Clear and quiet this early-evening Tuesday here in California’s Central Valley.
(Illustration: “Collapse Of Perfection,” oil on canvas, by Peter Kim, and found here.)
Shit’s getting deeper by the day. I’ve found it hard to post nowadays with such pessimistic ugliness polluting the news cycle nearly at a 24-hour-a-day clip. Nothing but horrifying shit-bending scope of the near future. T-Rump and Muskrat are destroying this country, and along with another set of MAGA minions-assholes, are really fucking with the world.
And it’s insane — FAA layoffs with a seeming increase in airplane accidents; HIH cuts as there’s a measles outbreak, huge work layoffs for fire-fighting crews, creating ‘scary’ consequences; as IRS staff terminated, Americans’ financial data compromised; and the horrifying list draws on and on and on, infimum.
Our current scenario is even worse than anything I’d figured after T-Rump won the presidency last November. I thought there’d be shit to pay, but nothing like what’s really happening. The country could slow-quickly break apart due to a shitload of factors. And how’s to stop it?
Collapse — George Monbiot at the Guadian this morning:
Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose processes become synchronised. In a fragile system, shocks can amplify more rapidly and become more transmissible: a disruption in one place proliferates into disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, has deftly explained, is what happened to the financial system in 2008.
[…]
Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.
At least in the short term, the far right tends to benefit from chaos and disruption: this is another of the feedback loops that can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats.
Alternatively, if collapse appears imminent, Trump and his team might not wish to respond. Like many of the ultra-rich, key figures in or around the administration entertain the kind of psychopathic fantasies indulged by Ayn Rand in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which plutocrats leave the proles to die in the inferno they’ve created, while they migrate to their New Zealand bunkers, Mars or the ocean floor (forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, power and survival is entirely dependent on other people). Or they yearn for a different apocalypse, in which the rest of us roast while they party with Jesus in his restored kingdom.
Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.
However, these ‘systems’ can’t be operational in a few weeks/months — most likely the time it will take the damage done.
Monbiot, a longtime British journalist, author, and environmental/political activist, sadly concludes: ‘Yes, we also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst.‘
A lot of news/blog posts on the InterWebs I read about this shit paint the same picture — We be fucked!
As we know it:
Time to pull it out, or not, yet once again here we are …
(Illustration out front: M.C Escher’s ‘Hand with Reflecting Sphere,’ also known as ‘Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror,’ and found here.)