Full screen recommended.
Deuter, "Endless Horizon"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
"A Look to the Heavens"
"How did galaxies form in the early universe? To help find out, astronomers surveyed a patch of dark night sky with the Very Large Telescope array in Chile to find and count galaxies that formed when our universe was very young. Analysis of the distribution of some distant galaxies (redshifts near 2.5) found an enormous conglomeration of galaxies that spanned 300 million light years and contained about 5,000 times the mass of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dubbed Hyperion, it is currently the largest and most massive proto-supercluster yet discovered in the early universe.
A proto-supercluster is a group of young galaxies that is gravitationally collapsing to create a supercluster, which itself a group of several galaxy clusters, which itself is a group of hundreds of galaxies, which itself is a group of billions of stars. In the featured visualization, massive galaxies are depicted in white, while regions containing a large amount of smaller galaxies are shaded blue. Identifying and understanding such large groups of early galaxies contributes to humanity's understanding of the composition and evolution of the universe as a whole."
Free Download: T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"
“Little Gidding”, Excerpt
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree.
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always -
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
- T.S. Eliot
The "Little Gidding" is the last of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets,"
which you may freely download here:
- https://www.fadedpage.com/
"It'll Do..."
Deputy Wendell: "It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?"
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: "Well, if it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here."
- "No Country For Old Men"
Oh, the mess is here alright...and you ain't seen nothin' yet...
Brace for impact.
And if they act like this over a TV,
what happens when there's no food?
Robert Palmer,
"You're Gonna Get What's Coming"
"The Recession Is On It's Way"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/31/23:
"The Recession Is On It's Way"
"The Recession is near. Everything points to catastrophic problems with the global economy. Manufacturing is down and interest rates are up. What is next?"
Comments here:
"I'm Only Human..."
And, of course, the universal and inevitable excuse…
“A person who is going to commit an inhuman act invariably
excuses himself to himself by saying, “I’m only human, after all.”
- Sydney J. Harris
I've always wondered...
Everyone says “I'm only human…” compared to what?
“Are You Sane?”
“Are You Sane?”
by Charles Hugh Smith
“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, “Welcome to the Monkey House”
“Madness has engulfed the entire world, with a concentration of power in the hands of a few psychopathic financial elite wielding an inordinate and dangerous expanse of power over the lives of the common man. They are a modern day version of Al Capone, except their weapons of choice aren’t machine guns, but a printing press, peddling debt, creating derivatives of mass destruction, and peddling heaping doses of disinformation. The contemporary criminal class wears Hermes suits, Rolex watches and diamond studded pinky rings, drops $500 to dine at Masa in NYC, travels by chauffeured limo, lives in $10 million NYC penthouse suites, occupies luxurious corner offices in hundred story glass towers, and spends weekends hobnobbing with the other financial elite at their villas in the Hamptons. They have nothing but utter contempt for the lowly peasants who depend upon a weekly paycheck to make ends meet. Why work when you can steal $1 or $2 billion from farmers with no consequences?
The willfully ignorant masses are kept at bay by the selling them a false dichotomy of Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, and capitalism versus socialism. The ruling class distracts the public with fake wars on poverty, drugs and terror, while using these storylines to further enrich themselves and keep the public alarmed and frightened. We’ve been “fighting” the wars on poverty and drugs for over four decades and poverty is at record levels, while drugs are easier to obtain than candy in a candy store. The war on terror is nothing more than a corporate arms dealer welfare plan. The end of the Cold War put a real crimp in the bottom lines of Lockheed Martin and the rest of the peddlers of death. 9/11 and the subsequent undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, with Iran on the horizon, have been a godsend to the bottom lines of the corporations Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
In reality, the politicians are interchangeable and bought off by corporate and special interests. The people are sold a fable, and controlled opposition is the fairy tale. They perpetuate the welfare/warfare state that enriches Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the healthcare service complex, politically connected mega-corporations and the corporate media propaganda complex. The American people are given the illusion of choice by their keepers. The system is rigged. The real decisions are made by unelected secretive men who operate in the shadows and use their wealth to direct the decision making of the politicians, government bureaucrats, and corporate entities that benefit from those decisions. Edward Bernays described a society that existed in the 19th Century, 20th Century, and has now grown to immense proportions in the 21st Century:
“Political campaigns today are all sideshows. A presidential candidate may be ‘drafted’ in response to ‘overwhelming popular demand,’ but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room. The conscious manipulation of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” – Edward Bernays
The manipulation of the masses has been perfected by the ruling class through decades of corporate mass media messaging the purposeful dumbing down of the populace through government public school education that teaches children how to feel rather than how to think. The conscious manipulation of the masses has been designed to produce obedient non-thinking consumers of corporate products, educated to believe the accumulation of material goods with debt constitutes wealth, to fear whatever the government tells them to fear, and never look up from their iGadgets long enough to actually think for themselves. We are bombarded with Orwellian memes designed to keep us sedated and pliant, as the ruling class pillages the national wealth and expands their power and control over our lives.
Conform; Stay Asleep; Do Not Question Authority; Obey; Consume; Reproduce; Submit; Watch TV; Buy; Follow; Doubt Humanity; No New Ideas; Feel, Don’t Think; Fear; Accumulate; Honor Apathy; Believe Experts; Surrender; Spend; No Independent Thought; Win; Want More; Hate; Succumb To Desire; Yield To Power; Choose Safety Over Liberty; Choose Security Over Freedom
This insane world was created through decades of bad decisions, believing in false prophets, choosing current consumption over sustainable long-term savings based growth, electing corruptible men who promised voters entitlements that were mathematically impossible to deliver, the disintegration of a sense of civic and community obligation and a gradual degradation of the national intelligence and character.
Vonnegut and Huxley’s social commentary reveals a basic truth that societies and human beings have been prone to bouts of madness over the course of decades and centuries. Humans are a weak species, susceptible to the vagaries of greed, lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth, envy and pride. The seven deadly sins are in full bloom today, as the American empire descends through Dante’s inferno of reality TV, celebrity worship, religious zealotry, adulation of wealthy titans, military conquest and worship of false idols.
This is where the interests of those in power and those being ruled have coincided, as a fiat based monetary system allowed unlimited spending to keep the welfare/warfare state growing, enriching the crony capitalists, deepening the power of the state, and providing the masses with foreign made trinkets, baubles, corporate logoed clothing, techno-gadgets, and pimped out financed wheels. The concepts of self-restraint, discipline, saving for a rainy day, prudence, discretion, and deferred gratification are rarely displayed in modern day America.
In a case of mass delusion, Americans have convinced themselves to live for today, recklessly ignore their futures, irresponsibly spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need, neglect their civic duty towards future generations, choose ignorance over knowledge, and vote for spineless politicians who promise them entitlements that are mathematically impossible to honor. The public’s foolish attitude towards debt accumulation matches the arrogance of our gutless intellectually dishonest leaders.”
"The Next Stage in Western Escalation" (Excerpt)
"The Next Stage in Western Escalation"
by Batiushka
Excerpt: Introduction: The Story So Far: "So far the US has carried out regime changes and created military conflicts in countries friendly to or important to Russia: Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Georgia, Syria, Libya. All this was to make Russia lose important interests or deploy its own forces. It has also staged PR events such as Litvinenko, Pussy Riot, MH17, Skripals, Navalny, Bucha, the destruction of Nordstream – in order to try and blame Russia and make it into a pariah state.
In particular, in 2014 in the Ukraine it carried out a $5 billion coup with the murder of and terror against Russian-speakers. It then installed a puppet government, promoted Nazism through racist indoctrination, besmirched the historic legacy through rewriting history and toppling memorials, terrorized and banned all opposition, set up US military biolabs, supplied and trained an army, made military threats against Russia, threatened the Crimea, and promised that the Ukraine could soon join the US-puppet NATO and install nuclear weapons."
Full, highly recommended article is here:
Gregory Mannarino, "IMF Warns Again On Global Economy"
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
Gregory Mannarino, 1/31/23:
"IMF Warns Again On Global Economy"
Comments here:
"Strange Prices At Meijer! This Is Crazy!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/31/23:
"Strange Prices At Meijer! This Is Crazy!"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer and noticing some strange price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
o
"Strange prices?" Yes indeed...
"We Just Witnessed An Economic Sign That Hasn’t Happened Since The Peak Of The Great Depression In 1932"
"We Just Witnessed An Economic Sign That Hasn’t
Happened Since The Peak Of The Great Depression In 1932"
by Michael Snyder
"Economic conditions are much worse than you are being told. Throughout the past year, prices have been rising much faster than most of our incomes have. As a result, our standard of living has been rapidly declining. It has become increasingly difficult for U.S. households to make it from month to month, and as you will see below, more than a third of all U.S. adults are actually relying on their parents to pay at least some of their bills at this point. But even more alarming is what has been happening to real disposable income. According to Fox Business, the most recent GDP report revealed that the decline in real disposable income that we witnessed in 2022 was the largest that has been measured since 1932…
The most troubling information in the GDP report is the precipitous drop in real disposable income, which fell over $1 trillion in 2022. For context, this is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression.
Just think about that for a moment. The last time real disposable income declined this quickly was literally during the peak of the Great Depression. And as our incomes get squeezed tighter and tighter, more Americans are starting to fall behind on their bills. For example, the proportion of subprime auto borrowers that are at least 60 days behind on their payments has just surged to the highest level that we have seen since 2008…
In December, the percentage of subprime auto borrowers who were at least 60 days late on their bills climbed to 5.67% - a major increase from a seven-year low of 2.58% in April 2021, according to Fitch Ratings. It marks the steepest rate of Americans struggling to make their car payments since the 2008 financial crisis."
We are already beginning to witness the largest tsunami of repossessions that we have seen since the “Great Recession”, and it is only going to get worse in the months ahead. One woman in San Antonio that knows that her vehicle could be repossessed at any time has decided that hiding it is the best strategy for now…"For some, however, the only lesson is to try and outsmart the repo man: hardly the best long-term strategy. Take San Antonio native Zhea Zarecor who is currently trying to negotiate with her lender so her 2013 Honda Fit won’t get repossessed. In the meantime, she’s hiding it.
The 53-year-old, who is currently in school for her bachelor’s in information technology (and raking up massive student loans for an education she should have had some 35 years ago) splits the monthly bill for the car - about $178 - with her roommate. But then the roommate lost his job, and with prices for groceries and everyday items increasing, there just wasn’t enough for the car payments.
Zarecor is trying to make extra money with odd jobs like contract secretarial work and participation in medical studies, but it often feels hopeless, she said. “Our money doesn’t go as far as it used to,” she said. “I don’t see prices going down, so the only relief I see is when I get my degree.”
Sadly, most of the country is just barely scraping by at this juncture. As I discussed in a previous article, one recent survey discovered that 57 percent of Americans cannot even afford to pay a $1,000 emergency expense right now. And a different survey has found that a whopping 35 percent of all U.S. adults are still relying on Mom and Dad to pay at least some of the bills…
"More than one third of adults (35%) admit they still have at least one bill on their parents’ tab. According to a new poll of 2,000 Americans, the top three expenses their parents still pay for are rent (19%), groceries (19%), and utilities (16%). In fact, almost one-quarter (24%) of millennials say their parents cover their rent."
Are things really this bad? Unfortunately, economic conditions are only going to get even worse in the months ahead as countless more Americans lose their jobs. On Monday, I was quite saddened to learn that electronics giant Philips will be giving the axe to another 6,000 workers…"Philips announced Monday that it’s cutting another 6,000 jobs worldwide as it works to boost profitability.
The workforce reduction will occur over the next two years with the first 3,000 cuts taking place this year, the Dutch consumer electronics and medical equipment maker said on Monday. In its earnings report, the company revealed it suffered a net loss of 1.6 billion euros in 2022, which is down from a net profit of 3.3 billion euros last year." And it is also being reported that one of my favorite toymakers has decided to eliminate approximately “15% of its global full-time workforce”.
I could go on and on if you would like. In fact, every day I could fill up my articles with nothing but job loss announcements. We have entered a very painful economic downturn, and one prominent Wall Street economist is warning that the full impact of this crisis will not be felt until the second half of 2023…"According to one Wall Street economist, a looming recession this year will feel more like the 1970s than a 2008-07 slump. “People are too focused on ‘08 and 2020. This is more like 1973, 74 and 2021,” Piper Sandler chief global economist Nancy Lazar said on “Mornings with Maria” Monday. Lazar predicted feeling the full impact of a recession in the second half of 2023 as lag effects from the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes take hold."
Actually, it would be quite wonderful if her seemingly gloomy forecast is accurate. Because I don’t believe that we are heading into a slowdown like we experienced during the early 1970s. Rather, I see all sorts of evidence that indicates that we are in the very early stages of the economic equivalent of “the Big One”. I believe that things will be very rough this year, and I believe that the long-term outlook is even worse.
Our leaders assured us that everything would be okay even as they were flooding the system with money and engaging in the greatest debt binge in all of human history. Now a day of reckoning has arrived, and we will get to suffer the consequences of their very foolish decisions."
"Ukraine, The War That Went Wrong" (Excerpt)
"Ukraine, The War That Went Wrong"
By Chris Hedges
Excerpt: "NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help...Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust."
Full, most highly recommended article is here:
"Warning! The Harsh Reality of SHTF No One Is Ready For"
Canadian Prepper, 1/30/23:
"Warning! The Harsh Reality of SHTF No One Is Ready For"
Comments here:
Monday, January 30, 2023
"Judgement Day Is Coming, Are You Ready? Consumers Freak Out; Banks Brace For Impact"
Jeremiah Babe, 1/30/23:
"Judgement Day Is Coming, Are You Ready?
Consumers Freak Out; Banks Brace For Impact"
Comments here:
"15 Things That Today's Middle Class Can No Longer Afford"
Full screen recommended.
"15 Things That Today's Middle Class
Can No Longer Afford"
by Epic Economist
"In the harsh economic environment that we're living in today, middle-class families are getting increasingly more cash-strapped and debt-burdened. In fact, if we compare the patterns of consumption from middle-class households of the 2000s and right now, we can rapidly realize that many of the hallmarks that symbolized that someone has made it to the American dream, - such as the ability to take vacations, or having more than one vehicle per household, or dedicating a share of their incomes to leisure and entertainment, - are actually things today's middle class can no longer afford.
Until 1990, the standard middle-class lifestyle included homeownership, sending children to college, affording health care costs, owning two or more vehicles, traveling at least once a year, and middle-class Americans were also known worldwide for their purchasing power and for boosting the U.S. economy through their spending. Right now, the reality of middle-income earners is definitely not the same. In fact, a whopping 81% of households in the income bracket are facing a consumer recession this year, Primerica revealed. Notably, nearly three-fourths, or 72%, of middle-class workers believe that their income isn’t keeping up with the rising cost of living.
Given that the cost of everyday necessities is squeezing the monthly budgets of middle-class households all over the nation, almost half, or 49% of middle-income earners are relying on credit cards to make ends meet. In the past quarter alone, about 29% of workers in that income bracket have said that their credit card debt has increased. With interest rates at the highest levels in decades, those balances can bulk up pretty fast. However, a new LendingTree survey found that 43% of middle-income Americans expect to add to their debt in the next six months. The share was highest for parents with children under 18, with 58% expecting to take on debt in the first half of 2023. The most common reason for adding debt: Paying for necessities, followed by emergencies and health care costs, LendingTree said.
Many of the things that make life livable are becoming out of reach of our population, and we're having to let go of the things we enjoy as the cost of basic necessities eats a larger share of our pay every month. Being a part of the middle class is more than having access to education and homeownership. In fact, those are essential aspects that should be guaranteed for all income groups. The American middle class is the epitome of a lifestyle that the whole world has embraced. And yet, Americans are being excluded from the culture they created themselves. Our standard of living is declining at a breathtaking speed, and that's a process that gets even worse with each passing year. With a recession at our door, conditions are expected to get even tougher in the foreseeable future.
It's sad but it's true: the American middle class is getting poorer over the years, and in today's video, we compiled several services, products, assets, goods, or lifestyle choices the current generation of middle-income earners can't really spend their money on."
Musical Interlude: Justin Hayward, "The Way of the World"
Full screen recommended.
Justin Hayward, "The Way of the World"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster's dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as a large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies, also cataloged as Abell 426, is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 15 million light-years.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110712.html
Chet Raymo, “Silk Dawn”
“Silk Dawn”
by Chet Raymo
“A magical morning. Warm and still. The hillside is cloaked in a fine, soft mist that will burn away by ten. I walk down the drive to open the gate. The field is carpeted with silk. Silk made visible by dew.
The spiders were there all along, of course. Their webs too. Everyday as I walked through the grass, they were there, unseen. Unknowingly, I crushed them with my footfalls. A field full of snares, each silken net flung across the grass, each net with its tunnel lair where the predator waits, patiently, for dinner. And now they are made visible in all their arachnoid glory, each grass tuft slung with Chinese silk, each furze bush as finely draped in silk as a pasha’s palace.”
"Sometimes I Wonder..."
"Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people
who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it ."
- Laurence Peter
Judge Napolitano, "Sanctions, Tanks & the Ukraine-Russia War"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 1/30/23:
"Sanctions, Tanks & the Ukraine-Russia War"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "W.H.O. Warns: Governments Prepare For Nuclear War"
Gregory Mannarino, 1/30/23:
"W.H.O. Warns: Governments Prepare For Nuclear War"
Comments here:
The Poet: Mark Jarman, "Coyotes"
"Coyotes"
"Is this world truly fallen? They say no.
For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way,
There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth,
And there's the panting rabbit they will eat.
They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope,
Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?
And yet we're crying over the stars again,
And over the uncertainty of death,
Which we suspect will divide us all forever.
I'm tired of those who broadcast their certainties,
Constantly on their cell phones to their redeemer.
Is this a fallen world? For them it is.
But there's that starlit burst of animal laughter.
The day has sent its fires scattering.
The night has risen from its burning bed.
Our tears are proof that love is meant for life
And for the living. And this chorus of praise,
Which the pet dogs of the neighborhood are answering
Nostalgically, invites our answer, too.
Is this a fallen world? How could it be?"
~ Mark Jarman
"Leaning Into The Light..."
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez
"Children Of Hope..."
"Children of Hope, to life we fondly cling,
Though woe on woe bitter hour may bring;
the spirit shrinks, and Nature dreads to brave,
The doubt, the gloom, the stillness of the grave.
But what is death? – a wing from earth to fee –
a bridge o’er time into eternity."
- Michelle, in “The Fear of Death Considered”
Musical Interlude: Gnomusy (David Caballero), "Footprints On The Sea"
Full screen recommended.
Gnomusy (David Caballero),
"Footprints On The Sea"
"This Is A Brutal Wake Up Call"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 1/30/23:
"This Is A Brutal Wake Up Call"
"We are getting more and more financial experts stepping forward and warning all of us. The warning is simple. Cut back on your debt and try to save as much money as you can. Big problems are coming."
Comments here:
"A Brief Disagreement"
Full screen recommended.
Steve Cutts, "A Brief Disagreement"
"A visual journey into mankind's
favorite pastime throughout the ages."
"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse, But We Will Probably Be The Last"
"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse,
But We Will Probably Be The Last"
by Chris Hedges
"I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.
I look out from the structure - known as Monks Mound - at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.
This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.
“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in "The Collapse of Complex Societies." “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”
Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories - wooden versions of Stonehenge.
The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man's head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.
The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”
Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers - Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina - have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.
“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” Jared Diamond argues in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”
Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.
“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.” In "A Short History of Progress", he writes: "Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee - or to watch out for - long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer."
Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind: "The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth."
Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century. We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.
As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in "Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians." He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.
Such descent into internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.
Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.
By the 1400s Cahokia had been abandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.
This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people. The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.
The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit."
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