by Reverse Engineer, Doomstead Diner
Published on The Doomstead Diner 15 October 2017
Discuss this Rant at the Podcast Table inside the Diner
The Frostbite Falls Daily Rant is BACK! At least for today, anyhow.
A few weeks ago we received a very large DONATION to the SUN Foundation for developing Sustainable Communities, which is the 501c3 Non-Profit arm of the Doomstead Diner.
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Said donor is a fan of my audio rants, so in gratitude for his generosity I promised him I would do a new Rant. I haven’t done any audio rants in over a year, mainly because they are a SHIT LOAD of work! LOL. OK, other reasons too, I got going on other projects and venues like Utoob and writing the How I Survived Collapse novel, but the main deal was the workload for the rants. Still, Diners do like them, so I will try to do them again periodically.
In case I don’t get a whole lot of new ones up, in conjunction with another project I am currently undertaking I am Archiving many of the Diner files on the FREE cloud on Google Drive. This week I got 66 Audio mp3s up in a new Doomstead Diner folder which is open to the Public for FREE downloads of numerous interviews and rants. You can also access many of these and more on Diner Soundcloud, but Google Drive is better because you can download the entire folder, plus it will stay up even after I croak and stop paying for the Soundcloud Channel.
Since it has been so long between Rants, I made this one a Catch-Up Rant, covering Collapse Bullshit that has been occuring over the last couple of years, although of course with a focus toward the recent Doom we have been experiencing by the Truckload. This of course made it fairly long at around 17 minutes, so it might take you through half the time it takes to weed your garden or feed the pigs to listen to it. Here’s are a couple of Snippets from the Rant:
It’s pretty tough to determine what or where the greatest havoc is in the world right now with the Hurricane Train having decimated pretty much the whole Carribean, Florida and Houston and 120K people evacuating Bali as Mt Agung threatens to Go Ballistic on the other side of the planet. 10,000 Cows are still stuck there though, so assuming it does erupt there will be a lot of Well Done steaks on Bali, if you can dig them out from under the lava after it cools down. This is stuff happening right now, which tends to pull your attention in that direction, but this is supposed to be a Recap Rant, so I have to get in Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC Machine and travel back in time to about when I took the extended Vacation from Ranting, which I estimate was around the time the POTUS primaries were getting underway. I estimate that was when I switched off the microphone because I can’t find any rants I did during the period, and I surely was doing plenty of ranting in text blogs. So we’ll start there in catchup.
The campaign for POTUS was so full of Tragedy & Comedy I don’t think even Shakespeare would know where to begin with it. I’ll randomly select the THEFT of the Demodope Nomination by The Clinton Gang in the Showdown at the DNC Corral. Dirty Tricks to Voter Fraud, it all was evident but of course as usual nobody gets even indicted, much less prosecuted or convicted.
Meanwhile, Donalditry Trumpovetsky over on the Repugnant side confounded all the Pundits and rounded up enough votes from “Deplorables” to win the nomination over there. The Repugnant establishment was fit to be tied, and a mad scramble ensued to find SOME kind of coalition they could work with and Goobern the FSoA if they happened to get elected. Which they did after even more egregious hanky panky than during the Primaries, trying to manipulate the election than went on regardless of the bullshit. Emails were leaked, collusion with the Ruskies to hack the election was alleged, but again of course no indictments to be seen anywhere. Various agencies are still “investigating” the bullshit, and will come back eventually with more bullshit but no indictments.
…and to FINISH…
What you have here is a catastrophe that exceeds even the vast capabilities of the FSoA Military to cope with. It’s the result of decades if not centuries of poor planning, colonialism, capitalist rape, racism and environmental destruction. It was an accident waiting to happen, and now it has. The Puerto Ricans are the victims of this.
As bad as that is, it’s still NOTHING compared to the kind of dislocation we will face when SHTF Day makes it into the core countries. Now you are not talking a few paltry MILLION people left twisting in the wind, the FSoA by itself has 350M. Then of course there are all those Billions oc Chinese and Indians, and when the FSoA and it’s monetary system go down, they go down too. They most certainly won’t be stepping in with helicopters and hospital ships when SHTF Day comes to the continental FSoA. Everybody will have their own problems, and there will be nobody out there to ride to the rescue.
What Puerto Rico hopefully does is WAKE PEOPLE UP to the fact the FAST COLLAPSE scenario is very real, and in general more likely than the Long Emergency of James Howard Kunstler or the Slow Catabolic Collapse of John Michael Greer. Industrial Civilization has a very few lynchpin systems that it depends on to function, and when they go away for whatever the reasons, climate, war, economics or politics, the essence of the way we live is stripped away virtually instantaneously. It’s not likely to happen at the same time everywhere unless we get Global Thermonuclear War, but town by town and region by region more places will fall off the cliff the way Venezuela and Ukraine and now Puerto Rico have. For these people, Collapse is not some theory about something that might happen sometime in the distant future. It is THERE. NOW.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
There is a full transcript of the Rant below. It’s just not the same without the Audio inflections though, you really miss out if you just read these things. My Pirate Radio friends know what I am talking about here.
Anyhoooo…without further ado, here’s the last 1+ Years in Doom, Rant Style from RE. Hope you enjoy.
Transcript:
Greetings Doomfans, and welcome to another edition of the Frostbite Falls Daily Rant, here on the Doomstead Diner.
Well, to be honest, it’s not really Daily or Weekly or even MONTHLY anymore, I haven’t done an audio rant in a long time, not sure when the last one was. I got out of doing the Audio Rants in favor of doing more video productions on YouTube, along with working on a Collapse Novel, How I Survived Collapse, a kind of parody of Survival Blogs that sell prep toys along with parodying Romance Novels. I am trying to appeal more to women. lol. I am about half way through that novel, but stopped working on it also in favor of going back to keeping tabs on all the REAL LIFE shit going on in Collapse that comes so fast these days you can hardly take a break to get some sleep if you are a Collapse Observer and Chronicler. I tend to jump around through different things to keep myself entertained, I get bored doing the same thing too long. That was true during my For Pay working career also. Now that I don’t work for money anymore, I can flit around even more, like a Honey Bee going from flower to flower for Collapse Nectar. lol.
The hiatus has some advantages though, since I took so much time off a HUGE amount of DOOM has accumulated in many areas, frome Geopolitics to Economics to Climate. What I am going to try to do in this rant is a short recap of major Collapse related events over the last year or so to kind of catch up on what has been ongoing. Most if not all of them I have covered in one way or another with text blogs, but quite a few folks like the audio stuff better because they can multi-task with them. You can play an audio mp3 file over your car stereo while sitting in traffic, or while riding your bike or running to stay in shape, or while gardening to try and have some food source around once TSHTF in your neighborhood. For me though, the audio is a bit of a pain in the ass, because first I gotta script it, then I gotta record it, then I gotta edit the audio which is extremely tedious work. However, I owe this rant to one of the Lurker fans of the Diner who made a HUGE contribution to our SUN non-profit project for developing sustainable communities, so here I am today scripting it out. Recording waits until whenever I finish scripting the fucking thing, which might take a little while. New DOOM keeps rolling in every day which takes me off this project and gets me writing on something else. Competing Doom, as it were.
It’s pretty tough to determine what or where the greatest havoc is in the world right now with the Hurricane Train having decimated pretty much the whole Carribean, Florida and Houston and 120K people evacuating Bali as Mt Agung threatens to Go Ballistic on the other side of the planet. 10,000 Cows are still stuck there though, so assuming it does erupt there will be a lot of Well Done steaks on Bali, if you can dig them out from under the lava after it cools down. This is stuff happening right now, which tends to pull your attention in that direction, but this is supposed to be a Recap Rant, so I have to get in Mr. Peabody’s WAYBAC Machine and travel back in time to about when I took the extended Vacation from Ranting, which I estimate was around the time the POTUS primaries were getting underway. I estimate that was when I switched off the microphone because I can’t find any rants I did during the period, and I surely was doing plenty of ranting in text blogs. So we’ll start there in catchup.
The campaign for POTUS was so full of Tragedy & Comedy I don’t think even Shakespeare would know where to begin with it. I’ll randomly select the THEFT of the Demodope Nomination by The Clinton Gang in the Showdown at the DNC Corral. Dirty Tricks to Voter Fraud, it all was evident but of course as usual nobody gets even indicted, much less prosecuted or convicted.
Meanwhile, Donalditry Trumpovetsky over on the Repugnant side confounded all the Pundits and rounded up enough votes from “Deplorables” to win the nomination over there. The Repugnant establishment was fit to be tied, and a mad scramble ensued to find SOME kind of coalition they could work with and Goobern the FSoA if they happened to get elected. Which they did after even more egregious hanky panky than during the Primaries, trying to manipulate the election than went on regardless of the bullshit. Emails were leaked, collusion with the Ruskies to hack the election was alleged, but again of course no indictments to be seen anywhere. Various agencies are still “investigating” the bullshit, and will come back eventually with more bullshit but no indictments.
Trumpofsky ended up winning the election in the Electoral College, although Killary took the Popular Vote. We’ll never know if Killary would have been worse than Trumpty-Dumpty, although after a year with him parking his fat ass in the Oval Office and attempting to look and sound “Presidential”, it’s hard to imagine how she possibly could have topped him in sheer buffoonery. The year has included numerous episodes of “You’re FIRED” straight off his reality TV show, endless gaffs and lies in his daily Tweets and total failures on his Immigration ban and Obamacare repeal. Not to mention he also did his best facsimile of Hitler at the UN recently. He’s more concerned with NFL Players kneeling for the National Anthem than he is with 3.4M FSoA citizens in Puerto Rico currently without power and sweltering with all sorts of bacteria multiplying up in the water supply. His fabulous response was to after a full week FINALLY deploy some of the massive assets of the FSoA Military, including ONE Hospital Ship! Do you know how many hospitals Puerto Rico had running in NORMAL times? 59. One hospital ship, when it finally gets there can maybe serve the people in one suburb of San Juan, likely a WEALTHY suburb. The rest of the population out in towns currently cut off from access by anything but helicopter will be left twisiting in the wind. We won’t see any video or photos from those places though, just video of patients being rolled up the gangway on the Hospital ship moored in San Juan harbor, and the media will spin it like EL Trumpo has done a fabulous job responding to this crisis. Then His Trumpness will use his new 240 Word Limit to Tweet Out what a fabulous job he did also.
The whole STRAFING RUN Hurricane Train has overshadowed other ongoing idiocies being perpetrated by the elite controlling the FSoA political system, besides trying and failing 3 times. CONgress still has no budget and they’re not even really discussing it. Once again, it will come down to the 11th hour, then they will agree to hike the “debt ceiling” once again because like the tag line for FedEx, “they absolutely, positively CANNOT default overnight”.
One of the major issues in getting any kind of balanced budget is the Obamacare health system, which is coming apart at the seams and which the Repugnants have been promising to get rid of for YEARS but for which they have no replacement plan. They have now tried and EPIC FAILED 3 times to push a repeal bill through CONgress, but they can’t come up with anything that is remotely workable. Because of course NOTHING is remotely workable, unless of course you keep issuing out more irredeemable debt to fund it. Although it is the best looking dog in the pound, not even Single Payer is remotely workable. At least though that one would not be a complete giveaway to the Insurance Companies on the way down the toilet here. Repugnants will never pass such a bill while they run the CONgress, so if it ever is to come to pass before SHTF Day, the Demodopes will need to start doing some winning for a change in the 2018 midterms, then in the 2020 POTUS election. To do that, they’ll need to find some pols worth voting for. Not doing too good there.
On top of all of that political farce making, Trumpty-Dumpty has submitted a new TAX PLAN, specifically designed to furthe redistribute what little is left of the wealth in Amerika from the Poor to the Rich, and plunge yet another knife into the back of the Middle Class. Are there any Middle Class people left? I don’t know any. All the people I know are either stinking rich Boomers and worried about how their Stock Portfolios will do and how to Preserve their Wealth in Collapse (usually gravitating to Gold); or else they are dirt poor Millenials and GenXers trying to find a job that pays something slightly over minimum wage; or else they are retired & disabled people lving on pensions and social security which if they haven’t disappered already are on their way to doing so.
Of course, Political Buffoonery here in the FSoA is not the only Doom manifestation we have had to deal with, the same shit is going on all over the world as numerous Nation-States get further flushed down the toilet and off the credit bandwagon. You can rack up Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venzuela, Myanmar and Libya all as official failed states at this point. Many more teeter on the brink, while the powerful central countries of the FSoA, China, Russia & Germany all Jockey for position to be at the top of the heap of a failing system. That struggle puts us at the brink of Global Thermonuclear War, beginning in any number of potential flash points, from the Middle East to the Eastern Europe border countries to the South China Sea or North Korea. All are Primed Tinder now soaked with Gasoline, just waiting for some Neo-Con asshole who thinks a Nuke War can be won to light the first match.
To tie it all up for today’s Frosbite Falls not-so-daily Rant, we have the last month of Mother Nature exacting revenge on Industrial Civilization with a STRAFING RUN unmatched in recent history. You probably have to go back to Biblical Times to get this type of mass destruction by the Finger of God all coming one right after the other. Harvey dropped in to take out Houston, then Irma dropped in to take out the BVI, northern Cuba and Florida, then Maria came in as the Clean Up Batter to hit a Home Run and completely FLATTEN both the FSoA VI and Puerto Rico. Fortunately at that point she turned into a fish storm and went out to see and didn’t head for the Carolinas. Plenty of damage done already though, far more than our incompetent Goobermint is capable of handling.
Even with more resources being directed at Puerto Rico now, it’s all still just a Drop in the Bucket. One hospital ship is not going to do jack shit in this situation, the number of infectious diseases that will breed up rapidly in that climate with all the standing water around will rapidly overwhelm its capacity. In NORMAL times Puerto Rico had 9 hospitals running. People in far flung communities have no way to get to this ship if they are sick. It’s going to get parked in San Juan harbor, and the more well off Puerto Ricans living there might get aboard, although there will doubtless be a long waiting line.
People can’t even get OFF the fucking island in any kind of timely fashion, the airports have all been operating on skeleton schedules with only a few flights going in or out every day. Even a Jumbo Jet only carries maybe 300 people, and there are 1000s who would like to leave RIGHT NOW, and pretty much the whole population needs to leave that island, they’re not going to be fixed up soon enough for most of them to succumb to disease or lack of food and potable water.
After a week, AT LAST somebody at Carnival Cruise lines had some CFS and they sent in a Cruise Ship to haul some sorry ass Touristas who picked the WRONG week to visit Puerto Rico off the island. Big boats unlike Jumbo Jets actually have some decent carrying capacity for Homo Sap Meat Packages, around 3500 Human Souls can be sardine canned aboard one of these vessels. It’s also not a real great distance over to Miami Harbor to drop them off and go back for another load of Climate Refugees either. However, think about it, how long would it take one Cruise Ship to evacuate even just 350,000 of Puerto Rico’s population of 3.5M, for 1/10th of the total? That is 100 round trips for that ship, which probably takes 4-5 days with refueling and resupplying. So maybe it could make 70 trips a year doing this Humanitarian Aid, but who is going to pay for it? The people getting on the Cruise Ship NOW are mainly mainland FSoA Touristas who were trapped there, and they’ll pay whatever it takes to get off the island. I pretty much GUARANTEE they are net getting this Cruise Home from Carnival for nothing. After 10 boatloads of Touristas have been shipped off the Island, do you think Carnival will keep shipping off sick and starving locals who have no money? Not unless Da Federal Goobermint pays for it they won’t.
Of course, the FSoA Military has naval assets that could be used of their own besides the commercial Cruise Ships. They have Big Ass Troop carries for Marines that can land practically anywhere, they don’t need real ports they can just use a Beach. They dropped plenty of Marines on the beaches of Normandy during WWII of course, and they have better equipment now. But you know, even if they did drop all those naval assets on the problem, that STILL would not be enough fast enough. They won’t do that of course, so the point is somewhat moot.
What you have here is a catastrophe that exceeds even the vast capabilities of the FSoA Military to cope with. It’s the result of decades if not centuries of poor planning, colonialism, capitalist rape, racism and environmental destruction. It was an accident waiting to happen, and now it has. The Puerto Ricans are the victims of this.
As bad as that is, it’s still NOTHING compared to the kind of dislocation we will face when SHTF Day makes it into the core countries. Now you are not talking a few paltry MILLION people left twisting in the wind, the FSoA by itself has 350M. Then of course there are all those Billions oc Chinese and Indians, and when the FSoA and it’s monetary system go down, they go down too. They most certainly won’t be stepping in with helicopters and hospital ships when SHTF Day comes to the continental FSoA. Everybody will have their own problems, and there will be nobody out there to ride to the rescue.
What Puerto Rico hopefully does is WAKE PEOPLE UP to the fact the FAST COLLAPSE scenario is very real, and in general more likely than the Long Emergency of James Howard Kunstler or the Slow Catabolic Collapse of John Michael Greer. Industrial Civilization has a very few lynchpin systems that it depends on to function, and when they go away for whatever the reasons, climate, war, economics or politics, the essence of the way we live is stripped away virtually instantaneously. It’s not likely to happen at the same time everywhere unless we get Global Thermonuclear War, but town by town and region by region more places will fall off the cliff the way Venezuela and Ukraine and now Puerto Rico have. For these people, Collapse is not some theory about something that might happen sometime in the distant future. It is THERE. NOW.
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You.
And that’s all the Doom, this time until next time, here on the Doomstead Diner. Later folks.