Apocalypse Ciao: Let the End Times Roll

It must be easy to try to make things worse when this is a critical time for our country.
You can just stick your lobotomized head in the sand and wait. I stand in total contempt for your sir. How dare you try to make things worse, as if they could be.
How many children could you have saved on your drunken spree. You are the a classic example of what is wrong with this country. Total lack of any responsibility. I am disgusted that by your actions and this publication of it you may encourage others to do the same. And what will you achieve? Anarchy... Be a part of the solution, get involved, and do something right. Please accept my apology, I forgot you lack any intellectual capacity to think that you might have done something constructive with the 14,000 dollars you wasted. I really cannot believe there are Americans out there TRYING to mess up this country to an extent unheard of.
Kudos for your perspicacious attitude. I did not know you could predict the future after a lobotomy...

I do hope that you are right, and that they are using the language of sustainability but being disingenuous. The thought that they are sincere in their want to profit over a major loss of quality of life to most everyone, including themselves, is incredibly disheartening.

Also, do they really think that a semi-agrarian economy is somehow better to the people in it? Not that our current economy isn't thoroughly and systemically messed up, but because it consists of people, we have the ability to influence it in a way that we wouldn't/can't if the major factors in the economy are weather patterns and other forces of nature. And such an economy is environmentally destructive as well, such as burning forests to create farmland.

They didn't specify that that was the kind of economy they were hoping for, but when you subtract the ones that they want to eliminate, there is not much else remaining.

I see the comments, where's the article being commented on?

When the post-collapse Grand Junker Duke of SoMa, the Ayatollah of Rock-and-Rolla, decides to transport Thor and Lane to scrape salt over in blasted flats Redwood City for their liege, all will be proper.

......they're dismissively laughing at this article and comments rather than taking a look in the mirror and doing a self assessment based on more than just the opinions of their head patting group of self affirming friends.

I agree with the above poster, this is so typical in San Fran and why I'm getting tired of this place too.

Haven't we seen this in most or many of the James Bond movies? The eccentric, rich criminal devises some nefarious scheme that will wreak havoc on the world, and yet allow themselves to profit immensely by said havoc?

Even in the recent re-make of "The Taking of Pelham 123," the antagonist has set up a scheme to make himself rich off of a collapsing stock market.

This is an entertaining read (Virginia's a good writer) but it's more fiction than fact. You can watch the 5 minute Ignite talk I did that this is based on [http://www.deprecated.com/2009/06/17/were-all-collapsitarians-now/], and you'll see it is not about wishing hard times on anyone, but about seeing transformation around the corner. It's an optimistic perspective on the future based on the goodness of people when they bond together, from someone who has personally been through hard times.

It is sad that the fact checker for this article chose to not use the corrections I provided. Among the things I tried to correct, I never said I *hoped* that those four sectors would collapse--I've said I thought they were already collapsing (in a kind of slow motion music industry collapse way), and that it isn't all bad. Who's really going to argue that the auto industry isn't collapsing, and that something less delusional won't likely emerge in its ashes? Or retail (Mall of America anyone?). Or the bloated, financial industry? Shedding the assumptions that gave rise to the problem children of capitalism should be encouraged, shouldn't it? Isn't that in-line with Mother Jones' ideals?

[And for the record, the bar tab that Lane covered on his personal credit card was a loan to the 10 other companies that co-sponsored the party with us.]

Reading this story and the comments too.... make me nostalgic for the Weimar!!

** "Before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, with a gold-backed currency, expanding industry, and world leadership in optics, chemicals, and machinery. The German Mark, the British shilling, the French franc, and the Italian lira all had about equal value, and all were exchanged four or five to the dollar. That was in 1914. In 1923, at the most fevered moment of the German hyperinflation, the exchange rate between the dollar and the Mark was one trillion Marks to one dollar, and a wheelbarrow full of money would not even buy a newspaper. Most Germans were taken by surprise by the financial tornado.

"My father was a lawyer," says Walter Levy, an internationally known German-born oil consultant in New York, "and he had taken out an insurance policy in 1903, and every month he had made the payments faithfully. It was a 20-year policy, and when it came due, he cashed it in and bought a single loaf of bread." The Berlin publisher Leopold Ullstein wrote that an American visitor tipped their cook one dollar. The family convened, and it was decided that a trust fund should be set up in a Berlin bank with the cook as beneficiary, the bank to administer and invest the dollar.

In retrospect, you can trace the steps to hyperinflation, but some of the reasons remain cloudy. Germany abandoned the gold backing of its currency in 1914. The war was expected to be short, so it was financed by government borrowing, not by savings and taxation. In Germany prices doubled between 1914 and 1919.

After four disastrous years Germany had lost the war. Under the Treaty of Versailles it was forced to make a reparations payment in gold-backed Marks, and it was due to lose part of the production of the Ruhr and of the province of Upper Silesia. The Weimar Republic was politically fragile.

But the bourgeois habits were very strong. Ordinary citizens worked at their jobs, sent their children to school and worried about their grades, maneuvered for promotions and rejoiced when they got them, and generally expected things to get better. But the prices that had doubled from 1914 to 1919 doubled again during just five months in 1922. Milk went from 7 Marks per liter to 16; beer from 5.6 to 18. There were complaints about the high cost of living. Professors and civil servants complained of getting squeezed. Factory workers pressed for wage increases. An underground economy developed, aided by a desire to beat the tax collector.

On June 24, 1922, right-wing fanatics assassinated Walter Rathenau, the moderate, able foreign minister. Rathenau was a charismatic figure, and the idea that a popular, wealthy, and glamorous government minister could be shot in a law-abiding society shattered the faith of the Germans, who wanted to believe that things were going to be all right. Rathenau's state funeral was a national trauma. The nervous citizens of the Ruhr were already getting their money out of the currency and into real goods -- diamonds, works of art, safe real estate. Now ordinary Germans began to get out of Marks and into real goods.

Pianos, wrote the British historian Adam Fergusson, were bought even by unmusical families. Sellers held back because the Mark was worth less every day. As prices went up, the amounts of currency demanded were greater, and the German Central Bank responded to the demands. Yet the ruling authorities did not see anything wrong. A leading financial newspaper said that the amounts of money in circulation were not excessively high. Dr. Rudolf Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank (equivalent to the Federal Reserve) told an economics professor that he needed a new suit but wasn't going to buy one until prices came down.

Why did the German government not act to halt the inflation? It was a shaky, fragile government, especially after the assassination. The vengeful French sent their army into the Ruhr to enforce their demands for reparations, and the Germans were powerless to resist. More than inflation, the Germans feared unemployment. In 1919 Communists had tried to take over, and severe unemployment might give the Communists another chance. The great German industrial combines -- Krupp, Thyssen, Farben, Stinnes -- condoned the inflation and survived it well. A cheaper Mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export, and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad. Inflation kept everyone working.

So the printing presses ran, and once they began to run, they were hard to stop. The price increases began to be dizzying. Menus in cafes could not be revised quickly enough. A student at Freiburg University ordered a cup of coffee at a cafe. The price on the menu was 5,000 Marks. He had two cups. When the bill came, it was for 14,000 Marks. "If you want to save money," he was told, "and you want two cups of coffee, you should order them both at the same time."

The presses of the Reichsbank could not keep up though they ran through the night. Individual cities and states began to issue their own money. Dr. Havenstein, the president of the Reichsbank, did not get his new suit. A factory worker described payday, which was every day at 11:00 a.m.: "At 11:00 in the morning a siren sounded, and everybody gathered in the factory forecourt, where a five-ton lorry was drawn up loaded brimful with paper money. The chief cashier and his assistants climbed up on top. They read out names and just threw out bundles of notes. As soon as you had caught one you made a dash for the nearest shop and bought just anything that was going." Teachers, paid at 10:00 a.m., brought their money to the playground, where relatives took the bundles and hurried off with them. Banks closed at 11:00 a.m.; the harried clerks went on strike.

The flight from currency that had begun with the buying of diamonds, gold, country houses, and antiques now extended to minor and almost useless items -- bric-a-brac, soap, hairpins. The law-abiding country crumbled into petty thievery. Copper pipes and brass armatures weren't safe. Gasoline was siphoned from cars. People bought things they didn't need and used them to barter -- a pair of shoes for a shirt, some crockery for coffee. Berlin had a "witches' Sabbath" atmosphere. Prostitutes of both sexes roamed the streets. Cocaine was the fashionable drug. In the cabarets the newly rich and their foreign friends could dance and spend money. Other reports noted that not all the young people had a bad time. Their parents had taught them to work and save, and that was clearly wrong, so they could spend money, enjoy themselves, and flout the old.

The publisher Leopold Ullstein wrote: "People just didn't understand what was happening. All the economic theory they had been taught didn't provide for the phenomenon. There was a feeling of utter dependence on anonymous powers -- almost as a primitive people believed in magic -- that somebody must be in the know, and that this small group of 'somebodies' must be a conspiracy."

When the 1,000-billion Mark note came out, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it. By November 1923, with one dollar equal to one trillion Marks, the breakdown was complete. The currency had lost meaning.

What happened immediately afterward is as fascinating as the Great Inflation itself. The tornado of the Mark inflation was succeeded by the "miracle of the Rentenmark." A new president took over the Reichsbank, Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, who came by his first two names because of his father's admiration for an editor of the New York Tribune. The Rentenmark was not Schacht's idea, but he executed it, and as the Reichsbank president, he got the credit for it. For decades afterward he was able to maintain a reputation for financial wizardry. He became the architect of the financial prosperity brought by the Nazi party.

Obviously, though the currency was worthless, Germany was still a rich country -- with mines, farms, factories, forests. The backing for the Rentenmark was mortgages on the land and bonds on the factories, but that backing was a fiction; the factories and land couldn't be turned into cash or used abroad. Nine zeros were struck from the currency; that is, one Rentenmark was equal to one billion old Marks. The Germans wanted desperately to believe in the Rentenmark, and so they did. "I remember," said one Frau Barten of East Prussia, "the feeling of having just one Rentenmark to spend. I bought a small tin bread bin. Just to buy something that had a price tag for one Mark was so exciting."

All money is a matter of belief. Credit derives from Latin, credere, "to believe." Belief was there, the factories functioned, the farmers delivered their produce. The Central Bank kept the belief alive when it would not let even the government borrow further.

But although the country functioned again, the savings were never restored, nor were the values of hard work and decency that had accompanied the savings. There was a different temper in the country, a temper that Hitler would later exploit with diabolical talent. Thomas Mann wrote: "The market woman who without batting an eyelash demanded 100 million for an egg lost the capacity for surprise. And nothing that has happened since has been insane or cruel enough to surprise her."

With the currency went many of the lifetime plans of average citizens. It was the custom for the bride to bring some money to a marriage; many marriages were called off. Widows dependent on insurance found themselves destitute. People who had worked a lifetime found that their pensions would not buy one cup of coffee.

Pearl Buck, the American writer who became famous for her novels of China, was in Germany in 1923. She wrote later: "The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people. They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them. Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency."

The fledgling Nazi party, whose attempted coup had failed in 1923, won 32 seats legally in the next election. The right-wing Nationalist party won 106 seats, having promised 100 percent compensation to the victims of inflation and vengeance on the conspirators who had brought it.

Copyright © 1981 by George J. W. Goodman. All rights reserved.

Yaa, Dude.... Careful what UB wishin foo........

Life as we kno-it...Pfoof......nomore......

A new order would arise....But would it be betta...?????

Real Collapsitarians are just secular versions of the fundamentalist Christian rapture believers. They believe that collapse will lead back to a pre-agricultural stone age with roughly a few hundred thousand humans and no technology. Their contrary or inverse opponents are known as Cornucopians, who believe that with a little technology here and there, we'll be able to feed 50 billion people and have them all enjoy a lifestyle of ever-expanding affluence.

The Collapsitarians described here are just middle-of-the-road collapsers. They are just regular Capitalists who have taken over the latest leftist fad and made a business out of it, just as Al Gore has made multi-millions from his apocalyptic scenarios of global warming or the way the mainstream culture adopted all the outward signs of the counter-culture and co-opted anti-war feelings from the 1960's. We'll have endless touchy-feely get-to-know-your-customer seminars while the Capitalists continue to fleece the proletariat just as they have always done it.

So the collapsitarians round the lunch table were rich - "Their proof of concept is only ever that they themselves are rich. And while that's hard to refute—" were they?
But one of them maxed TWO credit cards to pay a $14,000 bill and had to scrounge for lunch money. Come on! I have way bigger credit lines on several cards without even approaching calling myself rich. And an Amex card with no defined limit. These guys sound more like the inhabitants of an Irish novel from the 50's - grifters spinning a line for a free lunch rather than gifted seers of the future.

What I can't comprehend is if "conventional wisdom" is what got us into this mess, why do so many think conventional wisdom will get us out of it?

Freedom!
Horrible, horrible freedom!

Hmm. Not reading widely enough. The exact problem here is there are no "disinterested academics". All have been bought up by corporatists/bankers. All who resist are expelled. In some cases (do your own research!) murdered.

In the second place, did you not read Marx? Or did you not read Marx deeply enough? What is happening was predicted a long time ago. Like it or not.

Personally, I'm apt not to like it but there you go. You can't always get what you want.

Organize. Organize. Organize: for the protection of your children and your grandchildren. We are all they have. And that turns out to be true whether the buzz-ism of the day (ie., today's flavor: Ragnorok) survives until tomorrow or not. Corporatism succeeds to exact extent that we are atomized, divided, turned against each other.

Hey, but as my Grandpa said of WWI: the safest place is at the bottom of the trench, digging the latrine.. because when/if they all come back from the attack, they will all want to find the nearest hole to defecate in.

First off, MoJo, can you really not invest in some basic SPAM filtering?

Second, articles like this in publications I genuinely respect like Mother Jones, confound me. Is it sheer laziness to focus on walking caricatures like these guys? Are they the only ones you find through your social circles?

Heffernan may well be a good writer but this piece is not worth the paper, hehem, the pixels it was written on. Apparently, all those who see that the bills for our fossil fueled binge have come due are either run-for-the-hills survivalists, end-of-the-world-partiers, or some other such simplistic caricature.

You know, two things can mutual exist: the simple and the complex. The simple--which any third grader can help you understand, if you need it--is that you can't keep growing ... global economic activity, human population, resource extraction, energy use, atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, etc. .. on a finite planet without some consequences. Specific predictions may be wrong but that does not make the general trend less true.

The complex: That people might have mixed feelings and mixed responses when they let that simple, but mind shattering, understanding in. It takes courage to face reality, especially when most of us still live in the growth world we've built.

One of the things I admire about Mother Jones is its willingness to ask hard questions, to probe deeper. So, please, get off your @sses and do it.

These guys mention Kunstler and Orlov. Orlov is indeed in advertising, but Kunstler is the long-time critic (hater? estetik) of suburbia and what he calls the "Happy Motoring" culture of the U.S., and primarily an author and journalist given to hyperbole and bad predictions.estetik burun ameliyatları Nonetheless, lately Kunstler and Orlov have been spot-on. The "collapsitarians nazmi bayçın" are a far cry away from the capitalists and technology religionists discussed in this article. göğüs büyütme ameliyatlarıThey're of two varieties, with some overlap - economic and resource-depletion believers. estetik göğüs ameliyatları The economic collapsitarians believe that America's private and public-sector debts will at some point soon lead to a dollar collapse nazmi bayçın and economic hardship that proves politically and economically unbearable to a population that has known only göğüs küçültme ameliyatlarımaterial abundance. This seems reasonable as a description of cultural context but disputable as economics. karın germe estetiği The second camp points out that fossil fuel energy is the basis of modern civilization and Peak Oil is upon us, with regional peaks in natural gas also occurring. vajina estetiği They also cite data that shows uranium ore will peak within 20 years if we choose nuclear to replace fossil fuels, and coal is not as viable as the "200 lazer epilasyon fiyatları years of supply" believers would like the rest of us to believe as well. Add to that the facts that 1) karın germe estetiği current productions methods for solar panels and wind turbines are heavily energy intensive; 2) plastik cerrahi modern industrial agriculture and food distribution systems are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, 3) saç ekimi globalization that fulfills the best task it could of raising the living standards of the world's poor would only increase the strain on non-renewable resources; and 4) göğüs büyütme estetiği climate change has already and will continue to produce regional disruptions through weather, göğüs dikleştirme estetiği the spread of diseases, pests such as the beetle eating up the Rocky Mountain forests, and strains on the oceans and fresh water sources. göğüs küçültme estetiği Taking account of such actual conditions leads collapsitarians to recognize that a lower standard of living vajina daraltma ameliyatı is pretty much inevitable in the near future, probably two decades at the most, five years at the least. nazmi bayçın Then the question is not hoping that it will happen, or believing something ridiculous like we're nazmi bayçın going to devote our energy to maintaining the Internet and social networking -- nazmi bayçın rather than, say, refrigeration -- nazmi bayçın but rather preparing for and easing the transition in order to minimize human and ecosystem suffering. nazmi bayçın It's a tall order, and one that's generally not even near the radar of most folks. nazmi bayçın But it's likely to be on us before it gets on the radar, and that's the source of the collapsitarians' despair. nazmi bayçın