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People who are ignorant of history and of the dynamics of human life, have been casually tossing around threats of violence, even civil war in America if they don’t get their political druthers. Some of them who are members of Congress actually launched a mob action inside the Capitol that lacked only torches and pitchforks — and a cause — to be a replica of an uprising.
They know not what they do. Those who refer to our own Civil War mostly talk gibberish — they have no idea about its roots, reality or meaning. Those who toss out these matches of hatred and potential violence for the minor that causes various kinds of accidents like the traffic accidents, the momentary political advantage will smile and tell you that a match cannot destroy a country, and that’s true unless it lands on a mountain of dry tinder. And these people don’t even know what human tinder is, let alone how close it is to igniting.
All they have to do is raise their heads and look around. At this moment, matches are landing in tinder all over the world, with steadily increasing frequency and effect. Consider:
Hong Kong has been consumed by violent protests for five months. The match was a proposed law allowing extradition to mainland China. But the tinder was the result of years of privation. Please note that although the law has been withdrawn, the protests continue unabated. It’s not the match that kills you, it’s the tinder fire.
Lebanon is almost a failed state, its economy weak and heavily in debt. The population suffered in near silence until the government proposed a tax on internet phone calls. For two weeks now hundreds of thousands of people have been in the streets demanding reforms, and the removal of the entire ruling political class.
Iraq: Ignited by a flurry of calls on social media in early October to go to the streets, mobs responded all over Iraq, protesting government corruption, poor government services and widespread unemployment. So far — 150 dead, 12 in one day.
Chile: The match was an increase in the price of metro tickets in the capital. (Take note that the match can be, or seem to be, a relatively trivial thing. Except when it’s the match that breaks the camel’s back.) Since October 18, protests have spread across the country, and have become about far more than subway tickets.
Ecuador: The government stopped subsidizing the price of fuel. After eight dead and 1,340 injured, the government reinstated the subsidies, which it cannot afford.
And the beat goes on, in Bolivia, where the match was a disputed presidential election, in Egypt, where charges of government corruption and resentment of austerity have become incendiary. Similarly, people have taken to the streets in Ethiopia and Guinea.
According to Reuters, the cumulative effect of all these fires, burning this hot, has made itself felt in the executive suites of the rich and famous. There is growing fear of imminent global recession — actually, growing fear that it has already begun — that will not only worsen the conditions that lead to rebellion, but deprive indebted governments of the ability to borrow more money to throw at the problem. (Of course, none of the articles I consulted mentioned the problem that is at the root of almost all these eruptions — the destruction of agriculture by global climate change.)
Such is the dry tinder that is blowing in the global winds and drifting high against the increasingly flammable houses of the powerful. What match will set it alight in America? Only someone who knows history, who has experienced or at least studied what Camus called Resistance, Rebellion and Death, understands how close we are to ignition. Unfortunately, the people who know nothing at all are in charge of our fate.
One of the few who gets it, the fabulously successful tech entrepreneur Rick Hanauer, says, “You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.”
When people ask him what he sees up ahead, Hanauer tells them he sees pitchforks.
Similarly, no one has ever died of a disease – it’s the symptom that kills…Very deceptive! This is why modern medical science took so long to develop. The causes of disease defied easy discovery and thus remained obscure. Bizarre narratives were concocted to mollify the populace (the gods, miasmas, Satan, etc…) but these myths only served to impede real progress.
Likewise ‘Political Science’ may still be in its dark age. For example, war is not a problem; rather, it is a symptom of one, or any combination, of the following factors: resource depletion, overpopulation, and natural disaster. In this era, these are dilemmas that only radical policy changes can hope to address. Yet we are stuck in an age when such dusty institutions as nationalism, monarchy, corporatism and religion are not only intrenched, but seem to be gaining in strength. No doubt, such tools of the past will prove impotent against the challenges we face.
Once the barricades are breached, there will be no time for us … “to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand.”
Indeed, and even if you do, who’s to say the reception in New Zealand is going to be welcoming?
What’s coming will be all-encompassing, and while there may be bunkers and private islands or other isolated places of refuge, what satisfaction can there be, for someone who once strode the world like a colossus, to live like a rat or mole or some other similar type rodent, for whatever days are left to them?
re: all-encompassing. Don’t have to make my word for it. Read the recent DOD report. The mighty US military machine sees itself disintegrating within as little as 20 years due to the rapid onslaught of climate change … unless “something” is done about it!
This global unrest is merely the final manifestation of OVER POPULATION, it has zero to do with climate change, there just too many damned people on this rock.
I fully expect a local franchise of this riots syndrome to start any week now in my home country of South Africa with it’s pathetic .8% GDP and massive 3.8% population overshoot. We have at LEAST 29% official and acknowledged unemployment as it is! (plus a drought) So just what is going to happen by the end of 2019 when another 200 000 school/university leavers hit the streets? Answer: CIVIL UNREST, simple really. It’s NOT climate change at all.
David is right; humans have fought throughout history for possession of the land. Now, there are no more frontiers on the globe and the numbers grow. We are a virtual plague on the planet and will only thrive again when most of us are dust. The climate may indeed be changing, but that is nothing new. The architects of the NWO have recognized the problem of over population, and are feverishly working to resolve the problem. Their goal as stated on the Georgia Guidestones is world population of 500,000,000.
You mentioned that you have a drought? You mean the one that started in 2015, that is affecting food security in the entire region, that has had Cape Town on the verge of becoming the first major city in the world to run out of water? That drought? You’re right, climate change probably has nothing to do with anything.
I don’t mean to be snarky, and I take your point that overpopulation is an existential threat, but one cannot understand what is happening where and when if you take climate change out of the calculations.
The two problems are linked. Fewer humans would result in lower carbon emission, more trees, cleaner water, and so on…The result would be slower, less severe climate change.
A severe drought here in a large area of Australia.
Increasingly severe drought for many areas is probable .
http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/2013/drought-western-us-1900-2100.png
The venerable “Limits To Growth” report sheds light on the topic of over population vs climate change. That study ran multiple scenarios, looking at the impact of various miracles and policies on population, standard of living, etc.
What they found was that population control was a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a sustainable society,i.e. one that did not experience a crash in population levels and standard of living.
To achieve sustainability a number of other changes, in addition to zero population growth, were also required; changes that are anathema to the status quo [and hence the active demonization of this study by the powers that be].
(1) Adoption of a modest material standard of living for everyone.
(2) More efficient use of natural resources
(3) Reduction of pollution
(4) Adoption of agricultural practices that control land erosion and increase yields. (e.g. “bio-intensive farming” or “permaculture”)
Nearly five decades later we are tracking the “Business as Usual” scenario with stunning accuracy. In that scenario, our civilization is crushed between the jaws of resource depletion and blow-back from pollution (of which global warming is the most dramatic example), greatly exacerbated by unchecked population growth. That is exactly what we are witnessing today.
A sustainable society requires a widespread change in values and goals, and hence our present predicament is at root a spiritual one. A system that celebrates selfishness and greed can never be sustainable.
Sledgehammer blows are reigning down on the denialist camp, and the two biggest organizations that have always had your back, Big Oil and the MIC, have flipped, so screaming OVER POPULATION is understandable. What else is left?
Exxon/Mobile is now dead to the cause, obviously, and that’s a huge loss, but the DOD report is even more damaging. It’s an admission of near helplessness by the US military, and that is crazy level stuff, in and of itself, but what is most striking about the report, is that when reading it, one can help but thinking; “this has all been stated before, almost word for word, by Guy McPherson.”
But worst of all for denialists, is the news the BP and Shell are planning for a 5C hotter world in 2050. 5C is the probable end of civilization, I think most would agree. But what makes that 5C number so …troubling, is the knowledge that the climate scientists at two oil companies are likely up on the latest peer reviewed literature, and therefore fully aware that there really is no 5C, as at 4C the infamous cloud feedback loop kicks in, and adds somewhere between 8 to 12C of heat to our atmosphere almost instantly.
In other words, that 5C number sticks out like sore thumb, to anyone who remains even somewhat current on the literature. It’s a clear warning, that hothouse earth is right around the corner, and that corner is moving toward us, at warp speed.
And that is simply more bad climate change news is being brought to straight from the former Lords of Perpetual Denial, Big Oil!
No, at least in the “West,” the only reliable players left to denialists are FOX News and the Republican Party, and something tells me that in order to avoid irrelevancy, or worse fates, they too are going to flip, starting right about now.
Call it what you like, but it’s all a symptom of our fossil-fueled Pandora’s box. The drought you cite is most certainly a result of shifting atmospheric circulation patterns (i.e. climate change), themselves a result of excessive atmospheric CO2, from fossil fuel burning. The excessive population growth didn’t start until fossil fuel utilization took hold. More (fossil) energy means more food, easier manufacturing, better medicine, better survival rates, and more people.
One who has the good fortune to have been born in the southern United States understands the Civil War has never ended. Disease, disability and ignorance are the fruits of war and the harvest continues long after the armed conflict ends.
Destroy faith, hope and kindness and you have destroyed your self. Celebrate death, long for war and the harvest will be plentiful.
Those who seek ignorance will not be disappointed.
Human civilization has so many moving parts it’s rather facile to boil it down to one or even a few causes for what currently ails us. When the awesome geoengineering machine of this civilization eventually fails (like all other civilizations), it will all fail, leaving behind a largely uninhabitable earth. Some few elites may believe they can ride out the storm on or in their previously acquired and provisioned yachts, bunkers, or boltholes, surrounded by mercenaries to pick off the desperate, approaching rabble. I rather doubt they perceive accurately how this phase of history will unfold. It will be a dystopia those of us now living would not be too happy to confront. We’d rather die than make the necessary sacrifices to survive.
The elites of our times seem to agree with Milton’s Satan: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” — Paradise Lost
A human die-off is mandatory for ecology to continue to function but that damned survival instinct keeps mucking up the remedy. Not enough volunteers will force Gaia’s hand and she will be most accommodating. We will continue to debate cause and effect as dystopia enshrouds the land. And sobriety will become so last century.