Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Titanic and the Global Fiscal Crisis - Dummies Guide to Collapse

Our Way of Life - Unsinkable - Huge - Safe - Invulnerable

We have struck the berg - we did this in 2008 - we hardly felt the blow. We were all partying so hard and inside. The ship was so massive - what could have gone wrong? There was a problem but the Titanic seemed ok and anyway she was unsinkable.

But Andrews and the Captain knew something that most of us did not.

The hole was long and exposed a number of bulkheads. It was inevitable that the Titanic would sink - it was all about the power of exponential damage. The ship would seem to be ok until nearly the end. Looking out into that cold night, all the risk would appear to be in leaving the ship.

Titanic struck at 23.40. The first boats were away by 0.45.

By 2am the boat deck was flooded - the ship was still even with only a shallow list forward - but inside the water was rushing in and now cascading over each bulkhead - the angle would now accelerate. It was all connected.

If you were still on board you were doomed.At 2.05 the propellers were exposed. At 2.18, the lights went out. 

This is 2.20am. The ship plunges to the bottom. Titanic had been vertical and then the stern had broken off.

At 4.10 The Carpathia arrived and those in the boats were rescued. 

Do I need to explain it all to you?

The world looks grim now - but the band still plays - the lights are still on. But underneath, the water is pouring in and the early bulkheads have all been breached. We cannot imagine that this could be the end.

But the damage is all connected and vast. Just as the water cascades over the bulkheads and thus breaches the next - when the flow starts in earnest, it will all happen fast.

The risk is that the states will cascade - the risk is that the Eurozone will cascade - the risk is that much of business will cascade - the risk is that the Middle East will cascade - for once the first few bulheads go - the rest cannot hold.

This is how a great Titanic system dies. This is how our way of life will die.

There is nothing that Captain Smith or the crew could do to stop the ship sinking. Nor could they get help any faster that it came.

We cannot rely on "THEM" to stop this or to help us. We have to look after ourselves and those that we love.

So will you be on deck or are you drinking in the bar or worse are you trapped in steerage? Will you put your loved ones in a boat when it looks safer on the Ship? Will you get into a boat? Will your boat make it to the water safely? Will the Carpathia come?

Let me translate - Are you on deck? How locked into the system are you? Do you depend on the system for nearly all parts of your life? If so - get as disengaged as you can.

Do you have a shot at a life boat? Do you inhabit a place that is quite resilient or very dependent on the system? If you don't - have a plan to find such a place. 

Is there a chance of a larger rescue? Do you live in a region or nation has has enough of a civic tradition to work our a rescue?

You have no chance on your own.

More on this later

 

If our consciousness is evolving - this might be the map for that

Dr Brian Hall is one of the truly great thinkers whom you may never have heard of. His life's work has been to discover how to measure a person and a group's values. The sad part of this, is that he was successful - just at a time when our organizations reverted in the death throes to being very basic - all about survival - and so rejected his work. Here then is a quick summary of our values landscape.

You can see here the underpinnings of my upcoming book on human history.

The key here is in the section 10 - the locus of authority - this is where the struggle to evolve is taking place right now. Until now, most people looked to a higher person or institution for authority - the mass media - the CEO - the School - the university - the doctor - the banker - the supermarket - the oil company. The government!

We are now seeing that this does not work. It does not serve us to give them our trust and our lives.

When we shift our locus of authority to ourselves - we grow up as a species.

Once we make the shift - we start to want to participate in making our lives AND the world a better place. Until we do, we cannot. Those who work now on Local Resiliency, Local Food, Personal Health, Open Source - have all made this shift.

So have a look at this and find out where you stand

'Waking-Up' to a Conscious Future

This issue will become more central as we increasingly witness many of the material structures around us dissipating into a transparent fiction: our financial systems, our job securities, pensions, educational systems, etc. It is becoming increasingly difficult to believe that these structures will continue to provide for our needs. As our rafts search for land, our paddles are being taken away from us. So when we eventually find fertile land it will be from our own efforts -- and the cultivation that much more rewarding. As personal circumstances become more affected by the changes occurring in the world it will become necessary that people "wake-up" to new responsibilities and decisions. After all, the upcoming years will be different from what has gone before. And as these physical changes begin to impact and encroach upon each person's well-being, new voices will be rising and asking for assistance.

via huffingtonpost.com

This is an extract from an important piece - it is the context for my book on the Fractal History for Mankind - I see us on a path of development of consciousness - just as each of us change our world view as individuals.

When in the Gospel, Jesus says "consider the birds how they reap not or sow" he is not saying don't make a living - he is saying that the material world is not the most important world. We have made it everything. And now we see that it is not. The huge and majestic institutions are crumbling. We find that we own nothing, not even the house we live in. We have no ability to feed ourselves. To educate our kids. To heat our homes or to heal our bodies.

We are living at a time when we have to learn how to do real in the real world not a chimera in a game.

A Fractal History of the World - Part 2 - Can Fractals Reveal the Shape of our Society/History?

One of the wonderful aspects of "seeing" fractals is that when we train our eye to see them, we can see the deep order in all natural systems. I propose that human lives and human societies are just as much a system as any other for which we can now see a Fractal Order. If I am right, then we can make assumptions about our history and our future.

So in this post, let's look at how when we "see" the Fractal Shape, which has usually been obscured, we can understand and predict what seemed before to be unpredictable. 

This is is a hurricane. On the ground it feels like a mess. It is a mess. It is completely unpredictable. If this is all you know about hurricanes, you just have to endure them. You will be surprised every time a hurricane appears. You won’t know what the eye is. You will not be able to predict the intensity. You will just be in the mess.

We live in very messy times. Nothing seems certain any more. We cannot predict anything. We cannot make sense of anything.

Does it not feel as if we too were all living in a hurricane?

But using a larger perspective like this, we can see that hurricanes have a distinct pattern that drive both a structure and a trajectory. We can know the conditions and forces that drive them. We can’t avoid them. But we can plan for them. We can make sense of them. We can adapt to them.

I think we can use the theory behind this to make more sense out of our time and even give us hope for the future. 

How can this be so? The answer is in applying the principles of Chaos Theory to Human History.  There will be a pattern of human history just as there is a pattern for Hurricanes. Just as there are patterns for all natural systems. 

 When we look into the night sky, we can see some shapes.  But what we mainly see are billions of dots. But with the right perspective, such as a telescope, we can see that the universe is filled with a pattern that also drives structure and also trajectories. 

This is the Milky Way - Our Home - Notice how the pattern of the galaxy is the same as the pattern of a hurricane! 

No hurricane or galaxy is exactly the same. But all share the same architecture. All share common and math rooted rules about their dynamics. We now know where we live. 

Inside one of these structures. Space is no longer an aimless void punctuated by dots. We know how galaxies come into being. We know their life cycle. We know how they move. Their movement tells us the age of the universe. We have seen galaxies that were born at the beginning of time. This knowledge tells us who we are at an elemental level.

This is the revelation of Chaos Theory. 

With this new perspective, what seemed without form or order, such as coastlines, mountain ranges, weather and crop cycles, the rhythm of our hearts, birds flocking, forests could be seen anew. Using this new perspective, we can now understand them. 

We can understand them because we now can see the deep fractal patterns that governed them. 

This book is an exploration into what might be the Fractal Pattern that governs Human Society. 

For it must have such a pattern. All natural systems have them. Might it look like this?

 

Food - How we get duped by the wrong Info on what is healthy or not

Many are excited by the news that Mcdonalds are redoing the Happy Meal. They are cutting the fries portion in half and adding Low fat Chocolate Milk instead of the Coke.

But they and most of the food health folks are missing the point - the point is that obesity is driven by the insulin pathway - how we react to sugars.

The villain is the BUN! and now they have replaced the Coke with a drink that has even more sugar/hfcs in it than a Coke.

Yes Low Fat Chocolate Milk fails on 3 counts. One it is cows milk - a no no and worse if in America becuase the poor cows are on growth hormone. Two low fat milk has more carbs per unit than high fat milk - fat is not the risk - sugar is. Third - chocolate milk is loaded with sweetener.

So the new Happy Meal is going to make your kids even fatter.

 

A Fractal History of the World - Part 1 - Where are we and where are we going

I know that I am not alone in being worried about the state of the world today. Are you? My reaction has been to see if I could find a way of seeing things so that I could understand.

I needed to know where are are - how we got here and where we might be going. I needed context.

So I have been writing a very short book. It is all but finished and I thought now might be a good time to show you at least the premise of the book. So here is Chapter 4 - The Map.

Milk - The Dark Side

see more Very Demotivational Well - not quite true - but milk is not good for us either and the boy is right to be suspicious

What Started the Obesity Epidemic in America?

Over the past year, not a single US state has seen a decline in obesity rates. Instead, the incidence of obesity has risen in 16 states, and 12 states now have obesity rates over 30 percent! A mere four years ago, only one state had such a high rate of obesity. At this pace, the rest of the nation will soon catch up... Two-thirds of all US states already have obesity rates exceeding 25 percent.

Overall, 75 percent of American adults and nearly one-third of children and teens are currently obese or overweight…

It should be quite clear to everyone that whatever agricultural policies, public health policies, and dietary recommendations we've employed in the US so far have been and still are severely flawed, because they're not making even the slightest dent in this epidemic.

So, what's missing?

Two Keys to Curb Out-of-Control Obesity…

I believe there are two primary dietary recommendations that could make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately, they're both extremely unpopular because accepting these recommendations means cutting profitability for the food industry, and major health agencies having to confess that they've been misleading you for a very long time...

The two primary keys I'm talking about are:

1. Severely restricting carbohydrates (sugars, fructose, and grains) in your diet, and
2. Increasing healthy fat consumption

While health authorities insist that sugar is fine "in moderation," and that grains are an essential part of a healthy diet and can actually help you prevent heart disease, they fail to take into consideration that:

1. Fructose is the NUMBER ONE source of calories in the US. This means it's far from "moderate," and this is not at all surprising when you consider that fructose, primarily in the form of cheap high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), is in just about everything—even food items you'd never expect would need it, including diet foods and 'enhanced' water products. Even most infant formulas contain the sugar equivalent of one can of Coca-Cola!
2. Refined carbohydrates (breakfast cereals, bagels, waffles etc) quickly breaks down to sugar, increase your insulin levels, and cause insulin resistance, which is the number one underlying factor of nearly every chronic disease known to man, including heart disease

They've been equally wrong about fat.

Fats in general are considered the dietary villains, especially saturated fat, which many people still claim will increase your risk of heart attacks and cardiovascular disease. However, this is simply untrue. The only really dangerous fat out there is trans fat (margarine, vegetable oils), which for a long time were touted as the answer to that heart-harming saturated fat. Talk about living in a topsy-turvy world...

Saturated fats are indeed good for you.

They provide the building blocks for your cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone like substances that are essential to your health, and saturated fats from animal and vegetable sources (such as meat, dairy, certain oils, and tropical plants like coconut) provide a concentrated source of energy in your diet—a source of energy that is far more ideal than carbohydrates, and that's why I chose these two specific "keys" in combination, because when you cut down on carbs, you generally need to increase your fat consumption.

Is Fructose the Reason Why You're Overweight?

If everyone could easily keep their total grams of fructose to below about 25 grams per day then I believe we would start seeing some radical changes in these crazy statistics in short order. But the key issue is that while that is theoretically possible, precious few people are actually doing it, and the reliance on processed food is the primary reason for this failure.

This is largely because the majority of fructose is hidden in all these processed foods so that it becomes very difficult to see just how much fructose you're consuming every single day.

The average American now consumes 1/3 of a pound of sugar DAILY. That's five ounces or 150 grams, half of which is fructose, which is 300 percent more than the amount that will trigger biochemical havoc. And many Americans consume more than twice that amount!

To put it into even further perspective, based on USDA estimates the average American consumes the equivalent of about TWO TONS of sugar during their lifetime. So is it really any wonder that the United States is the fattest of 33 countries, with a whopping 75 percent of Americans crowding into the overweight category?

via articles.mercola.com

I think that this post sums up the health crisis for me. All the evidence shows the epidemic exploding. It shows that the conventional wisdom is failing.

Mercola points the finger at the main culprit - Fructose. HFCS was introduced in the 1980's this was when the epidemic started.

Fructose is now in all processed food.

This reminds me of Dr John Snow who showed that a typhus epidemic in London was centred around ONE pump. All who drank from that pump, got sick and most died. The establishment of the day knew that disease was not carried by water but by Smells - The Miasma Theory! - they controlled the debate and shut Snow down. But they did find that sewage had contaminated the well and they did lock the well. The local epidemic stopped.

There was no Germ Theory at the time. Snow did not know why the sewage in the water was killing people. But it was clear that it was.

We know more now. We know that Fructose makes us fat. We know that animal fat does not. We know that we eat a lot of fructose. We know that fructose is now in all processed foods.

So when are we going to connect the dots?

When are we also going to give up on the Miasma Theory of our time?

I am sure that we will and then watch out all those who use HFCS. If I know this, so do they. It was the same with tobacco. They knew the real threat. But they confused the public.

How do these people go to work every day knowing what they do? When the public finally get it, they will be turned on.

To Reach Simple Life at Camp, Lining Up for Private Jets

Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.

This weekend, a popular choice for visiting day at camps, private planes jammed the runways at small rural airports.

via nytimes.com

But no tax increases for the rich!

Our financial world - On the edge - I am really scared

Back in 2007 I was posting my fears of the crash that arrived in October of 2008. The crash that the experts said could not have been fore casted! I posted a lot BEFORE the crash of what I could see unfolding. So much so that some friends could not bear to read my blog.

I also took my own advice and got out of the market in the spring of 2008. I have been in cash ever since.

Nothing that could have restored health to the market was done. As we have seen, the banks got saved but the real economy got killed.

Well - it is clear to me now that 1933 is right around the corner. What is the key now?

Back in 2008, I pointed out that it was going to be the housing bubble that was going to be the agency for a crash. Today is is sovereign debt. The Eurozone, The US and the States are trembling on the brink.

In the Eurozone, there is no lender of last resort other than Germany and Germany cannot pay for all.

The banks are all enmeshed too.

Back on my side of the Atlantic, it is clear that the American system, that is designed to have checks and balances, has been high jacked by ideologues who want armageddon. 

Inside the US, the States's finances are also crumbling. 

I don't know what the trigger will be. It may be a financial event or a weather event. But there will be a trigger and then the whole thing will unravel. Each part of the system will cascade into the other.

This time there are no moves left. What ever safety net we had has been squandered.

So what to do to protect ourselves?

Back in 2008, I got out of the market and I am now in cash. But now I fear for "Money" itself. What value the Euro? What value a US Dollar? I have been in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. I have seen what happens when the currency becomes a joke.

In truth, I don't really know what to do now. Because this fall will take us into unknowable territory. I have to look back to the end of Rome for a parallel. In 400 the Empire still stands. The roads and sealanes are intact. Food is transported from Africa to feed the city. The army is intact. Progress is being made in defending the border. But the costs of all of this are over whelming and are put upon the land ownersw. The elite are exempt.

By 450, Rome in the West is done for. By 500 the city that had 700,000 people in 400 has maybe 30,000. The food system that could feed 700,000, down from over a million at the peak, has collapsed and people have to spread out and grow food or starve. People had had to look after shelter, food and energy themselves. All the mechanisms of the state had gone. The tax capacity, the bureaucrats, the army, the transportation system.

Could this be us? I don't know but it is not out of the realm of possibility. Our system is so connected and this is its weakness.

I am thinking about what would be wider effects of a failure in Euro system. What would happen to the Euro itself? How would people conduct transactions? Imagine Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland pulling out. What happens to the banks and credit. Then pile on the US credit issues and what will happen to the 70 million Americans that depend directly on the US Treasury? What will happen to the States and all those that depend on them?

If you live pay cheque to pay cheque what will happen to you? How will you pay the rent or your mortgage? How will you buy food? Buy gas? etc 

I don't see any way of avoiding this either

In this scenario - the quality of your real network and your family may be the key. Your access to food and shelter may be the key.

If you hated my posting back in 2007 and 2008, you must really hate this. I hate it too. So if you have a better view and that you can put weight behind, please tell me.