darkness falls

[some updates from the blogger Anya in Iceland]

Another collapse .. anothe collapse .. another

I can not start to explain how tiring it is to listen to the endless “threats” of another collapse. Really ..

Now it seems like everything will cause another giant collapse like the one a year ago. Honestly .. its like “wolf wolf” or just threats.

If they dont do this now it will cause another collapse, if this doesent happen right NOW there will be another collapse.

Perhaps it will, but it is essential to rub my nose in it almost every week? I would love it if the media would focus on hard facts.

It has been a year now, and life is upside down just as it has been from the beginning just 12 months worse than October 2009. I guess i´m sounding pretty negative these days but theres really not much being done to encourage any positivity around anything.

And i´m still waiting for a reason why everything keeps raising and raising when the exchange rate stands still, when the króna gains strength things seem to continue to raise in prices and when it finally weakens the prices raise abnormally. And wages in general are still “just” the same if people have any income.

I´m sad to say that there are a lot of people giving up, walking away from their families, their houses, and even walking away from their lives and just say goodbye to this world. One would think that there is anything positive going on after all of this time but from my point of view there is not much.

I´m also sad to say that farmers are giving up in increasing numbers. Makes me wonder how this winter will be. Since it is here already and one is being reminded nearly every day that there are 12 months since this all started … I´m thankful for my website. I think I can thank you guys out there for still being able to think straight even though I havent been as active in posting here as I should have been.

I´m working on continuing to encourage myself to continue and its working “ok”, hope you guys are doing good after today. Lets see how “tomorrow” will be.

I wish I had the manual

But I guess there is no manual of how to handle a economic collapse of a nation and the bankruptcy of everyone around you depression of your friends and all the relationship breakups. But I really need a manual here. I´ve been thinking about taking notes .. things you dont say and things to say. But whats the point in that? Its difficult to listen to your friends talk about this situation, and not being able to actually give them any advice just be there. I know its enough but one always feels like there is something more that can be done .. right? Its just normal I guess.

But I would hate to turn people away, and I never do. I always care. But its safe to say it is wearing. Some days i´m dreading what i´ll be hearing that particular day. Every single day is filled with negativity, seriously.

Has any of you given the thought of how much it means to people to hear something positive? Just something? Anything? It means the world to some people, and believe me, it does.

After a whole year in this turmoil I can say with full confidence that everything positive that I can see around me can just make my day. Some days i´d like to just block everything out and live in my own little world but thats just a straight line into insanity.

One thing I like to do when I feel like the world is sitting on my shoulders, is listen to an old movie I have on dvd, makes me feel like there is life around me which does not evolve around prices, raising rent, less income, no savings, icesave, bankruptcies, suicide and divorces. Honestly ..

I´m sorry i´m not very positive these days but a lot has happened for the past few weeks in my own life and my friends lifes which has affected me deeply, and it is a fact, the winter does not bring much else than darkness and dreadfullness.

I am translating as I am supposed to be doing every day except sundays .. and still encouraging myself on. Its working still !

And I would like to send another special thanks to all of you who have sent me positive e-mails! You make my day.

Happy halloween!

After spending most of the night in front of the tv I realized that its halloween today for you guys. Halloween is not a large thing out here in Iceland.

I decided to do very little today, since my “general” health is not so good these days from all of this stress and planning and so forth and so forth. I am almost at the point where I say I cant deal with all of this anymore.
But i´m not going to say it. I´m going to try to relax this weekend somewhat, i´ll translate a bit back in time tomorrow, I just need to relax a bit.

So i´m just going to say for now, happy halloween for those who celebrate it, and I hope you guys have a wonderful evening..

All of this just plain stinks

Am I the only one who feels like everything just stinks … everything. Nothing seems to make sense, and yes I do know that I have said this so many times, but each time I say it .. I say it with more meaning and enthusiasm.

This just does not make any sense at all, in every meaning of the sentence.

The government makes no sense, the prices make no sense, the weather even does not make sense, the swine flu does not make any sense, and this swine flu vaccine and so forth and so forth …

Poor McDonalds had to move out of Iceland because of this economic crisis, how bad is it when a cheap drive through chain can not operate in Iceland .. argh!

I know I wont miss McD, since there are no such places close to me, and i´m fine with this but still, just yet another sign of what is happening. And I think it is total Bull**** that this will be all fine in a year like some people claim. Those individuals seem to live in a different world than the rest of us. Farmers are giving up, people are giving up, companies are giving up, companies are leaving the country for christs sake.

And they say ……….. oh be patient. I mean i´m not ashamed of Johanna Sigurdardottir, but she is not a leader. She is NOT a leader. This whole government seems to be constructed of “yes” persons, if you know what that means. The type of people who sit and just listen and say “Yes” to whatever you say. Thats what I think about “my” government. I´m not sure what exactly should be done really, so do not think i´m against this just because I have a solution. I know about a lot they COULD do though, but that is material for quite the longer post than this one.

I think I should sit down tomorrow and write a long one for you guys .. I´m really tired today. As I was yesterday and the day before. I need to do something that increases the energy, but this whole situation, this whole atmosphere around everyone is just plain sickening and tiring. Not because “i´ve heard it so many times” but because the real life problems and the real things are not getting out there at all !

I´m so glad that I have you guys around, those positive e-mails even those one liners make the world for me.

BUT .. I have a question for you guys. I have googled as much as I could, but I keep getting too many answers to the very few questions I have.

Why should I get the swine flu vaccine?
Why should I NOT get the swine flu vaccine?

What should I do ? I´m confused and have spent most of today and yesterday reading about this flu and I´m even more confused than ever.

If any one of you guys out there have any information about this swine flu and the vaccine ( I guess we get the vaccine from swiss ) .. please do send me a link to some reliable material or articles that I could read to help me make up my mind. I´m not sure about this whole thing .. i´ve been on both sides lately. And now i´m just … confused !

I hope the Halloween weekend was great for you guys, nothing happened here, no trick or treaters, or any decorations or any halloween parties, just .. another weekend of planning and working on my “stuff”.

How to make plans when things change faster than one can keep up with?

I am getting so very very very tired of all of this here in Iceland, life is so much different. I am not talking about just different because of financial reasons, but mentally I guess it is called.

I feel like depression is sitting and lurking over everything, and I feel like nothing is the same anymore. People cant do anything else than stay at home and I think it is just driving people crazy. I know it is driving me nuts most days. I feel like there is no chance of making any plans anymore, because whatever I try to do it seems to mostly fail, whatever I want is out of reach. I am getting so very tired of all of this.

I had to quit my education when all of this started, and I havent been able to continue. Now I am mainly just starting to be frustrated at all of this, and feeling like its impossible to try because all of this is far out of reach and only seems to be moving farther out of reach.

What does one do when everything seems to be just out of reach, when you cant make any plans, when all you did for the past months hasnt worked out, and you have too little to make anything happen? Wow .. it really makes one feel worthless doesent it.

I have had hopes, not even too high .. but I feel like i´m watching all of my hopes become nothing, and christmas is not too far from now, my favorite time of the entire year, and i´ve lost all longing for the xmas. I just feel like …

[her blog can be found at http://newsfrettir.com/alive/]

 

alt comment “Dreams Die Hard” thread

(gang, let’s try something different .. since Jim often won’t go out of his way to reboot the TRS-80 running his own blog, maybe we can comment here?)

The following post originally appeared on Jimbo’s blog and was written by James Howard Kunstler. No copyright infringement intended.

/begin quote

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual – that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

It’s tragic that the avatar of hopefulness himself, Barack Obama, stepped into his role at exactly the moment when this set of conditions was getting traction. It is sure to get worse, and there are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there who will be suffering terrible losses and real pain in daily life. Societies don’t do well when the public falls into the broad despair that is the opposite of hope. That’s when the long knives and the tribal animosities come out and things get smashed.

Within the context of conventional party politics – the kind that has been baseline “normal” in the USA for a long time – we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for “hope” – if not hope itself – the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They’re flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government’s name. They’re willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against “the malefactors of great wealth.” They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a “consumerism”) that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

The trouble with self-delusion, either in a person or a society, is that reality doesn’t care what anybody believes, or what story they put out. Reality doesn’t “spin.” Reality does not have a self-image problem. Reality does not yield its workings to self-esteem management. These days, Americans don’t like reality very much because it won’t let them push it around. Reality is an implacable force and the only question for human beings in the face of it is: what will you do? In other words, it’s not really possible to manage reality, but you can certainly choose to manage your affairs within reality. We won’t do that because it’s too difficult. This harsh situation leaves the public increasingly with little more than bad feelings of discouragement and persecution. It’s astonishing that all the smart people around the president don’t get this.

Reality unfolds emergently, and this ought to interest us. For instance, I have maintained for many years that we are approaching the twilight of the automobile age – and the implications of this for daily life in the USA are pretty large. For a long time, I had assumed that this change of circumstances would proceed from our problems with the oil supply. But reality is sly. It has thrown two new plot twists into the story lately. America’s romance with cars may not founder just on the fuel supply question. It now appears that our problems with capital are so severe that far fewer people will be able to borrow money from banks to buy cars at the rate, and in the way, that the system has been organized to depend on. Our problems with capital are also depriving us of the ability to pay to fix the hypercomplex system of county roads, interstate highways, and even city streets that make motoring possible. What will we do?

For now, a cashless government gives out cash-for-clunkers, which is basically a self-esteem building program designed to make the government feel better about itself because it is ostensibly taking 11-miles-per-gallon cars off the road and replacing them with 27-miles-per-gallon cars, thus forestalling scary problems with climate change. It’s dumb of course, but the failure of leadership is comprehensive. Even the elite environmentalists at the Aspen Institute are preoccupied with finding new “green” ways to keep all the cars running. They put zero effort into the idea of walkable communities, or restoring the railroad system, which will be the reality-based remedies for the car-dependency problem.

The Republican right wing is, if anything, even more childishly delusional. For Glen Beck and Sarah Palin it comes down to “drill, baby, drill.” They know nothing about the geology of oil – they don’t even believe that the earth is more than six-thousand years old, meaning they don’t believe in geology, period – but they are inflamed with the faith of eight-year-old children that we must have a lot more oil in the ground because this is America and God loves us more than people in other parts of the planet so it must be there. As their disappointment mounts, their childish ideas will turn cruel and sadistic. They’ll seek to punish anybody who believes that the earth is more than six thousand years old. The catch is, If they get into power in the election cycles ahead, they’ll be impotent and ineffectual even at persecuting their enemies.

In the meantime, American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe. It won’t wind down to a complete stop. It’s near-term destination is to lower levels of complexity and scale than what we’ve been used to for a long time. People will be able to drive fewer cars fewer miles. The roads will get worse. They’ll be worse in some places than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to and fewer things sold. People who live in communities scaled to the energy and capital realities of the years ahead are liable to be more comfortable. We’re surely going to have trouble with money. Households will drown in debt and lose all their savings. Money could be scarce or worthless. Credit will be scarcer.

Both factions of American political life indulge in the fiction of control. History is reality’s big brother. It is taking us someplace that we don’t want to go, so it will probably have to drag us there kicking and screaming. For starters, both reality and history will probably take us out to some woodshed of the national soul and beat the crap out of us. That could be a salutary thing, since the crap consists of all the lies we tell ourselves. Once we’re rid of all that, we may rediscover a few things left inside our collective identity that are worth regarding with real self-respect.

/end quote

 

approximation of life + book review

During the weekend I scrolled through SlashDot just for kicks (ok, for the record, I am a confirmed Penguinista-type geek gal) and saw something interesting about space travel and microbes. No, this isn’t the usual science-fiction stuff like the Blob, the wonderfully irreverent Evolution, or the fantastically-campy Slither .. it’s more like a creeping awareness of the fact that when you cram living things (that’s us) into sealed containers for any length of time, the internal environment starts to get kind of Abbey-Normal.

Some of the problems of low gravity have been known for a long time: people lose muscle mass and bone density; there is radiation damage from living outside the protective envelope formed by an atmosphere piled deep atop our gravity well; often the returning [whatever]nauts cannot walk or stand without help; and more. Recent studies indicate that immune systems get compromised too, but the causational link is not clear.

I had been hoping that the folks at NASA would by now have spoken with the folks from the Biosphere 2 project, and that they would have deduced that solving the problem of having humans in space long-term is going to take more than just a significantly bigger spacecraft crammed with more stuff. To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet devised a sealed environment, with a whole ecosystem inside that includes plants, animals, insects, humans, etc that will support all that life indefinitely ~ unless you include the planet we’re on, which wasn’t exactly “invented” anyhow and which seems immune to integer division.

As the good commenters at SlashDot noted, continuously-inhabited space vehicles (err, flimsy tin cans kept in orbit) tend to get parts of them gummed up with less-than-pleasant things that are also part of our natural world. That mold you sometimes find in an uncleaned bathroom? Stuff like that lives in and around standing and flowing water all over the world. Those annoying fruit flies? Ditto, they’re part of the natural world, buzzing around decaying stuff.

The first time I saw Greenbeans, we got to do some hiking in a little area along the Mohawk River, not far from lock 7. He made the very prescient observation that being outdoors among the plants and the other living things is far more relaxing to us (on a very low level we probably don’t know too well) than most other environments we could choose.

With that in mind, I sometimes go hiking at lunchtime in the woods behind the office where I work. One of the guys has made some nice trails back there, but they’re more like game trails than anything else .. there are no markers, and unless you’re right atop them you’ll never see them. I was out there last week, and again today, and it was amusing to see the fruit flies buzzing amidst the decaying leaves and such in the woods.

To totally switch topics .. I’m prepared to get flamed for this, but I wanted to say that from the perspective of a first read of it, JMG’s book “the Long Descent” is pretty damn good. It borrows more from other histories/theories of the constant rise & fall of civilization than it does from contemporary Americana (which seems to be Jimbo’s one-and-only inspiration) and as such, it’s missing a lot of the predictions that we associate with Mad Max outcomes or things from zombie movies. I need to read it again (taking notes this time) to make sure, but I believe he skipped completely over the negative form of American Exceptionalism that seems to, ahh, infect much of the doom community of the day.

Jimbo’s blog is a good example of that sort of thing. The plot line is that Americans are sooooo obscenely spoiled, so used to getting their way and no other way, that they’ll de-civilize at a scorching meteoric rate once the Cheez Doodle truck stops arriving on time, or when the power goes out just as American Idle (sp) gets to the interesting part. Another variant of the same assumes that formerly good neighbors will be hacking each other apart with machetes in order to steal gasoline so they can keep driving their enormous SUVs to Mall*Wart. This is American Exceptionalism flipped to the dark side, and little else.

Enough of this praise-for-the-AD stuff, however .. no, what I found really interesting was that even as “the Long Descent” painted a future just as stark as (or even worse than) what was contained in Dmitri Orlov’s book “Reinventing Collapse”, the former left me feeling more hopeful and open-minded about the possibilities of the future (along with the reinforcement that yes, things are going to get rough) whereas the latter nearly made me throw up a couple times, and left me in a pretty dark funk for awhile.

One of the many interesting tidbits in the AD’s book was that the smallest unit of human survival is not the individual, or the household, or the family, but is in fact the community. His notes on what constitutes appropriate technology were pretty good too, though probably none of it is new to anyone here. He did a good job dissing the beans & bullets type of survivalism. He also had what seemed like a very good set of suggestions for how to cope with the coming changes as America de-industrializes and ceases to be an empire.