What Would A U.S. Civil War Look Like?

Authored by GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs" Gregory Copley via OilPrice.com,

Yes, there is a civil war looming in the United States.

But it will not look like the orderly pattern of descent which characterized the conflict of 1861-65. It will appear more like the Yugoslavia break-up, or the Russian and Chinese civil wars of the 20th Century.

It will appear as an evolving chaos.

And the next US civil war, though it yet may be arrested to a degree by the formal hand of centralized gov-ernment, will destabilize many other nation-states, including the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

It may, in other words, be short-lived simply because the uprising will probably not be based upon the decisions of constituent states (which, in the US Civil War, created a break-away confederacy), acting within their own perception of a legal process. It is more probable that the 21st Century event would contage as a gradual breakdown of law and order.

The outcome, to a degree dependent on how rapidly order is restored, would likely be the end, or constraint, of the present view of democracy in the US. It would see a massive dislocation of the economy and currency. It would, then, become a global-level issue.

Humans mock what they see as an impulse toward species suicide among the beautiful lemming clan of Lemmus lemmus. In fact, these tiny creatures have a societal survival pattern which seems more consistent than that of their human detractors. The pattern of human history shows that civilizations usually end through internal illness rather than at the hand of external powers.

It is significant that the gathering crisis in the United States was not precipitated by the November 7, 2016, election of Pres. Donald Trump, and neither was the growing polarization of the United Kingdom’s society caused by the Brexit vote of 2016.

In both instances, the election of Mr Trump and the decision by UK voters for Britain to exit the European Union were late reactions — perhaps too late — by the regional populations of both countries to what they perceived as the destruction of their nation-states by “urban super-oligarchies”.

The last-ditch reactions by those who voted in the US for Donald Trump and those who voted in the UK for Brexit were against an urban-based globalism which has been building for some seven decades, with the deliberate or accidental intent of destroying nations and nationalism. It is now crystallizing into this: urban globalism sees nations and nationalism as the enemy, and vice-versa.

The battle lines have been drawn.

The urban globalists — the conscious and unconscious — have thrown their resources behind efforts to avert a return to nationalism, particularly in the US and UK, but also in Europe, Canada, Australia, and the like.

Urban globalists control most of the means of communications [is this new “means of production”; the 21st Century marxian dialectic?] and therefore control “information” and the perception of events.

“Nationalists”, then, are operating instinctively, and in darkness.

There is little doubt that the US, despite the evidence that economic recovery is at hand, could spiral into a self-destructive descent of dysfunction, dystopia, and anomie. The path toward a “second civil war” has significant parallels with the causes of the first US Civil War (1861-65). Both events — the 19th Century event and a possible 21st Century one — saw the polarization of a fundamentally urban, abstract society against a fundamentally regional, traditional society.

In some respects, it is a conflict between people with long memories (even if those memories are flawed and selective) and people to whom memories and history are irrelevant. Equally, it is a conflict between identity and materialism, with the abstract social groups (the urban populations) the most preoccupied with short-term material gain.

I have covered the US for 50 years, and my earliest view of it was, a half century ago, that its populations would inevitably polarize into protective islands of self-interest, surrounded by seas of unthinking locusts. What is ironic is that the present islands of wealth and power — the cities — have come to represent short-term materialism, as cities have throughout history.

But what is interesting is that, despite the global attention on the political/geographic polarizations occurring in the US and other parts of the Western world, there has been a reversion in other parts of the world to a sense of Westphalian or pre-Westphalian nationalism. The fact that “the West” may have ring-fenced Iran, Russia, and so on, with sanctions and other forms of isolation may well be what ensures their endur-ing status.

They have avoided the contagion of globalism.

Russia, indeed, recovered from the Soviet form of globalism in 1991.

An urban globalist “victory” over Trump and Brexit would trigger that meltdown toward a form of civil societal collapse - civil war in some form or other - as the regions disavow the diktats of the cities. That would, in turn, bring about the global economic uncertainty which could impact the PRC and then the en-tire world.

But such a conflict - physical or political - could, equally, lead to a victory for nationalism over globalism, and to the protection of currencies and values. We have seen this cycle repeated for millennia.

It is the eternal battle.

'Narratives' Are Not 'Truths'

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

The polity is a social organism, of course, meaning that it adds up to more than the sum of its parts, a body of politics, if you will, just as each of us adds up to more than just our bodies. It’s alive as we are alive. We have needs. We have intentions in the service of those needs. Those intentions animate us and turn us in one direction or another to stay alive, and even more than that, to thrive.

The American polity is not thriving. It has been incrementally failing to meet its needs for quite a while now, playing games with itself to pretend that it is okay while its institutional organs and economic operations decay. It turns this way and that way ever more desperately, over-steering like a drunk on the highway. It is drunk on the untruths it tells itself in the service of playing games to avoid meeting its real needs. Narratives are not truths.

Here is a primary question we might ask ourselves: do we want to live in a healthy society? Do we want to thrive? If so, what are the narratives standing in the way of turning us in the direction?

Let’s start with health care, so called, since the failure to do anything about the current disastrous system is so fresh. What’s the narrative there? That “providers” (doctors and hospitals) can team up with banking operations called “insurance companies” to fairly allocate “services” to the broad population with a little help from the government. No, that’s actually not how it works. The three “players” actually engage in a massive racketeering matrix — that is, they extract enormous sums of money dishonestly from the public they pretend to serve and they do it twice: once by extortionary fees and again by taxes paid to subsidize mitigating the effects of the racketeering.

The public has its own narrative, which is that there is no connection between their medical problems and the way they live. The fact is that they eat too much poisonous food because it’s tasty and fun, and they do that because the habits-of-life that they have complicitly allowed to ev0lve in this country offers them paltry rewards otherwise. They dwell in ugly, punishing surroundings, spend too much time and waste too much money driving cars around it in isolation, and have gone along with every effort to dismantle the armatures of common social exchange that afford what might be called a human dimension of everyday living.

So, the medical racket ends up being nearly 20 percent of the economy, while the public gets fatter, sicker, and more anxiously depressed. And there is no sign that we want to disrupt the narratives.

A related narrative: the US economy is “recovering” - supposedly from a mysterious speed-bump that made it swerve off the road in 2008. No, that’s not it. The US economy has entered a permanent state of contraction because we can’t afford the fossil fuel energy it takes to continue expanding our techno-industrial activities (and there are no plausible adequate substitutes for the fossil fuels). We tried to cover up this state of affairs by borrowing money from the future, issuing bonds to “create money,” and now we’ve reached the end of that racket because it’s clear we can’t pay back the old bonded debt and have no prospect for “making good” on issuing new bonded debt. Recently, we have been issuing new debt mainly to pay back the old, and any twelve-year-old can see where that leads.

Reality wants us to manage the contraction of that failing economy, and because that is difficult and requires changing familiar, comfortable arrangements, we just pretend that we can keep expanding the old system. Of course, all the work-arounds and games only increase the fragility of the system and set us up for a kind of sudden failure that could literally destroy civilized society.

Another popular narrative of the moment - a dominant preoccupation among the “educated” elites these days - is that we can change human nature, especially human sexuality and all the social behaviors that derive from mammals existing in two sexes. This set of narratives is deeply entwined with fashion and status-seeking, with the greatest status currently being conferred upon those opting out from being either one sex or the other, along with the biological imperatives associated with one or the other. This has been identified by the essayist Hugo Salinas Price as an updated form of Gnosticism and is now the official reigning ideology of the college campuses. Some call it “cultural Marxism,” but it is really a form of religion. It offers colorful distraction from the more difficult adult tasks of managing contraction and rebuilding the political economy with its social armatures.

So, these conditions might prompt us to ask the more general question: how much longer do we, as a polity, want to pretend that narratives are the same as the truth? As I’ve averred previously, I think reality itself has to force the issue by delivering circumstances so compelling that it is no longer possible to keep telling yourself the same old stories. And that reckoning is not far off.

Joseph Tainter: The Collapse Of Complex Societies

By popular demand, we welcome Joseph Tainter, USU professor and author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies (free book download here).

Dr. Tainter sees many of the same unsustainable risks the PeakProsperity.com audience focuses on -- an overleveraged economy, declining net energy per capita, and depleting key resources.

He argues that the sustainability or collapse of a society follows from the success or failure of its problem-solving institutions. His work shows that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. From Tainter"s perspective, we are likely already past the tipping point towards collapse but just don’t know it yet:

Sustainability requires that people have the ability and the inclination to think broadly in terms of time and space. In other words, to think broadly in a geographical sense about the world around them, as well as the state of the world as a whole. And also, to think broadly in time in terms of the near and distant future and what resources will be available to our children and our grandchildren and our great grandchildren.

One of the major problems in sustainability and in this whole question of resources and collapse is that we did not evolve as a species to have this ability to think broadly in time and space. Instead, our ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers never confronted any challenges that required them to think beyond their locality and the near term(...)

We have developed the most complex society humanity has ever known. And we have maintained it up to this point. I have argued that technological innovation and other kinds of innovation evolve like any other aspect of complexity. The investments in research and development grow increasingly complex and reach diminishing returns. We cannot forever continue to spend more and more on technological innovation when we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, which I argue we have reached.

Our system of innovation is going to change very significantly over the next twenty to thirty to fifty years or so. By the end of the century, our system of innovation will not be anything like what we know today. It will have to be very different. And it’s likely that innovation is not going to be able to solve our problems as readily as it has done to this point.

The technological optimists have assumed that the productivity of innovation is either constant or increasing. And in fact, what I think my colleagues and I can show is that the productivity of innovation is actually decreasing. What that means is that we will not forever be able to solve resource problems through innovation(...)

And so individuals need to take responsibility for their own ignorance. As I said, our species did not evolve to think broadly in terms of time and space and if we’re going to maintain our way of life, people have to learn to do so. People have to take responsibility for knowing and understanding the predicament that we’re facing. I have argued over the last few years that we need to start teaching early school age children in K to 12 to think differently, to think broadly in terms of time and space – to think historically, to think long-term about the future, to think broadly about what’s going on in the world around us instead of the narrow way – the narrow, local way – that most people live and think. So I put responsibility on individuals to broaden their knowledge.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris" interview with Joseph Tainter (42m:44s).

What's Triggering The Left Now? Soon You Won't Be Allowed To Say "Patriot"

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

There was a time when liberals and conservatives both agreed on one thing. They both used to love their country. Though they differed on what values and policies would be best for their homeland, they still had that shred of common ground.

That’s clearly no longer the case. Across the Western world, you’ll find that even moderate liberals are often uncomfortable with terms like “patriotism” and “nationalism.” As for the far-left, they now view these terms as poisonous and archaic. That’s because they want the whole world to be one big happy family, where borders are meaningless, people can freely move from one country to the next, and no society is inherently better than another. They preach diversity, but they want the world to be blended into one drab monoculture that falls in line with their beliefs.

So it was only a matter of time before leftists would start being triggered by patriotic rhetoric. It’s happening in Australia, where Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull recently stated that he wants the government to tighten citizenship and visa requirements.

“There is no more important title in our democracy than “Australian Citizen”. And we should make no apology for asking those who seek to join our Australian family to join us as Australian patriots – committed to the values that define us, committed to the values that unite us. Our success as a multicultural society is built on strong foundations which include the confidence of the Australian people that their government, and it alone, determines who comes to Australia.”

Sounds pretty inoffensive right? Not to many Australians, who have taken umbrage with his use of the word “patriot.”

Demanding loyalty to the state... don"t fascists like Trump keep spraying that bile?

— Agent Arioch [Umbra] (@the_LoungeFly) June 13, 2017

It"s UN-Australian to use that right-wing American term. Didn"t need it for Italians,British, Greeks, Chinese,Vietnamese, etc. etc.#false

— RODH2 (@2hdor) June 14, 2017

"I resent the word "patriot", its use & application to immigrants. It feels Trumpesque, someone who"s either a zealot/ extremist" #TheDrum pic.twitter.com/YXlcuGwh2o

— ABC The Drum (@ABCthedrum) June 13, 2017

That of course, is so typical of the Left. They care more about how they feel regarding an issue, rather than the objective truth. And the truth of the matter, is that these people don’t seem to know what patriotism means. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, it simply means “love for or devotion to one’s country.” According to thefreedictionary.com, a patriot is “a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests.”

What’s so bad about that?

Make no mistake, people are increasingly being offended by patriotism across the Western world. It’s even ramping up in America, which is considered one of the most patriotic nations on the planet. Here we have leftists melting down over sports fans wearing red, white and blue clothing. Even in Germany, a country that is notorious for frowning upon most patriotic displays, it’s not taboo to wave the German flag at a sports game.

This trend has to be fought at every turn, because there’s nothing shameful about loving where you come from.

To everyone in the Western world, take note. What happens in you culture, will eventually influence government policies. So if this derision of patriotism ever goes mainstream, you can say goodbye to our borders. And when our nations are flooded with migrants who come face to face with a self-loathing culture, they’ll have no motivation to assimilate. Then you can say goodbye to your values and way of life as well.

Caught On Tape: Reporter Assaulted Live On Air During Humanitarian Refugee Story

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

If you happen to be visiting Rome, Italy anytime soon (or pretty much any Western European country), then you may want to come prepared with pepper spray or other self defense tools, because as you’ll see in the video below, peaceful refugees looking to culturally enhance Europe aren’t always as friendly as you may think.

Italian television correspondent Francesca Parisella was doing a live broadcast about the plight of refugees at the central train station in Rome, when she and her camera crew were attacked by migrants who had sought shelter for the night.

Ms. Parisella was able to find safety with a Taxi driver who happened to be in the area, but the cameraman was not so lucky. According to reports, he was beaten and his camera destroyed:

Google Translated From Il Giornale Via Vlad Tepes:

Just as Nicola Porro connects at around 23.30, with his post at Rome Termini Station, to document the situation of the bivouacs that populate her at night, Francesca Parisella has the time to start the connection and then warn “we have been assaulted “. The room swings, it is understood that the journalist and operator are fleeing, and the voice of the chronicler rises up to become a real scream of fear. A few minutes later, studio studio explains that “Francesca is upset but she is okay, they have destroyed the camera and hacked the operator.” One like that of this evening It should not be a reportage in the war zone. “Thanks to a taxi driver, if not It would be much worse. ” A version confirmed by Parisella himself, on the phone, shortly afterwards: “We were away to tell what kind of hospitality we can give, are bothered and attacked. They rushed me and taken to my jacket,” the reporter said.

Watch:

Such scenes are now playing out regularly in once quiet, peaceful and crime free areas of Europe. While politicians and the mainstream media either downplays or completely ignores such reports, the fact is that the cultural enrichment being forecibly injected into Europe is leading to increased sexual attacks, violent assaults and large-scale terrorist attacks. In fact, it’s so scary for citizens of the countries accepting refugees that Germany actually sold out of pepper spray and Europeans have been scrambling to acquire self defense firearms.

While the common denominator is clearly the influx of immigrants from countries that are so culturally and religiously different from Europe that there is simply no way a peaceful assimilation is possible, anyone who dares mention the reality of the situation is branded a racist, a nationalist or a fear monger. In fact, in Germany, you can now be arrested and have your children taken from you by the government if you criticize refugees – that’s how bad it’s gotten.

One Angry Foreigner had enough and took to the airwaves to explain how mass migration has led to fear and crisis across Sweden:

t appears that all over the world, most notably in present-day Western Europe, immigrants from countries with completely different world views and legal perceptions are moving in and pushing their agendas on the natives, often with full support from their elected representatives and their media mouthpieces.

In an incredibly insightful opinion piece from an Angry Foreigner living in Sweden, we learn that it’s not just Americans who are fed up with the political correctness being forced upon the people by politicians, feminists, cultural groups, and immigrants themselves.

As you watch the video you’ll no doubt notice some key parallels between Europe and the United States. For all intents and purposes you could swap out the word “Swedes” for “Americans” and the points being made still ring true.

I have never come across a country where nationalism is one of the biggest taboos… to the point where it’s considered to be racism.

Because if you love your own country and your own culture the most then you don’t love other peoples’ as much and that’s not equal. That’s not progressive.

Nationalism is only ugly when Swedes express it.

When immigrants express a desire, a will to preserve their identity and their culture then it’s charming because, remember, they are the ones with the culture… not the Swedes.

Watch the full video:

This Map Explains The Roots Of France's Growing Nationalism

Via MauldinEconomics.com,

What does it mean to be French? Inherent in this question is a fundamental tension within French nationalism that is unique to France.

Originally, France consisted of diverse regions with their own languages, resources, and way of life. Take a look at the map below.

This diversity grew into a united country. From this, we can understand how one aspect of French nationalism is that it views itself as a universal program.

This nationalism holds that French ideas about “liberté, égalité, and fraternité” are as equally important as speaking French and living on French soil.

In this sense, anyone who adopts these principles can be French. And anyone who becomes a French citizen is heir to these principles.

Nationalism and Immigration

French nationalism was based on the idea that the nation was of paramount importance. It was defined by class and a set of ideas about how society ought to be structured.

All of the various factions in the French Revolution believed they were unifying the nation. But each faction had to exclude certain groups from the nation in order to define the whole.

This has morphed far beyond the original exclusion of the aristocracy. It has been used to exclude immigrants to France. The question of immigrant and Muslim assimilation as full members of the French state is at the forefront of debate leading up to presidential elections in April.

France is currently at the beginning of an inward turn that indicates a moment of crisis. The next French President will enter office with a country whose strategic position is weak, its economy stagnant, and its society divided.

*  *  *

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Artist's Impression Of Judge Gorsuch's Nomination Hearings

He looks like he was interpreting the law as it was written not how he feels. Of course, we all feel that an autistic child get all the opportunities possible but the law stated that the school district had to provide just anything above the absolute minimum. If the district was providing anything above the minimum, the district was well within the law and the three judges were right. But then there are the vitue signaling , holier than thou crowd who is SOOOOOO enlightened and who is annointed to spend others peoples money and who write the laws from the bench, of course that crowd would overturn a judgement that is perfectly in line with the law as written.

New York Real Estate Prices Plunge In 4Q As Listing Days and Discounts Soar

After reviewing the Elliman Report on the New York City Real Estate market at the end of 3Q 2016, we concluded that sellers had simply refused to accept the fact that the Manhattan real estate bubble had burst and rather than dropping prices had decided to simply let their apartments sit on the market unsold while hoping for a miracle.  Here was our conclusion (see "NYC Real Estate Bubble Bursts As Apartment Sales Crash 20%"):

In conclusion, the lesson seems to be that the marginal New York City buyer has been priced out of the market (volume down 20%) while sellers have not yet accepted that the bubble has burst deciding instead to maintain listing prices while letting their apartments sit on the market longer amid growing inventory levels.  Meanwhile, the luxury market is the only segment that seems to be holding up which only serves to prove that Chinese billionaires still have cash they would like to hide in the U.S.

Alas, with the release of Elliman"s 4Q 2016 report, it has become apparent that that miracle never materialized for New York"s hedgies and i-bankers.  In fact, the data from Manhattan real estate sales was almost universally bad with median pricing down 8.7% YoY, volume down 3.7%, listing days up 14.6% and discounts up to 5.5%.

Meanwhile, a view of the longer term sales and pricing trends for Manhattan seems to suggest that the 2013-2015 expansionary period has officially turned.

As was the case last quarter, the re-sale market was among the hardest hit segments with median prices down 6.3% YoY and volume down 1.5%. 

Also like previous quarters, the luxury market, despite sinking volumes, is the only segment to continue to show growth in median sales prices.

And while buyers are abandoning Manhattan en masse, Brooklyn seems to be the key beneficiary with purchases there soaring 22% YoY and median prices climbing 15%.  Per Bloomberg:

Home buyers in Brooklyn competed for a record-low number of listings in the fourth quarter, driving up prices in the New York borough that’s historically been seen as a refuge from Manhattan’s high costs.

Purchases in Brooklyn rose 22 percent from a year earlier to 2,582, while the median price of those deals climbed 15 percent to a record $750,000, according to a report Thursday by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The number of homes for sale at the end of December tumbled 31 percent to 2,232, the fewest since the firms started keeping the data in 2008.

The sales market in Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, is moving in the opposite direction to Manhattan’s, where rising supply is offering buyers more choices and the option to walk away from listings they view as overpriced. Manhattan’s median home price dropped 8.7 percent in the fourth quarter to $1.05 million as sellers awakened to a slowdown after years of holding out for all they could get, the firms said last week.

“You have a disconnect with sellers in Manhattan, and Brooklyn is poaching some of that demand,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, said in an interview. “Overall, it’s generally a lower price point, and affordability has been a big issue the last couple of years.”

Seems that "Bridge & Tunnel" is starting to have a nice ring to it.