britain at the moment, and it's not entirely pleasant. Foul beasts are rising to the surface of the murky pond of the national psyche and sending out suckered tentacles to drag the unwary screaming from their beds. This disquieting scene could mark a step change in the narrative of who we think we are, and set an endpoint to the fairy story we have been telling ourselves for the last few decades. The dark mould stain of entropy is beginning to appear on the walls and no amount of fresh paint seems to get rid of it.

I've taken on a job as a bartender. What better way to earn a little cash at the end of the industrial age? The place is a hotel: a kind of garden haven beside the sea where people come to spend a few days and get a break from their stressful lives. I pour gin, polish wine glasses and listen to what the customers have to say, offering sympathy where appropriate. Many of them are Germans, on holiday with their families, but there are also many Brits and Americans, and many of these love to talk.

There's a sense of something having gone badly wrong. One national tragedy is eclipsed by the next, seemingly in ever more rapid succession. My daughter came home from school and declared that she and her classmates were getting tired of all the one and two-minutes silences. If it isn't people being run down in the street or having their throats slit as they eat dinner, it's tower-block infernos and other man-made tragedies. Being down at the dog end of Cornwall, of course, our local tragedies tend to be small-scale. A man falling off a cliff here, a surfer drowning there, a dog chasing a rabbit into a disused mineshaft — all tragedies in their own way but also, perversely, all part of the natural order of things. But now the great summer invasion is upon us, as the local population is boosted tenfold by those from up country — and they bring their energies and bigger tragedies with them.

Road rage on the melting tarmac of yet another day of record breaking heat. Me on my bicycle, and the woman in her Audi screaming abuse and yelling about road tax. She's like a heavily made-up monkey, trapped in her metal cage on wheels and enraged at ... something. I almost feel sorry for her. And there are lines of traffic to the horizon on country roads that are so windy and narrow as to be more of a natural feature of the landscape rather than a carriageway filled to the brim with delivery trucks, holidaymakers' cars and white vans. On either side of the stream of vehicles the wildflowers sag in the heat and nod their heads in the light breeze. How can you have road rage when you are surrounded by a blaze of wildflowers?

And the car radios burble out a constant stream of politics. Meaningless, valueless, maddening, hypnotic, soul-deadening politics of who said what to whom and how a commission should be set up to investigate something and how so-and-so expressed outrage about a target not being met in some branch of a bureaucracy somewhere. And Brexit. Brexit, Brexit, Brexit — as if they repeat the silly word enough times they'll beat us into submission and we'll declare the whole thing a mistake and take it all back just so long as they stop talking about it. Perhaps this is adding to the road rage.

And, the people take the bait and battle it out on social media and in pubs and on the streets as if they were rehearsing for some kind of civil war where nobody knows who or what they are fighting for. Many have grown battle weary and simply keep their gobs shut, but there are those who still hold out, tapping away into the early hours of the morning engaged in the hand-to-hand of flame wars, and reporting on their battles to their own echo chambers. An insanity seems has gripped the nation and still the Americans in the bar talk about how civil we all appear and how civil our conduct is compared to 'back home'. And it probably is.

But there was nothing too civil about the declared 'day of rage' yesterday, called in the wake of the Grenfell Tower inferno in London, which killed God-knows how many and ignited a firestorm far larger than the one caused merely by cheapskate polystyrene cladding. Scores dead, killed in their own homes, while the multimillionaire company owner who thought it would be a good idea to beautify a 27-storey tower block filled with mostly immigrant poor people by cladding it with firelighters walks free.

The day of rage turned out to be a damp squib. People were too busy dealing with the kind of heat they'd expect to encounter in Greece to be bothered about getting publicly angry. Even the police were pleading with people to calm down, saying that they'd "had enough" due to the heat and could they please protest when it had cooled down a bit? Being British, whatever that even means anymore, people politely obliged. For now.

But all of a sudden the ship of state seems rudderless. There's a lame duck sitting in Number 10, and people scent blood in the water. Socialism is surging in popularity, after a long leave of absence, as the reality of the precariousness of things starts to become apparent. The body politic is foaming at the mouth and having convulsions right now, and there doesn't appear to be a doctor on hand.

How do we even begin to address these not-inconsiderable problems and tragedies? Well, a vacuous pop song has been released by a multimillionaire TV personality in response to the incineration of the families in the tower block. This comes hot on the heels of the pop concert in Manchester to 'honour' the children and teenagers blown to pieces by an Islamic fundamentalist, even before some of them had been buried. This is our national response to mass death now: gyrations and brave faces and emoting on social media. Celebrities run to be seen at the scene of the latest tragedies, and it's probably not too far fetched to assume that the next logical step is to have them singing and pouting live from the scene of the next terror attack — perhaps rushing them out there in the back of ambulances and police cars, along with the doctors and paramedics. It all smells a bit ... desperate.

People just wish all this nastiness would go away. They hope for it to crawl back into the swamp it came from, and are in no mood for examining the reasons as to why any of it might have appeared in the first place. There's no problem so great that it can't be solved by a hashtag and a declaration of 'One Love', whatever that means. Any deeper examination of cause and effect is shot down in fiery rhetoric. Maybe the great paradigm of our times has nothing to do with scientific enquiry or the Enlightenment — maybe it's to do with the refusal to examine the consequences of previous actions, be they governmental, societal or individual. Indeed, consequences, like elephants in living rooms, are not a popular topic of conversation right now. Which is a shame, but so it goes.

***

In other news, the Midsummer deadline for entries for my fiction writing challenge has now passed. Thank you to everyone who sent me stories, I will be announcing the results next week.

Q is for Quotidian Fluctuations in a Teacup

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 12 Jun 2017 10:05:00 +0000

Here in the UK, things have been a little weird over the past week. People have red rings around their eyes and they get angry at the slightest provocation. You may have heard that there was an election, and that the result was somewhat unexpected and confusing. You may have seen some news about it and experienced a fleeting sense of bewilderment, wondering whether it was relevant in any way to your own life. And then, deciding that it wasn't, you will have instantly forgotten about it. But if you're even a wee bit curious as to what is afoot, here is an explainer of sorts. I will summarise the election twice. The first summary will be incredibly brief. In fact, it will be one sentence. Should your curiosity be piqued, the second summary will be a bit more in depth.

Summary 1

Nobody is in control and the politicians are running around like headless chickens emitting a strange gurgling squawk from their neck holes as they hold up banners saying 'Situation Normal - please carry on shopping'.

Summary 2

Okay, take a deep breath and get ready to shake your head slowly from side to side whilst quietly muttering "And these people once ran a whole empire?" For clarity and understanding I shall proceed in bullet point format.

So, the prime minister, Theresa May — a vicar's daughter who was never elected to lead the country and only promoted to the position after David Cameron resigned following the Brexit vote — called a snap election a little over a month ago.
The prevailing logic was that her party, the Conservatives (Tories), would prevail in a landslide, thus cementing her authority and enabling her to follow through on some of her most favoured pledges, such as breaking up with the European Union (which, ironically, she was opposed to in the vote), bringing back grammar schools, taxing people with dementia so that their homes can be stolen, and re-legalising fox hunting for the 1-percenter chums of her investment banker husband.
Political analysts boldly stated the Tories would win a landslide because May's only viable opponent, Jeremy Corbyn (leader of the opposition Labour Party), was completely unelectable, despite being very popular with the non-elite.
Corbyn, it was said, was 'completely unelectable' because he was a bearded socialist who rode a bicycle to work and spent his down time growing organic vegetables rather than chasing foxes with dogs and selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. In short, he was 'crazy'.
Much was made of a statement he made when he said he wouldn't want to start a nuclear war and kill millions of people, which was seen as hopelessly idealistic and weak. What a loser!
And the fact that he once spoke with representatives of the IRA (remember them? The Irish Republican Army) to try and get a peace deal. Clearly a friend of terror!
A smear campaign was launched by the media, with just about every publication, including so-called progressive outlets, such as The Guardian and the BBC, saying he was not fit for office.
Pollsters predicted that the Labour Party would be wiped out — possibly for generations — and we would enjoy a prosperous future governed by the Tories, whose main objective was to privatise everything and share out the spoils among the top 1%.
But not everyone loved the Tories. In fact, anyone not under the spell of the media smear campaigns, or under 60, hated them. With bells on.
They hated them so much that some of the other progressive parties, such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, even bowed down and told their supporters to vote for Labour.
This made some of their supporters angry. They didn't like the idea of tactical voting. "It will end in tears," they opined.
But young people were quite keen on the idea of getting rid of the Tories and electing Jeremy Corbyn. He had promised them a long list of things, such as abolishing tuition fees for students, halting austerity programmes and taxing the rich more to pay for public services. Oh, and he was not going to privatise the National Health Service, which the Tories wanted to do.
Fighting between the two sides was bitter and acrimonious. The media stooped low, very low.
And it began to work. People started to call Jeremy Corbyn 'the terrorists' friend', Jezbollah and Red Jezza.
As all this squabbling was going on a young Islamic fanatic walked into a pop concert in Manchester filled with teenage girls and children and detonated a suicide bomb, killing 22 innocents.
Everyone went quiet for a few days until Theresa May popped up again saying she was the only one who could be trusted to keep Britain safe from terrorists.
But then people with a memory longer than the average goldfish remembered that in her previous role she had axed 20,000 police officers as part of an austerity drive. The police themselves said that would probably have caught the terrorist if they hadn't been so underfunded and resourced.
Some of the right wing newspapers began to turn on Theresa May, although they made it clear that the still hated Jeremy Corbyn even more because he 'supports terrorism' and doesn't like war.
Theresa May, who enjoyed war and said she would be more than happy to nuke entire nations, tried to fight back. But there was a problem. All she could say was "I am strong and stable" over and over, like a robot that had been programmed by a 10-year-old using BASIC and was stuck in a recurring logic loop. People began to call her the 'Maybot'.
She came across very badly in media appearances and decided not to turn up to a televised debate for party leaders, which looked bad.
Then, for some reason known only to her and her team of advisors, she stated that she was going to confiscate everyone's houses when they got old and infirm. This didn't go down very well with a lot of people.
The gap between Labour and the Tories began to narrow as the election approached, sending several newspapers in paroxysms of terror. All the stops were pulled out in smearing Corbyn and his party.
But none was more terrified than The Guardian, which had been knifing Jeremy Corbyn in the front for the past two years and suddenly realised he was in with a chance of winning. The editor decided to completely reverse position on Corbyn, ordering all leader writers to do a U-Turn on the man. Up until then the progressive organ had advocated a Blairite ideology of free market capitalism under the guise of 'socialism lite'. The spectacle of journalistic slithering and backsliding and was enough to upset a delicate stomach.
And then three Islamic fanatics attacked central London on a Saturday night, butchering people with kitchen knives and slitting a waitress's throat before they were killed in a hail of bullets by police.
Everyone went silent, again. It was only a week before the election. A few liberals could be heard bleating about extending the hand of love to Jihadis, but otherwise it was quiet.
In fact, things were pretty quiet right up to the day of the poll, other than a constant low level murmuring on social media about tactical voting.
Nobody mentioned the almost £2 trillion (and rising fast) national debt, or the precarious state of energy reserves. These were issues that are not considered important enough compared to, say, Jeremy Corbyn's fondness for growing his own vegetables, or the fact that he once rode around behind the Iron Curtain on a motorbike.
On election day, every online British news site declared that the Tories would win by a substantial margin, meaning that Corbyn supporters might as well just stay at home. A suspicious person would almost think that there was a coordinat ... oh, never mind.
Polls closed at 10pm and then it was revealed that there was a SHOCK EXIT POLL which showed that Jeremy Corbyn could potentially WIN!
How could the opinion pollsters have got it so wrong, gasped the public. I mean, they never get it wrong, do they?
Corbyn supporters went wild with excitement for several hours as the results began to come in, most of which showed the Tories being savaged by the electorate, even in supposed 'safe seats'. For the second time in less than a year, it seemed people were lining up to plunge their daggers between the ribs of an out-of-touch government.
A Tory bloodbath ensued and by the next morning it looked like the government was DOOMED...
BUT there was a major catch. Something which would take a while to sink in for Corbyn's supporters...
The Tories had still WON, albeit by a margin not large enough to mean they could be declared fit to form a government.
A HUNG PARLIAMENT was declared.
Which does not mean suits dangling on the end of lamp posts (yet) but simply means there was no overall winner and a caretaker government would have to be put in place until another election could be scheduled (and we're getting pretty sick of elections, I can tell you).
But Labour supporters (and many others) STILL saw it as a victory and started drinking beer, even though it was a Friday morning, and they should have been drinking tea instead.
And then Theresa May, who should have been dead at this point, TOTALLY KILLED THE PARTY!
She went to see the Queen and told her she was forming a new government with the DUP. Queenie said "Okay, Mrs May."
"The DU what?" said everyone.
The DUP — Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. They had enough elected Members of Parliament to form a viable majority with the Tories.
Everyone frantically Googled the DUP to see who they were and what they stood for. When they found out there was much gnashing of teeth and renting of hair.
The DUP, it turns out, are an Irish version of ISIS. As Presbyterian fundamentalists, they define themselves by what they hate, which is Catholics, gays, single mothers, sin, Catholics, modernity and gays. What's more, many of their supporters wear black balaclavas and paint murals on the sides of houses depicting them holding machine guns with words such as "Never Surrender" and lines of scripture.
These people were now potentially our government.
And Jeremy 'the terrorists' friend' Corbyn was still free to spend plenty of time down at the allotment watering his pumpkins.
Progressives fell into a profound pit of despair as something beyond their worst nightmares had come to pass. Their strategic voting hadn't worked, and the smaller parties, such as the Greens, having voluntarily acted as doormats, had lost credibility.
But it wasn't all bad news from their perspective, at least now EVERYONE hated Theresa May — including her own party. For she has taken a party that was telling itself to get ready to rule for several decades, if not forever, and brought it to the much reduced point where they had to cosy up to people who wore ski masks in the pub.
She'll probably be killed off for good shortly and replaced with Boris 'the buffoon' Johnson.
And she didn't even get to re-introduce her favourite blood sport, which must hurt.
To further confuse things Scotland voted FOR the Tories, rather than their beloved Scottish Nationalist Party — meaning the Scots wanted to be part of Britain and rejected the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon's desire to break away from England BUT surrender to the EU. Confused yet?
Meanwhile, the pound fell on all the uncertainty, and the whole process of Brexit has been thrown into confusion. And the EU just sits there, thrumming its fingers on the desk and saying "Well, are you leaving, or aren't you? Make your mind up."
But the DUP don't like the idea of Brexit (which must be sinful, in some way) — despite once stating that Europe was run by the Antichrist — and seeing as they have a very big bargaining chip they might insist on either staying in the EU or watering down the terms of leaving it — most probably in the form of keeping the borders open.
Meanwhile 'unelectable' Corbyn is down at his vegetable plot fertilising his brassicas, a wry smile on his weathered face. Not only does he now have a large army of fanatical supporters, but he has some major chunks of the media begging for forgiveness. And if another election were called in the next couple of years —which, let's face it, is looking very likely — he'd stand a good chance of winning.
So, to recap, the Tories won but they 'lost', Labour lost but they 'won', the Scottish Tories won for Britain but lost for Scotland, the Northern Irish Presbyterians, who could never have dreamed of winning, have won the whole UK, UKIP has disappeared but might appear with a vengeance if Brexit is threatened, the Green party got thrown on the compost heap and the Liberal Democrats simply annoyed everyone — all clear?
And still nobody mentions the debt or the energy entropy time bomb ...

So there you have it. I imagine it looks like a storm in a teacup from an international perspective — but it sure feels uncomfortable when you live in the teacup.

And the winner is ...

P is for Patience

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 12:08:00 +0000

Image: Sarolta Bán

Patience is something I got a lesson in recently when I almost sliced my hand in half with an angle grinder. Minutes before my little accident I'd been sitting at the dining room table with my wife, discussing the jobs that needed doing before summer. Spring was in the air and I felt full of pent-up energy after the winter. I wrote a list of all the various renovation projects that needed doing on our old house, the tasks that needed to be completed in our woodland to ensure a supply of firewood, charcoal, mushrooms and fruit for the coming year, and the last-push that needed to happen to get our polytunnel producing food during the main growing season. Yes, there was a lot that needed doing, but I felt equal to the task and was impatient to get on with all the jobs.

Twenty minutes later I was walking to my local hospital - which, luckily, is only five minutes from home - a blood-soaked pillow case wrapped around my hand and arm. "I'll be alright," I was telling my wife. "It's just a cut — we'll stick a plaster on it and it'll heal." Luckily, she disagreed with my prognosis and prodded me along to the hospital emergency centre.

An operation under general anaesthetic was performed that saw surgeons digging chunks of abrasive disk out of my metacarpi and sewing severed tendons back together. When I came round and saw a plaster cast from my elbow to the fingertips I began to realise that my list of jobs might just have to wait. The hand doctor gave me the bad news. "You won't be able to use the hand at all for a month, and it'll be three months before you can do any manual work with it."

And so that was that. A right-handed person losing the use of their right hand, albeit temporarily, is severely limiting, to put it mildly. There was no chance I could complete any of the jobs I had set down on my list. I couldn't drive, I couldn't cook, I couldn't open bottles or jars, get my clothes on or off, or eat food that wasn't already cut into small pieces. I managed as best as I could with my left hand, but I'm not ambidextrous and it's pretty hard to do things such as type or brush your teeth with the hand you're not used to using. I became like a big baby — almost totally helpless when it came to doing simple tasks.

Now, three months on, it has completely healed. I have an interesting scar that I can show to people at parties, and I can't make a 'thumbs up' with my right hand, but otherwise there is no sign of my injury. I got off pretty lightly, having heard some rather gruesome stories from others (walking around with a power tool injury seems to attract a certain type of man who is keen to show off his own power tool injury scars.)

But apart from teaching me that angle grinders are dangerous (something I had known on a theoretical level but now know on a visceral one) my mishap did teach me about patience. Sitting around for a month with nothing much to do apart from read books and reflect made me realise that in the seven years or so since I first learned about the fate of the industrial world, how delicate is its mode of operation and how dependent we all are upon it, I have been engaged in constant hurried preparation for its demise. I'd downsized from my job, moved the family out of a city and country to somewhere less risky, bought a piece of land, learned a few skills that might be useful for when the current economic model has a seizure, and spent countless hundreds of hours filling my questing mind with books, blogs and media trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the world and what an appropriate mode of living might look like in response to it.

And over those seven years I've seen the majority of collapse pundits repeatedly get their predictions wrong for when 'the big one' is coming. Well, so far, 'the big one' hasn't hit us in our cosy first world bubble, but there are plenty of signs of carnage and chaos if one cares to look. We have various failed state countries, including Libya, Syria, Venezuela and Egypt. Each one of these countries was relatively prosperous and stable a decade ago, and yet now, life for many people living there has become a mad scramble for survival amidst political turmoil, hunger, rioting and civil war. Mainstream news media doesn't often report on what is going on within these countries, so it falls to independent observers to go out and look at what is happening on the ground and spread their info using social media.

On the finance and economics front we have basically seen the death of economic growth, in any meaningful sense. Sure, there are lots of figures and factoids flying around about 'full employment' and 'economic recovery' and the like, but scratch the surface and you'll find a dispiriting reality of millions of unemployed but uncounted people, people working minimum wage jobs on zero hours contracts and GDP figures that are almost entirely comprised of central bank generated debt. The debt bubble has ballooned to epic proportions, but again, the media doesn't seem interested. Debt allows countries, institutions and people to look good in the short term, while at the same time sacrificing the longer term.

On the energy front there is a sustained and continued fall in the density of the supplies available to us as a species. We consume something like five times as much oil as we discover, and whatever new stuff we do discover tends to be so challenging to extract and process that we have to expend huge amounts of our remaining energy just to do so: translated, this means that we might as well not bother. It's as if we have been at a rambunctious frat party and the parental liquor cupboard has been smashed open and drained. All that remains are a few empty bottles lying on their sides and some really horrible sticky orange-flavoured aperetifs. The party looks like it's about to fizzle out when someone discovers several crates of booze in the basement. Party on! But wait, it's just shandy, but who cares, it looks like beer and it comes in bottles that look like beer bottles. And all the time new guests keep arriving and demanding booze...

To make up for the inconvenient truth that we are running out of the highly-concentrated fuels our industrial civilisation needs to run, we have a loud cacophony of techno-optimists who insist that business as usual can continue if we just build enough wind turbines, or solar panels or propagate algae in the sea that we can turn into diesel. All of these schemes look great on a computer screen and it is easy to get uninformed people to believe that they are indeed feasible, but none of them ever consider the mechanisms — financial, political, economic — that would be needed to scale them up to a level where they would make much of a difference to offset the diminishing conventional fuels. We seem to be lost in a dreamlike state of demented unreality, like blindfolded people wandering around in a maze shouting hail Mary through gritted teeth. The sad truth is that the smartest people among us are those who capitalise on this madness, amassing huge personal fortunes by promising the moon (or Mars), just so long as the government subsidies continue rolling in.

Aside from all this we have ten different shades of crazy running through our societies. Some mischievous demon somewhere decided to lob a bomb into our carefully ordered political consensus of what constitutes left and right, good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate. This has given the chattering classes, who thought they had it all sorted out, a bad case of the vapours, and turned many of them into little more than drooling basket cases who become psychotic when presented with images and words that go against their programming. Thus we have people who identify as 'liberal' throwing their allegiance behind billionaire financiers and politicians promising endless war, and those who identify as 'conservative' being generally in favour of conserving nothing except for their own privileges at the expense of everyone else.

On top of the above factors, we've also got a few new wars, environmental problems that are getting steadily worse, the drumbeat of Islamic terrorism that is getting closer to home, and there are now half a billion more people in the world than when I first started writing this blog, some of whom are refugees heading this way.

So, when you look at the past seven years, a lot has changed. Even if it doesn't feel like it on a day-by-day basis, the world is going through a profound readjustment. Sure, at some point, something will probably snap. Maybe it'll be a financial crisis that pops the debt bubble and ends up bankrupting entire countries as bonds get slaughtered. Maybe it'll be a war confected by the deep state and the western military industrial complex — that uber parasite on mankind — and we'll all be lying flat on our backs not knowing what hit us. This time next week/month/year we could all be dead or starving, or eating each other's brains for breakfast.

But here's my simple take on things: to give in to such depressing thoughts is to deny ourselves the ability to lives our lives in the best way that we can. Surrender to the fact that there's nothing you can do to 'fix' things, other than making yourself and your loved ones as secure as you can, and try to make the best of the hand you've been dealt. Create stuff, love people and life, try and make things a bit better for others and keep laughing at the absurdity of it all. The universe doesn't owe you a safe passage — there is no other way.

O is for Ouch!

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 21:49:00 +0000

Hello everyone, just to say that I'm not writing much at the moment as I've had a little ... accident. As you can see from the picture, my right hand is not fully functional, and given that it's my writing hand I'm forced to type with one finger on my left hand.

Yes, two weeks ago I was cutting through a steel pipe with an angle grinder when the tool caught an edge, banged against a wall and rebounded onto the back of my hand. Luckily, I was at home when it happened, which is a five minute walk away from the nearest hospital. Once there they ascertained that it was serious enough to be sent to the regional hospital, and I emerged two days later having had an operation to sew together a severed tendon and dig some fragmented disk out of the bone.

Although I've been using power tools for 25 years, this was my first experience of anything going wrong. It was a silly mistake that could have been avoided, and I've learned my lesson. I also got to learn a few things about the health system here, and got a free mini-break in a nice hospital with nice doctors and nurses. So, much humbled, I'm back home and recuperating.

Anyway, I'm pretty much handicapped for three months while it heals, which has torpedoed most of my work projects. At least I can catch up on a lot of reading - it could have been a lot worse.

***

In other news, I'm sad to report that heretical polymath and fellow peak oiler Liam Scheff passed away earlier today aged 45, having written this note. I wouldn't claim to have been a friend of Liam, having only become aware of his work six months ago, but I interacted with him quite a few times on social media and appreciated his rapier wit and sharp thinking. The tale of his demise is a sad one, but he bowed out lucid to the end and with true spirit. He was definitely one of the good guys - I've got his book Official Stories on order.

Not Sci-Fi but Pi-Fi

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 14:06:00 +0000

Right now, it seems like people's faith in the idea of endless progress is being shaken. Whether it's the UK leaving the EU, Donald Trump's ascension to the American presidential throne or simply a gnawing feeling that something 'big' has gone wrong somewhere, more and more people are expressing anxiety about the direction in which we are heading. If one wants to see proof of this phenomenon one need look no further than the mainstream media, traditionally the gatekeepers of human consciousness in terms of the day-to-day business of sorting out what is important from what is not. Even a brief glance at an online news site will show a slew of articles that are more biased opinion pieces than factual news items, and the reader comments below — if they are permitted at all — will more often than not display a remarkable level of hostility towards anyone who disagrees with them. Is it any wonder that trust in these mainstream publications has fallen to historic lows across a broad range of demographic groups, with only the over sixties still possessing much faith in them at all?

At the same time, faith in science and technology is facing a similar crisis. Casting an eye back over the last few decades, to give a couple of examples, it would seem that new inventions have been supplanted by mere innovations and 'upgrades', whilst actual space travel has been replaced by theoretical space travel (or low Earth orbit space stations). If one wants to see them there are plenty of artistic impressions of what faraway planets 'might' look like, presumably to make up for the occasional blurry pixel we are told is the actual, and the public at large is ambivalent at best about the latest discoveries made by particle physicists with research grants the size of small countries. Once again, is it any wonder why faith in science is being tested when there are so many things we were told were scientific proofs are now discredited, such as the idea that a low-fat diet makes you slimmer and that you must drink eight glasses of water and five (now increased to 10) portions of fruit and veg a day to maintain health? No, those men and women in white coats are having to fight harder and harder to win over an increasingly sceptical public.

Of course, this cannot be permitted. The reaction by the guardians of the media and the scientific technologists to this loss of faith by their subjects is to double down on their claims and amp up the rhetoric. Thus information that emerges from a non-mainstream conduit is decried as 'fake news' or 'propaganda' and science that emerges through a non-approved channel is debunked as 'pseudo science'. No quarter is given in this battle of consciousness, and no dissent is permitted.

And yet people do dissent. Finding themselves caught in an ever-tightening vice of economic policies which make them materially poorer with each passing year, and faced with an indifferent class of media-savvy personalities who insist that things are getting better all the time, they are wont to ponder whether, in the realm of hopes and dreams, they've been sold a dud. Most people, no matter where in the world they live, yearn for practically the same thing. They want peace and security, a decent low-crime area in which to raise a family where they might have a little place of their own with maybe a space to grow some food, and a few good friends with whom they can share a meal or a drink while feeling happy within their own cultural boundaries. That's basically it: a modest, happy life with peace and a degree of autonomy. Is this too much to ask?

Instead, what they get, is an increasingly degraded living situation where, if they live in a poor country, they either have to work long hours in a factory producing gadgets and other consumer items, or else they get a subsistence wage working in dangerous conditions mining minerals or producing chemically poisoned cash crops for the commodities market. And if they are fortunate enough to live in a rich country, the majority will have to work long hours in an office doing unfulfilling work to pay off the huge loans they have taken out to finance buying the gadgets made by the poor people. Here they are forced to dine in the staff canteen on chemically poisoned food from abroad while their bosses wax lyrical about replacing them all with robots made from the commodities mined by the even poorer people abroad.

Weren't we supposed to be living in Utopia by now?

And so people need some kind of new plausible vision. In the past, in the industrialised nations at least, we were offered salvation in the form of Sci-Fi fantasies about living in space and travelling around the universe meeting interesting new aliens. Now, unless the aliens come to us, these dreams appear unlikely. The dwindling of oil supplies, and the technical inability of renewables or anything else to replace it, means that the industrial basis of our civilisation has a very short shelf life. Indeed, due to the immutable and non-negotiable laws of thermodynamics, the party really will be over sooner rather than later. Mention this to most people of course and they'll airily dismiss it as an apocalyptic delusion, and that "they'll" think of something before then. But given that an ever growing groundswell of people are losing their faith in "them" — what's a narrative-driven sapient mammal with an above average sized brain to do?

That's where the PI-FI writers step forward. PI stands for Post Industrial and Fi for Fiction, because that's what is needed right now. So what's the difference between a sic-fic writer and a Pi-fi one? Well, instead of dreaming up yet another variation of the tired old trope of muscular space-heroes travelling around the galaxy in spaceships and saving virgins/peoples/planets from annihilation*, the PI-Fi writer recognises that the limits imposed on the human race by geology, thermodynamics and the biosphere mean that we're not looking to the stars for salvation, but under our own feet on the nice blue magic ball we call planet Earth.

PI-fi, it could be said, is a maturation of a form. Remember when you were a kid and you wanted to be a rock star? You played the music on volume 11 and stood in front of a mirror with a hairbrush and imagined thousands of adoring fans swooning, of lighting cigars with wads of money and seeing pictures of yourself in magazines (I know I did)? And then you get older and you realise it will never happen, and you learn to take life's tragedies and victories in your stride and you see on the news that another pop star has taken a drug overdose or died at a relatively young age and you think, "Thank God my teenage dreams never came true!" It's the same thing with fiction and all those ideas of conquering the universe and dominating other planets.

What does Pi-Fi look like? Thankfully we already have plenty of examples, probably the most well-known of which is James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand series. John Michael Greer's After Oil: SF Visions of a Post Petroleum World burst onto the scene in late 2012, cementing the establishments of a new genre, and in the meantime we have had the launch of the quarterly magazine Into the Ruins, showcasing further talent. Another new magazine, Mythic, explores post industrial fiction, as well as more traditional Sci-Fi, and I'm sure there will be more as we move forwards and old narratives continue to disintegrate.

Obviously Pi-Fi has more constraints placed on it than Sci-Fi in terms of possible story lines — or so it would seem. But, wait a minute, doesn't true creativity flourish best when it is constrained by form and must follow agreed-upon conventions? Don't the boundaries of the field of play focus the attention of what's happening in the centre? A case in point: which piece of music sounds better to your ears, Bedřich Smetana's Vltava, with its sinuously flowing phonics that evoke a force of nature, or a piece of avant garde 'noise music' that adheres to no rules or form whatsoever? As ever, the choice between the two is subjective and depends on the listener, and admittedly the latter is evocative of a certain technological dysfunction in its experimental nature: it has its place in the auditory sound ecosystem, but which piece would you rather listen to on your deathbed?

What qualifies as Pi-Fi? At its heart, any narrative that is written with this genre in mind must be set in a post-industrial future. This is our most likely future, and therefore the one that the tool of fiction is the most powerful and useful. This raises the question, what does 'post-industrial' mean? After all, we are often told that we live in a post-industrial society, since most manufacturing moved to China. No, Pi-Fi is different. We are considering a future in which industrial civilisation is either ending or has ended. To that end the following assumptions would have to apply:

1 - Humankind's access to highly concentrated forms of energy will be severely curtailed in the near to medium term
2 - There will be a corresponding collapse in the complexity of civilisation and the population it can support
3 - The future will be haunted by the mistakes of the past, especially in the form of inappropriate technologies

Sound a bit gloomy, or merely realistic? It's been pointed out by others that we have a binary obsession with either/or visions of the future, namely that either we will head off on a grand space adventure in the stars, or else face apocalyptic annihilation at home. But there's a huge amount of ground between those two poles — ground that Pi-Fi is more than happy to occupy. Neither of the two extremes is particularly useful to us, except as a means of escapism, and what if neither of our standard assumptions takes place? What if — gulp — the human story continues for another few thousand years, with different types of technology, different ways of organising our societies and different ways of relating to our planet? True, those skeletal horsemen are certain to be busy — just as they have been throughout nearly all human history — but the folks sticking around will likely have a lot of good stories to tell about their experiences.

Can you imagine telling some of them?

If you think you could then you might be interested to hear that I'm moving forwards with a small publishing venture, with the aim of publishing a handful of Pi-Fi books every year. At present there is not much going on in this genre over on this side of the Atlantic (Europe, that is), or indeed the world outside of America — so I'm particularly interested in, but not limited to, stories taking place in the wider world. I'm going to kick this off with a call for submissions for an initial anthology of stories up to 8,000 words in length, but 2,000 at a minimum.

For this anthology, writers will need to follow these seven rules for their story:

1 - Stories must be set in the future at some point within the next 100 years

2 - The laws of physics as currently understand them must be abided by

3 - Due consideration must be given to the natural limits placed on humans, as well as the damage done to Earth's ecological systems by industrialism

4 - No deus-ex-machina technology that rescues industrial civilisation at the last moment

5 - Stories must be stories, with believable characters, plots, narrators etc., and not just thinly-disguised technical propositions, sociological commentaries or screeds

6 - Metaphysics is permitted and even encouraged as a story device so far as it relates to popularly understood concepts (metaphysics doesn't run on oil, so there's no danger of us running out)

7 - Stories must not simply be "horses and hearses" i.e. a re-hash of pre-industrial Europe, supposedly set in the future

I'm really hoping that readers will respond to this and rise to the challenge with vision, imagination and plausible realism. Unleash your mind and see what happens. I will be cross-posting this blog on a number of different social media pages, channels and groups, and the closing date for entries will be May 1st 2017 — Beltaine — which is seven weeks away. To enter, ideally publish your story on a blog site or other web page and post a link to it in the comments below this post — making sure there's a way of contacting you in the form of an email address somewhere — but if you can't do that then send it to me as an email at the address found in the 'About' section on my site. The stories must be original and they must be by you. I'll pick the winners shortly afterwards and they will share an equal proportion of 70% of the proceeds of the resultant book after the costs of production have been discounted (which is simply the price of designing a cover and printing a few review copies). The book, after I've edited, typeset and printed it, will then be available through print-on-demand and published by Belenos Press (I'm working on making a website so it's just a Facebook page at the moment) — and I'll send all the published authors a copy.

Best of luck for the challenge and I look forward to reading your stories.

* I do realise that not all Sci-Fi is so two-dimensional, although much of it has been in the past, and some of it still is — and I'm as much a fan of it as you are.

M is for Madness in our Time

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 15:36:00 +0000

Image by Tavis Leaf Glover

Have you noticed how many people are losing their minds recently? Ever since people here in the UK democratically voted to leave the European Union and, more recently, voters in the USA decided they'd rather have a businessman as the president instead of a career politician, people have been, to put it politely, going batshit crazy. People who, before these votes took place, appeared to be well balanced and generally happy in life, might now spend their every waking moment hammering away on keyboards with the caps lock on, spitting out an endless slew of invective against people they don't know. The slightest thing can trigger them off into an epic meltdown and one can only imagine their red rheumy eyes scanning their computer screens as they scroll continuously looking for another perceived slight that can be blown up into a full-on fight to the death.

If this were the Middle Ages these people would be called "possessed".

Here's an interesting thought experiment, imagine if we wound back the clock by a couple of years and approached these keyboard warriors with a simple question. If they were British we might ask them "On a scale of 1 - 10 how interested are you in the political and trading arrangements between the UK and the European Union?" Most people, I suspect, would reply that they were either rather uninterested or utterly uninterested. Many would just grunt and look puzzled and say "Eh?" They would then ask you what you thought of the latest series of Game of Thrones.

Now, these same people might say that the arrangements between the UK and the EU are practically the most important thing in the history of things. They might then claim they have always thought that way — that all those years when they ventured no comment on politics or economics or anything serious at all were merely an act — and that anyone who even dares to question the importance of such a thing is a closet fascist and an ignorant sub-human who deserves to be put out of his misery with a cricket bat.

The same goes for America. Ask a person in 2014 whether the country should be run efficiently and like a business and most people would probably agree that it sounds like a good idea. Roll forward to 2017 and there's a president who's a businessman who's trying to run the country like a business and half the population are claiming that he's a satanic Hitler who uses kitten heads as golf balls and lets Vladimir Putin urinate on him as he's wrapped in the American flag.

What's going on?

Clearly, social media and digital legacy media have played a part in the great insanitising of the West. People have retreated inside their own echo chamber silos where the only views they get to hear accord 100% with their own views, meaning the moment they encounter someone with a slightly different viewpoint (which, to them, will also appear 100% logical and correct) they react as if they just opened their wardrobe to find a tentacled Chthonic abomination trying on their shoes as it lazily devours their firstborn child.*

But anyway, what is it exactly that is causing so many people to go crackers over what, to many of the people who read this kind of blog regard as of the lesser order of magnitude of the Bad Things That Can Happen scale? For a long time we've been saying that our civilisation depends on cheap and abundant energy, and that the supply of our most accessible form of that energy — oil — is faltering and that there's nothing out there to replace it, in any meaningful sense. And that as it falters we'll follow the time-honoured trajectory of civilisations in decline which will feature the more powerful actors attempting to secure energy and materials (as represented by monetary wealth), an inevitable kickback by the left-behind majority whose survival instinct will lead them to choose leaders and reject the ideology foisted upon them by the establishment, who will in turn then fight back etc. — in a rinse and repeat cycle that continues until a new equilibrium is established, albeit at much lower levels of available energy, materials and — yes — population.

We entered into this part of our dance of death some decades ago and it's testament to the power of politics and marketing that the illusion of things getting better (How? For whom? At what cost?) has persisted for so long. When this mass illusion began to fracture in the early part of the 21st century most people doubled down on the denial presented to them by the corporate media. We had somehow convinced ourselves that we were a 'special case' and that the normal rules of entropy and dissolution did not apply to us. Boy, was that a bad mistake, but surely someone must be to blame?

Have you ever heard of the term 'gaslighting'? I encountered it for the first time when I read Thomas Sheridan's book on psychopaths and mind control Puzzling People: The Labyrinth of the Psychopath — but have heard it used increasingly ever since.

The 1940 British film Gaslight is about a married couple who move into a vacant house in a fashionably wealthy London square. An old woman had been murdered in the house some years before and the property had stood vacant ever since. At first everything seems normal and the couple are happy. But then something odd happens; the woman keeps mislaying things around the house and forgetting where they are, and the husband begins to accuse her of stealing them. He disappears for long periods of time to the top floor of the house—somewhere his wife never ventures—and every time he does so the lights in the house dim. His wife notes this but he dismisses it, implies that she is losing her marbles.

Gaslight — which you can watch for free on YouTube — is a classic illustration of a how a psychopath controls their unsuspecting victim. The person being controlled does not realise they are being manipulated in such a way as they see every 'failing' as a personal one and they will do anything to protect the person who has captured their mind and soul. This is the precise manner in which cults are able to convince people to commit suicide en masse, and anyone who manages to escape from the cult will be able to tell you how terrifying it is for someone to have such complete control over you without you even realising it. They will sink to any depth to defend against anyone who is attacking their beloved leader, to whom they have unconditionally surrendered their mental and emotional faculties.

Which begs the question: have millions of people in the West fallen victim to mind control and gaslighting? In my view the answer is almost certainly yes. Are they irrational and impervious to any argument that doesn't conform with the one they have drilled into their own head? Are they united against some kind of common enemy or demon who is so evil as to justify any form of protest or violence against them? Are they willing to lay down their lives for their dear leader — just like the members of the Heaven's Gate cult, whom Marshall Applewhite managed to convince to commit suicide in order to hitch a ride on a passing alien space craft? When Hillary Clinton released a video yesterday calling for 'resistance' to Donald Trump, the hive mind of social media immediately responded with the following image:

Generations of cultural and social programming has resulted in a mass of people who are mentally vulnerable and easily manipulated. Some of it has been deliberate and some of it may not have been. In Dmitry Orlov's recent book Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self Sufficiency and Freedom (New Society Publishers), he makes a convincing case for the existence of a "Technosphere", which is an emergent system that has evolved the characteristic of intelligence and now seeks to dominate the human mind and spirit. It takes human beings with rich histories and cultures, as well as great intrinsic worth, and processes them into almost homogenous units of consumption and production as a means of expanding its own power. People, willingly and unwillingly, submit to being fed into its gaping maw and one of the software programs this Technosphere machine runs on is neoliberal economic orthodoxy, as personified by Hillary Clinton or any other globalist politician.

The Irish writer and artist Thomas Sheridan, likewise, identifies the same phenomenon but from a different angle. Working on Wall Street he once handled a report for a large bank financing a dam being built in Central America. He asked a senior staff member what the miscellaneous costs item was at the bottom of a row of figures and was told off-handedly that this is the money put aside to pay the local mafia to murder all the people opposed to the project. That was an epiphanic moment for Sheridan and he went on to investigate how such seemingly evil machinations can be passed off as merely the cost of doing business, coining the term "Psychopathic Control Grid", which to all intents and purposes is the same as Orlov's Technosphere in that it assigns value to humans and nature only in as much as it can use them for its own ends. In this regard we have somehow created the ultimate death machine, and its modus operandi is neoliberal corporate capitalism.

For people to willingly submit to having their cultures assimilated, their economies ground into the dust, their sense of sexual identity made incoherent and to endure a lifetime of debt servitude in hock to a priestly class of bankers, academics and pseudo mystics (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk et al.) they must be offered something as recompense. And that something is no less than a vision of perfect enlightenment or Nirvana. The true believers, who usually identify themselves as atheists, are even willing to be sacrificed to the gods of progress — just look at how many applied for a one way ticket to Mars and the reasons they gave for willingly giving up their (usually young) lives. This Nirvana, of course, won't be attained by the faithful any time soon, but remains far off in a fuzzy Star Trek future i.e. after they are dead. In effect, 'progressive' neoliberalism is a death cult.

On the other end of what appears to many to be a spectrum, we have Donald Trump, Brexit, nationalism and conservatism all lumped uneasily together. For neoliberal progressives this can also appear cult-like. Who knows, perhaps there are people out there who worship Donald Trump as a living messiah and hang his tweets on their bedroom walls in gilt frames, and certainly there are those who maintain that concepts such as the "free market" (a mythic entity with no earthly presence) are worthy of unquestioning worshipful obedience — but in reality they are a different kettle of fish. Most people who chose to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump didn't do so on idealogical terms, they did so on down-to-earth practical ones. Unable to see the greater glory of a neoliberal progressive future they turned instead to look at their own run-down communities, their empty wallets and their ever-dimishing freedoms and they decided to vote against the assorted lawyer-politicos and unelected bureaucrats who they identified as the cause of their malaise.

So, if you got caught up in this and lost your mind, then I'm afraid to say you may have fallen at the first hurdle of our increasingly challenging future. If you spend hours of every day sitting on Facebook writing snarky passive-aggressive comments to your "friends" and trying to debunk them by posting links to your own favoured highly-manipulated information source, then you've been bitten just as bad. Claiming that anyone who doesn't agree with you is "Hitler" is not the way to regain your mental balance, and neither is calling anyone who doesn't agree with you a "Snowflake Pussy" from the other team. Bear in mind that, as Frank Zappa once said, politics is merely the entertainment arm of the military industrial complex, so try to concentrate on the things that are more immediately relevant to your life, such as your friends and family.

To that end, i you value your sanity and think it wiser to direct your energy towards making your little bit of the world a better place during your limited time here then it's probably best to steer clear of political death cults altogether, and instead take a more Stoical view of life. If you've got the time and inclination, take off for a hike alone in a region not too infested by the Technosphere. Pick somewhere you won't encounter many people (or, better still, any) and pack a copy of the meditations of Marcus Aurelius (as I did in the account of my Swedish forest journey The Path to Odin's Lake) and something by Carl Jung. To ensure you are out of the reach of the Psychopathic Control Grid, leave your phone at home and say 'Hi' to your shadow side as you contemplate your own inevitable demise and the demise of everyone and everything you hold dear — because plumbing the depths of your psyche builds perspective and makes you a more balanced individual. Spend time in nature, notice the animals and the trees and the way rain drips off leaves and how sun light is dappled on the ground, and then meditate on deep time and what it means to be a human being alive at this point in the turning of the Earth. If you do this you'll find it to be a useful first step in building up some protection against gaslighting and mind control and you'll feel a greater sense of autonomy and personal resilience. When you get back, if you've truly embraced the challenge you'll be quite unable to hate anyone on the basis of their ideology, cultural or religious identity or whatever — and that will be a useful mental state to be in as we continue on our hike down the far side of Hubbert's curve.

Of course, if this is too difficult and, like a moth circling a candle you simply must throw yourself into the flames, then by all means be my guest. You won't lack for company as you self-immolate and after you've been reborn you can visit a past life regression hypnotist who'll inform you that you died a martyr to some cause that will seem completely incomprehensible to the future you. But there will be more food and stuff to go round for the rest of us, so take your pick.

* [You will either have laughed at my flippant comments above or you will have stared at the screen shaking your head and closing the tab because you've no time for people who joke around when things are so serious. But please take note: gallows humour is another way of avoiding insanity.]

L is for Learning new Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 12:46:00 +0000

One of the benefits of knowing that the demise of the oil industry is at hand—and thus the modern way of life—is that it now makes sense to learn new skills. Under the standard educational model for most people in the industrial world, most learning takes place in the early years, perhaps stretching into early adulthood for a few. It is during this time, we are told, that the necessary skills are acquired to enable us to become obedient worker/consumers in the economy (or "upstanding citizens in society" in old money). For most people, any learning beyond this age tends to be merely a tweaking of what they already know. For example, they may already be able to operate a computer in an office environment, but they may need to be sent on a course to learn how to use the latest versions of a software package. This kind of learning is called training and one is expected to go through it in order to get a pay rise or avoid being sacked—at least until the day your job is handed to a computer algorithm or a robot.

Of course, this isn't real learning, it's merely learning how to tinker with an unstable and unsustainable system. On the other hand, many adults take it upon themselves to voluntarily expand their minds and pick up new skills. They attend night school classes and go on courses, learning a dizzying array of new subjects that could include anything from conversational French, stained glass window making or calligraphy, through to quilt making, taxidermy or astrophysics. Many more simply buy books and instructional DVDs and learn all about the foxtrot, Faberge egg painting or ritual magic that way—but usually the reason for learning this new information is motivated by a desire to practice a hobby in the leisure time outside of one's productive, money-earning life.

If you want to switch professions, say from being a teacher to a lawyer, you'll likely have to gain a professionally recognised qualification, awarded after a lengthy period of burning the midnight oil and at great personal expense. This is another kind of learning, often referred to as re-training, and although it might give you the ability to make more money in the short term it still likely does not address the problem of systemic instability in the longer term—you might be re-training for a job or profession that doesn't exist in five years.

Economic logic in our over-complex world currently dictates that it is very hard, if not impossible, to earn a living making useful things that can be made far more cheaply elsewhere due to mechanisation, cheap fossil fuels and globalisation. Only people in the continually-shrinking upper middle classes can afford to pay the real costs of production for items made by people who do not work under conditions of slave-labour. For example, I have a friend who is a highly skilled woodworker. He can take a piece of freshly-cut wood and transform it into a beautiful and practical object, such as a chair, a set of spoons and bowls, or a canoe paddle. The amount of work and attention to detail he puts into his creations is both impressive and admirable. But even he admits that he'd rather buy a cheap chair from Ikea than pay the full cost of one of his beautiful hand-made chairs — and he's realistic enough in his outlook that he doesn't blame others for doing so.

Yet this unfair-seeming scenario will not—cannot—last forever.

As the availability of high-density energy sources falters and dwindles, and the political technostructures that make globalisation possible grind to a juddering halt, the calculus of this setup will turn on its head. Many, if not most, of the items we currently take for granted will become very expensive. In other cases they will simply become unavailable at any price. When this happens, the laws of supply and demand will assert themselves and anyone able to provide necessary products and services will find themselves in an enviable position.

Learning new skills and how to make things, however, takes time. There's an assumption these days that anything can be learned quickly and easily, and that once one has learned it one can instantly become a teacher of it. The wife of my chair-making friend—who herself makes baskets, lamps and even coffins from willow—told me last week that she has fielded several separate phone calls in the last two weeks from people wanting to learn how to do exactly what she does. All of them, she said, wanted to quit their careers immediately and move down here to west Cornwall—which for many people is really the back of beyond—and instantly become basket weaving teachers, despite their never having touched a piece of fresh willow in their lives. When gently prodded as to why they felt so moved they each gave some answer that indicated Donald Trump or Brexit as the cause of their unease. An impending sense of Armageddon seemed to be the driver behind their sudden desire to learn how to make picnic baskets.

My friend patiently explained to them that it took her many years of practice to get where she is today. There were the years of experimenting with different designs, and of growing different species of willow, discerning which ones were appropriate for the local climate and soils. Aside from the ongoing learning of the skill of basket-making there were the years of plodding around the region's craft fairs—leaving home at 4:30am in order to get there in time to set up her stall, only to come home late in the day having hardly made the petrol money. There were the years of research into these lost skills (including hunting down old retired fishermen in their 80's and 90's, and learning how they once sat on the harbour walls weaving the extremely specialised lobster and crab pots before the era of mass industrial production) and the years of building up the strength in her hands and fingers. And then there were the numerous setbacks, such as rabbits destroying her willow crop, and all the other various slings and arrows that life chucks at you. Only, she then says, only after a decade and a half of dedication has she been finally able to call herself an artisan who is able to make a modest living from her craft—and she still refuses to call herself a master (you can see what she makes and judge for yourself).

But the people who contacted her were not interested in all of this—they wanted to learn how to make baskets next week and be teaching it the week after.

The point I'm trying to make here is that learning useful skills takes TIME. And the moment one begins to learn something new one begins to realise that there's a lot more to it than you previously thought. Growing food, for example, is another skill that many people assume you can just pick up more or less overnight. It's true that you might be able to quickly grow some food without any prior experience, but growing enough for a balanced diet that will keep you and your family alive is a whole different ball game: man cannot live by beans and potatoes alone.

From a personal perspective, since I first encountered the seriousness of our predicament some six or seven years ago, once I had worked through all the Kübler-Ross stages of grief "No, it can't be happening!", "I'll be alright if I just pack a bug-out bag and buy some gold," etc.) I have picked up quite a few new skills and been led down many an interesting intellectual avenue. Having gone from a situation of relative complacency with a comfortable, if unfulfilling, office job, I have now learned the value of what it means to be a producer of things rather than just a consumer of them. Among the things that I can now produce are charcoal, wood products, fruit, biochar, natural soap, wine, cider, herbs and vegetables, and books. I'm working on producing many more things, including mushrooms, coppice products (fences, hurdles etc), herbal beers and honey. I've planted a forest garden, I've learned permaculture and coppice woodland management, I can strip a chainsaw down and I can field dress a squirrel. All of these things take skills that I have learned, to some degree.

Am I an expert at making and doing these things? NO! (I might be able to make some charcoal in an oil drum but I'll never be like the Japanese masters who had 2,000 different grades of charcoal, which apprentices had to learn to recognise merely by sniffing the smoke it gave off during production.) Could I live self-sufficiently using these skills? Don't make me laugh! In fact, I consider myself a rank amateur in terms of my practical skills, although to an outsider it might superficially appear that I know what I'm doing. This, I have learned, is the case for many people who nevertheless pass themselves off as experts (I recently heard of a young newly-qualified permaculture teacher who had never seen a carrot grow and was unsure how to get it out of the ground - and he was 'teaching' a group of middle aged people who had been expert gardeners since before he was born).

That's where the community aspect comes into play. Nobody can know everything. I would go further and say that hardly anyone can even know a lot of things. There are very few people in the world who can do everything from rebuild a car engine, solder electronic circuit boards, grow (and know how to use) their own medicine, and defend themselves in a court of law. For the most part it is far better to specialise and organise into small, manageable groups. The ideal size for an autonomous group of differently skilled individuals is around 150 people (see Rob O'Grady's book, 150 Strong). This was the size of group I chose to use as an example of 'good practice' in my fictional novel Seat of Mars. In my story the 'clan leader' Art Gwavas, takes over a farm and only allows people with a variety of useful skills to live there. In this way they manage to make life a lot more bearable than it is for the hapless individuals hit by the same national calamity.

People learn in different ways. Many are autodidactic to some extent (can teach themselves), but many also prefer to be taught as part of a class. Some things have to be taught one-on-one. A good method for learning that I have heard works well is to be part of a skills swapping group. The concept is simple; you meet up once a week or month and someone teaches their particular skill to the rest. The next meeting it is someone else's turn. The ones I have heard about tend to involve skills such as sewing, soap making, fermenting and household item repair—but it could be anything really. What I have found with learning is that you should only try and learn things in which you have a natural interest. If you're unsure whether it is for you, you can always dip you toe in and give it a go to see if it appeals to you. I have something of a butterfly nature and tend to flit from one thing to next, so there have been many things I have thought would be interesting to me but turned out not to be. I've been learning my whole life and I plan to only stop learning new things when I'm dead.

It's scientifically proven that learning new things keeps your brain ticking over as you get older. My grandfather decided to learn Italian as an old man. Having never been outside of England in his life, he simply got on a ferry and a train and lived in Rome for a while. His method of learning was to sit on public benches and strike up a conversation with similarly-aged Italian men. They no doubt chatted about the war and the how things had been. When he was happy he could speak Italian he returned home.

So if you decide to learn a new skill for the future, make sure it's something that will likely survive the future. Learning how to race cars is probably not such a good skill for the future (nor is anything that would involve wasting fossil fuels). Also check out the competition. For example, when I lived in Denmark I taught myself how to make natural cold-pressed soaps. Everyone was amazed that I could do this ("What, you mean you actually make it? With your own hands?") and was happy to part with a tidy sum of money for a simple bar of soap. Then I moved to Britain and soap-makers are two-a-penny, and so my soap-making venture no longer makes sense*.

The main thing it's important to consider is the lead time involved in acquiring new skills. The best time to start learning them, ideally, is ten years ago. The second best time is today.

* Oh, and don't become a yoga teacher either. The world is already full of yoga teachers and doesn't need any more.

K is for Kids, and How to Prepare Them for the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:26:00 +0000

One topic that is often glossed over by Kollapsniks is the topic of how to talk to children about the future. Perhaps it's because, as humans, we tend to place our hopes for the future in our children, and if all we can see is a bleak future then why bother telling them about it at all?

I have two daughters—aged 11 and 13. They are bright and beautiful, clever and compassionate. I'll admit that sometimes I worry about the world they will inhabit when they become adults. It's likely to be a world that very few people are preparing their kids for—and that's putting it mildly. Given what we know about how climate systems are becoming chaotic, how energy that was once as concentrated as a bottle of whisky is rapidly turning into a glass of shandy, about mass extinctions, overpopulation, the creeping corporate takeover of society, the dumbing down of culture, the pollution and destruction of the biosphere, mass refugee movements, resource wars, nuclear meltdowns and so on and so forth ... is it any wonder that so few of us want to broach the topic?

Despite all of these threats hanging over us what message, if any, is society sending to kids about the future? Are the cultural engineers who shape these young minds preparing them for a world in which the above drawbacks of industrial civilisation are honestly discussed? Or are they, instead, doubling down on the failures of the past and hammering into them the idea that what may kill us will also be our saviour? I think you already know the answer to that.

As a parent, I often get to unwillingly overhear/see children's TV programmes in the form of CBBC (Children's BBC). There are no commercials on CBBC but that doesn't mean it doesn't contain plenty of social programming and, by now, my kids are well used to hearing me howl in disagreement at something that was said—especially when Newsround is on.

Newsround—and pretty much every other programme on CBBC—propagates the narrative that we are heading towards a shiny future living on Mars, and that robots will do all the drudge work. Everything will be solar powered and there will be all sorts of consumer gadgets and devices, such as jetpacks and flying skateboards, and instead of dying we will be able to upload our minds into "the cloud" and live in virtual reality worlds that will be even more awesomer than living on Mars with robots.

The CBBC Newsround gang - getting the kids ready for the future

These little techno utopian skits are punctuated with other "news" items about reality TV shows, sports and the lives of celebrities, and—needless to say—everything is very PC and "right on" with a perfect mix along lines of gender/race/ability.

If this little window onto the cultural programming of infants is in any way reflective of the wider world then I hate to think what will be the effect on the state of mind of our youngsters as they approach maturity and find out what the real world is like. What's a concerned elder to do?

So, reaching over and turning off the mind-warp machine for a moment, what are reality-aware parents supposed to do to prepare their offspring for the future they'll likely get? Well, I can't speak for everyone, but my strategy is revealed in the 18 tips that follow:

1 - Teach them how to be aware of when someone is trying to con them. Adverts are a great place to start. Teach them how to strip an ad down to its basic components: what's it trying to do? Make it funny. My kids can laugh at any ad they see and tell you what emotion/fear/desire they are using to get you to buy their product.

2 - Get them interested in making things that are useful. I'm not very crafty, but my wife is, and she has taught them how to sew and crochet. They can now make their own clothes—and they enjoy doing it immensely. And if you're doing any DIY get them to watch and hand you the tools. There is nothing more lamentable than adults who don't know how to change a lightbulb or fix a leaky tap.

3 - Don't give them everything they want. Being denied something that you really, really want, is good for you. Growing up and getting everything you want all the time creates adults that are selfish and unhappy. They will be forever craving material possessions and will be mentally unable to process not getting what they want. They end up unhappy and have unfulfilled and unfulfilling lives. In the future people will not be able to get what they want—the best time to practice for that is now.

4 - Teach them to cook proper food from an early age. Let them be messy and let them create hideous concoctions, if that's what they want. Kids love preparing food and cooking, and the only way they'll learn about it is doing it for themselves. For your own sanity, also insist they clean up their mess afterwards.

5 - Tell them that school teaches you useful stuff but the real lessons come from life and what you learn yourself. I tell my kids that I don't care what grades they get as long as they do their best: that grading schemas are dreamed up by dull people in London as a way to get our kids to compete with Chinese kids and squeeze every bit of creativity out of the educational system. These days most children are put on a conveyor belt from early infancy which leads them through school and college and turns them into bonded debt slaves working in unfulfilling jobs. Impress upon them that this doesn't have to be the case and that alternative paths are open to them. Encourage them to follow their interests as long as this will likely lead to them being able to make a living for themselves that doesn't rely on massive amounts of fossil fuels or ponzi finance schemes. Guide them, in this respect. Impress upon them that the world doesn't owe them a living and that no job should be below them. To that end, don't give them pocket money unless they've earned it doing chores.

6 - Show them how much fun can be had for free. My fondest memories from childhood involved tobogganing down a snowy hill on a plastic bin bag, building dens in bit of woodland at the edge of town, hunting for fossils for my collection, playing conkers, riding my bike with friends from dawn until dusk and bodyboarding on a cheap polystyrene surfboard. All of these activities were either free or very cheap—and very fun. I also had loads of toys and certainly suffered no lack of anything—but toys were things to be played with when all the other possibilities just mentioned had been exhausted. Today my kids, and many of the other kids in town, go down to the harbour in the summer and jump off the walls into the water, just as kids have done here for centuries. You can hear their cries of joy from afar.

7 - Get them interested in reading, because books open up all sorts of doors in the mind. If you want to be really devious occasionally forbid them from reading certain books. I forbade my 13-year-old daughter from reading 1984 recently ("It's too grown up for you,") and—unsurprisingly—found a copy hidden under her bed with a bookmark placed well into it. There is nothing like forbidding something to make it attractive to curious minds. When they are young read them stories every night. All kids love being read stories and they love their parents to read them stories most of all. From a book. Made of paper.

8 - Teach them to question authority and not to blindly obey whatever instructions are given to them. By this I don't mean encourage them to be mouthy confrontationists, I mean tell them to trust their instincts and, if something doesn't feel right, discuss it openly with people they trust. At the top I mention CBBC—when I was a kid in the 1970s, many of the famous faces on TV (we now discover) were pedophiles, using their status to prey on young kids. We can only guess how extensive this network of kiddie fiddlers was/is (even the Prime Minister at the time, Edward Heath, is under suspicion of running a ring), but we know that the psychic vampires who populate it prey on people's blind obedience and unwillingness to question authority. Give your kids the equivalent of a silver crucifix and some garlic to ward off these monsters.

9 - Tell them about how the future is likely to be, but don't be a doomer. Show them documentaries. Talk to them about problems—and ask them if they have any good ideas about how to tackle them (you'd be surprised). Nobody knows what the future will hold. It will certainly be turbulent, and turbulence means lots of potential and possibilities for those willing to engage with it.

10 - Teach them about growing plants for food. Just as with preparing food, kids love to grow plants—especially if they can eat them afterwards. Tomatoes are great to get started, as are potatoes, peppers and radishes. All are easy to grow. If you have the space, give them their own plot, raised bed or mini greenhouse. If not, then get them to grow some plants of a windowsill. Take them to a farm and show them where eggs and milk and meat comes from. Teach them what grows for free in nature.

11 - Allow them to be bored. Many kids today are over-stimulated and cannot figure out what to do with themselves if the entertainment gadgets are switched off. Periods of boredom allow the brain to slow down and—more importantly—develop a more reflective aspect. In the future there will likely be far fewer opportunities to be over-stimulated, but at the same time there will be a lot of boring drudge work that needs doing. A mind addicted to external stimulation would not be able to cope with—say—working in the fields for hours each day, whereas a mind that is able to be quietly contemplative and reflective will fare far better.

12 - Make sure they are good mannered. Manners are a form of currency that will open doors and make them pleasant to be around. Also teach them how to disagree with someone with an opposing viewpoint without being hostile and reactive. Being good-mannered in a disagreement doesn't mean being a pushover—it simply means that you can reject the other side's BS with good grace and move on without turning into a foamy-mouthed berserker.

13 - Impress upon them the importance of avoiding debt. Unless they are certain the debt is an investment, make sure they realise how it can trap them. If they want to buy something that is a consumer item they should save up for it.

14 - Teach them how to physically defend themselves from attackers. Getting them enrolled in martial arts classes or boxing will be good for them in many ways. Not only will it give them the ability to fight off an attacker, but it will boost their self-confidence and improve their physical fitness. What's more, many if not most would-be attackers already have some knowledge of their victims, and knowing that they are a black belt in karate or a kick boxing champ will make them think twice. In Europe we are already seeing a huge upsurge in domestic abuse and violent street crimes as law and order breaks down. Young women on the streets of some cities face the prospect of being raped by gangs of men, who can get away with it as observers stand idly by and the police turn a blind eye in the name of community relations. As the father of two girls I want them to be able to fend off an attacker—fighting dirty if need be.

15 - Tell them they ain't gonna live on Mars. No way. Never gonna happen.

16 - Teach them to be open minded but realistic. Get them to think logically and to seek out evidence. Once they have discovered the harsh truth about the Tooth Fairy and Santa, use this as an example of why you should never trust anything you hear. Being an open minded sceptic is the best way forward.

17 - Show them by example. There's no point in telling them to do stuff if you then go and break all the rules yourself. Admit that you're far from perfect. Tell them all the mistakes you have made along your path, and that you hope they'll avoid the same mistakes. Be ready for them to make the same mistakes.

18 - And finally—loosen up. Don't be one of those joyless parents who only allows their precious snowflakes to eat organic quinoa and listen to non-culturally appropriated fairy tales. Instead, allow them to drink Coca Cola, eat chocolate until they throw up, stay up all night during sleepovers, play with knives, hear rude jokes, encounter bullies, be in the same room as drunken adults talking nonsense, climb trees and run with scissors. Seriously. Because although there may be some minor risk involved in all of these things, there is an almost 100% probability that if you don't allow them this freedom you'll create a delicate little flower who won't be able to survive unless they are cocooned within a safe space and given trigger warnings every time they encounter mild peril. What's more they'll just end up rebelling against you and will turn into exactly the kind of person you didn't want them to be - and it'll all be your fault.

That's pretty much how I'm raising my kids, mindful of the likely future they'll find themselves living in. Oh, I forgot one last thing—make sure you treat your kids well. Look after them, love them and treat them with respect. Foster within them joy, compassion and a sense of fairness. Those kids are not yours—you're just borrowing them. Because one day the boot will be on the other foot and, if you've done your job right, you can only hope the favour will be repaid. And if the future turns out even harsher than all your preparations have allowed for, then at least they might help you to push that shopping trolley down The Road.

***

This blog post is an updated version of an earlier one, including four new points and a few edits for clarity.

J is for Just Out - Seat of Mars

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 11:36:00 +0000

And so, just in time for Christmas, my new book Seat of Mars has been released by Club Orlov Press. Some people will be familiar with the story as I wrote it as a series of blog posts over 2015/2016, but for those who are not, the synopsis is as follows:

"Hell-bent on preserving the privileges of the wealthy in the face of a looming resource crisis, the British government executes a false flag terrorist attack and shuts down the national electricity grid. In the ensuing turmoil a shadowy cabal of globalists watches on with interest from a bunker deep beneath the frozen wastes of Iceland as they ready themselves to roll out the “experiment” across the world. Seat of Mars follows the fortunes of a handful of ordinary people flung into extraordinary times. These include Rose, a teenage Goth, who finds herself pulled into a web of intrigue within a fortified London; Jack and Cat, an ordinary city couple who end up stranded far from home; and the resourceful prepper Art Gwavas who sees the mayhem as a chance to take back what is rightfully his. The story asks the wider question of how well any of us would fare if the safety blanket of industrial civilisation were suddenly pulled from us and whether, from the embers of chaos, something more beautiful could emerge."

This book is an updated, edited and slightly re-jigged version of that story. It's kind of funny how it came about. A couple of years back I wrote a story that featured in John Michael Greer's book After Oil 3 - The Years of Rebirth. That story was set in Greenland in the 25th century and featured a young female archaeologist named Saga—and the story is called Saga and the Bog People. She ventures across the sea to what used to be the Isle of Skye and there she uncovers the corpses of a family buried in a bog inside their Audi. They seemed have died a violent death and the driver was still holding his iPhone in his hand half a millennium on.

This got me wondering who this family might be and it gave me the idea to write a story set 500 years in her past—i.e. our present. I wanted to write some sort of realistic(ish) collapse story that didn't involve zombies. And then a thought occurred to me: do you ever have those conversations where someone says "Oh yeah, the government knows all about peak oil and everything, but they just don't want to admit it? Well, I reasoned, if they know about it, why is it the only thing they try to do is grow the economy as an answer to everything? Why don't they take some kind of proactive action ... such as kill off 2/3 of the population and preserve the lion's share of the remaining land and wealth for an elite few?

So, with this thought in mind, I wondered how they might be able to achieve this. A false flag eco-terrorist event was what I decided upon, giving them the excuse to shut down the electricity transmission grid and essentially fling most of the population back into the middle ages. And if they did this, how would people survive (if at all)? I settled on the idea of taking a few people from different places on the socioeconomic spectrum and tossing them into the maelstrom. Thus we have Art Gwavas, an anarchist prepper who takes over a farm and raids local stores and houses to ensure the survival of his band of followers. Then we have Rose O'Keefe, a young Goth girl astrophysics blogger who gets sucked into a web of intrigue in a fortified London and ends up with some very special powers. There's also a city couple who get caught up in the chaos, the neurotic Prime Minister with a penchant for pills and the—frankly pure evil—political advisor Ignatius Pope, who just does what the voice in his head tells him to.

It's quite a fast-paced story, with the action being spread between modern day London, Cornwall and Iceland. We also venture forth into post-apocalyptic Britain as we follow the travails of Rose O'Keefe as she turns from a young internet sensation into an old woman living in a hobbit hole where she spends a desperate night penning her life story in the knowledge that dawn will bring with it something wicked. It's probably not a book for younger readers or for people who are easily shocked, as I've been told variously that certain story elements are 'sick' (not in a cool way) and 'disturbing'. That isn't to say it contains gratuitous violence—far from it—but neither does it shy away from some some of the darker aspects of humanity.

If you want to get hold of a copy you can click on the book cover image to the right, or search it up on your regional Amazon site - or book distributor. It is only available in hard copy format at present, although it's possible that an eBook might come out in a year or so (issues with piracy remain).

Anyway, if you do read it I hope you enjoy it. Those who read this site and others like it will be familiar with many of the issues covered in the narrative of Seat of Mars. If it proves to be a success I'll write the second instalment in 2017.

I is for Interesting Times

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Heppenstall) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 11:46:00 +0000

"May you live in interesting times," says the old Chinese curse. The election of Donald Trump to president of the United States was the starting pistol for interesting times. From now on, not much will remain the same.

On the night of the election I had tried to stay awake to watch the whole thing unfold. Because of the time difference I knew there would be no clear results until early morning, and so I ended up going to bed at about 1am— at which point all the TV pundits were saying it was 'practically impossible' for Trump to win. So I went to be bed, but barely managed three hours of sleep due to fitful dreams. My phone was on the table next to the bed when I awoke, but I couldn't bring myself to turn it on and see all the "First Woman in the Whitehouse" headlines. I put it off and tried to snooze a while longer. Unable to do so I eventually reached over and turned it on with a 'better get this over with' attitude.

That was when I almost fell out of bed in shock.

It was like Brexit all over again. Brexit on steroids. The impossible had suddenly been proved possible. A spell had been broken and the world had been turned on its head. Donald Trump—a giant ego on legs—had pulled off the impossible. He had taken on the arrayed masses of media, celebrities, pundits, received wisdom and social inertia—and beaten them all. Thrashed them, in fact.

The stunned disbelief on social media rapidly turned into white hot anger. I felt a great disturbance in the force—it was as if a million voices cried out in terror; and then there was violence. Protestors rampaging around the streets, setting fire to cars and smashing window. Yes—the great hissy fit had begun.

From my perspective across on the other side of the Atlantic, I had one immediate cause for celebration: my family would not be nuked. Given Clinton's bellicose rhetoric about surrounding China with missiles and 'taking on' Russia, I had every reason to believe that she would willingly start a world war within months of taking office. With Nato forces building up on the border of Russia in numbers not seen since WWII, and the mainstream press squirting out anti-Russian propaganda from every orifice, and with Russia itself drilling its citizens for imminent nuclear war, I felt I had every reason to be concerned—especially as I live close to a couple of likely military targets. But on the morning on October 9th I got my geiger counter, my iodine pills and my copy of US Armed Forces Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Survival Manual, and put them away in my bottom drawer. For now.

But, of course, global nuclear war is a piffling matter for those more concerned with transgender bathrooms and the breaking of glass ceilings for power crazed career politicians. "But what about Pussygate?" scream the angry mob of social justice warriors. To which I would reply that there are plenty of places where presidential fingers don't belong, but frankly I'm more concerned about them being on the big red button.

So, yes, a large bubble has been popped. This is what the apocalypse looks like. The word 'apocalypse' means 'living the veil'. It's a consciousness thing. The apocalypse will happen at the level of human consciousness before it happens (if ever) on the physical plane. The fake doctrine of neoliberalism/neoconservatism/globalisation—that has made the world we see today, has been exposed for what it is. And all of those who happily went along with it feel a deep terror in their bones. They sense, perhaps correctly, that all of the horrors America and the West have unleashed on the world over the last four decades—horrors which they thought were safely locked away in the basement—have been awoken and are starting to walk up the stairs, feet shuffling, hands outstretched. Not even the soothing tones of Barack Obama can convince them to go back down again—they know they are done for.

So who are all these people who are so terrified? They are the ones who have fallen prey to the globalist controlling mindset. For them, it's all a matter of identity politics, victim statuses and the almighty ruling patriarchy. Status is conferred by your relative minority status, delineated along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation etc. By shifting the entire nature of politics into the realm of identity politics the globalist class have quite brilliantly— with the unflinching support of the mainstream media and Hollywood—cast a magic spell that almost succeeded in enslaving the entire world. And because identity politics so enfeebles people, it was easy to divide and conquer them and get them to conform to their idealised state of passive obedience. This idealised state is one where everyone is defined in a very narrow sense, there is no collective grouping outside of one's own little group, and anyone who objects to this state of affairs is called a 'racist' or a 'homophobe' or a whatever. With everyone so caught up in policing one another the globalists have been able to continue their destructive course of war profiteering and handing democratic sovereignty to corporations largely unchallenged.

The power of the spell is broken now, even if the socially-engineered, weak-minded apologists for the power set refuse to believe it. For what they don't realise is that the election of Trump—and Brexit before it—was the anguished howl of a people who had had enough and were unwilling to acquiesce to the madness any longer. In that respect, Brexit and Trump's election will go down as the most important historical events of Western civilisation in the 21st century. If you don't believe me, just wait.

Yet the people still entrapped by this spell believe in maintaining the status quo so vehemently that they are quite unable to function when their overlords are exposed as frauds and fakes. They are fine with their military raining death down on foreign nations so that they can plunder their oil (but don't turn away the refugees), fine with supporting a candidate who takes blood money from a nation that routinely kills gays and stones women for adultery (as long as we have freedom and equality) and fine with starting a nuclear war which would kill millions of innocent people (because Putin said something nasty about gays). They are also the ones who loudly insist that it is racist to be against globalisation, although they always assume that the benefits of globalisation will accrue to themselves, and if you find yourself living in a wasteland of drug addiction, crime and unemployment because of it, well then that's just your own stupid fault and you're probably a racist so there.

These people are all going to be swept away into history's compost bin, and they know it. It would be a good thing if they could be brought round to see reason—after all, some of them are good people and it's not their fault they've been brainwashed. But, alas, in most cases they are too far gone and it is impossible to reason with them. They belong to a superfluous unproductive class for which there will soon be no further need. They are the corporate PR flacks, the media, the overstuffed university faculty members, the fat layers of government who produce nothing but new regulations and rules to penalise everyday people, and the political hangers-on and other assorted medieval court fauna. As the global energy pie shrinks and the very real limits to growth assert themselves, these people will find themselves pushed out of the picture. No longer will they boast on Facebook about not being able to change a lightbulb as though menial, physical, useful skills are for the Untermensch classes—they'll be too busy fighting among themselves about whose fault all this was and forming circular firing squads.

For anyone who thinks they might detect a note of glee here, they'd be right. I would dearly love to see the likes of The Guardian, the Clintons and all the other warmongering, social engineering, psychopathically driven impediments to real human progress tossed into the fiery abyss. But, gratifying as that might be, it doesn't mean everything will then be all sweetness and light. Indeed how do we even know what to expect next? As has become abundantly clear to many people, the world of mass media, talking heads, opinion formers and politicos don't offer us any useful guidelines any longer. That's why the polymathically inclined turn to other areas where they might find better tools for human understanding—and one particularly useful area is the realm of mythology and psychology.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung noted the various archetypes manifest in human consciousness, and explained how we relate to these in our lives (although they exist on a subconscious level so usually we don't realise it). Joseph Campbell took this a stage further in his analysis of myths throughout human history, drawing out these archetypal figures to help make sense of such a widely diverse universe of stories. These archetypes are encoded in our minds and have been there from the time of our earliest ancestors. For the most part they lurk there unseen, only revealing themselves in times of need, when they help us to make sense of the world when everyday logic seems to fail us. This, of course, flies in the face of progress and scientism and the other pseudo-religions we like to insist are useful to us, and so many people choose to ignore the lessons of mythology. So it goes.

The archetype that should concern us today is the one they call the Trickster. The Trickster is a magician—someone who can conjure something seemingly impossible out of nothing. Magic, by the way, is the ability to take something from a non-physical realm and bring it forth into the physical one. It is the ability to change human consciousness through act of will. We all do it, usually without realising it, and politicians try to do it more than most of us (check out the Clinton team's disastrous experiments with Spirit Cooking). The Trickster is adept at this, appearing in times when civilisations have become stale and moribund, and when politics seems dead and insipid. The Trickster strides onto the stage and explodes the neat order of things, creating chaos and mayhem and collapse. Trickster is a disruptive intelligence. He laughs as he brings down elites, chuckles as he tosses political grandees into oblivion and cackles with mischief as he throws entire societies into turmoil.

In Norse mythology, Loki took the main Trickster role. Loki wanted to start Ragnarök—an all-encompassing battle that would destroy much of the world and also kill the gods in the process. Pan was also a Trickster—you've heard of 'pandemonium' and 'panic'—as was Shakespeare's Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Britain we have a real-life Trickster in the form of Nigel Farage, and now in America, we have The Donald. Pretty soon, across much of Europe, each nation will have its very own Trickster running the show.

A note of warning. Those who are tired of the status quo, who are sick of corrupt politicians and exploitative corporations, and who yearn for deep and meaningful change should beware. Because normally we don't get the Trickster we want: we get the Trickster we deserve. It is worth knowing that we ourselves may be tossed into the abyss along all the other detritus: we relinquish control when we summon forth the Trickster. Because, as Jung once again explains, the type of Trickster we get depends on our own dark Shadow. This Shadow represents our deepest fears: it is everything about us that we have been too afraid to confront. Our Shadow, at a societal level, is represented by all those bodies in the basement I mentioned above. It's all the stuff we have tried to block out, such as the harm we do to the planet, the resource wars our politicians get into on our behalf, factory farming, nuclear weapons technology—all the stuff we chose not to focus on rises up from the collective subconscious and becomes the Trickster beating down our basement door.

What follows is never pretty. When Shiva dances, worlds crumble. But afterwards, when the Trickster has had his fun, he leaves the scene and a time of renewal can occur. For, even after the mayhem of Ragnarök the land rose up from the sea, cleansed and refreshed.

I'll let Puck have the last word, with his closing speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this, and all is mended—

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearnèd luck

Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long.

***

In other news, the latest issue of the post industrial fiction magazine Into the Ruins has just been released. As ever, it features great stories that help us to imagine what might lie on the other side of Ragnarök, so to speak. I myself have a story in this issue called The Fifth Garden. It's about an old man in a dusty and ravished country who plants gardens and restores life to the land, changing human consciousness in the process. You can get your copy here.