Dmitry Orlov's Blog, page 11

American Foreign Policy Fiascos

Jon ShiremanThe US has been quite busy this century trying to undo itself as a world power. This was slow going in the beginning—after all, mighty empires don't tend to fail overnight—but after a decade of assiduous effort the pace has started picking up speed. Like most collapses, the fiascos the US has been creating proceed slowly at first, then all at once.
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Village Medicine

[The Four Questions have drawn an incredible number of responses, both as blog comments and as much longer emails. They are still coming in, and will take me some time to process.]

The e-book edition of Communities that Abide includes a chapter by Peter Gray, which didn't make it into the paper edition. Peter is a family physician in Canada (as is James, who contributed another chapter on medicine; it is nice that Canadian medics are stepping up to helping people deal with the medical madness that reigns south of the border). He set out to explain “how a village healer in a post-collapse community of a few hundred people, with some basic knowledge and simple tools, might make a positive difference to health, illness and suffering in that community. Peter is not any sort of alternative practitioner: “The tools and techniques described in this essay are only to be used in scenarios where conventional Western medicine is unavailable.” But unlike the vast majority of his colleagues, Peter has spent a great deal of time thinking forward to the time when the tools Western medicine takes for granted are unavailable, and finding out which alternatives are effective, which medical interventions should still be attempted, and which are pointless to try.Read more »

Communities that Abide Kindle Edition

The e-book (Amazon Kindle) edition of the book is now available worldwide, and includes a bonus chapter on Village Medicine by Peter Gray, an allopathic practitioner who has been giving the inevitable future of his profession a lot of thought.

Please order it here.

Interview on Voice America

How Near is the U.S. to a USSR Like Economic Collapse?

You can listen to it here.

The Four Questions

At the end of last week's review of Age of Limits 2014, I posed the following four questions, which I think are key to moving beyond merely intellectualizing the predicament we face, and toward making actual meaningful changes to the way we live:

1. How can we communicate the reality of collapse to family and friends in ways that are constructive rather than destructive and find helpful ways to reflect our “endarkenment” in our everyday behavior?

2. How can we form personal relationships with people that can survive the disappearance of official life support systems based on finance, commerce and centralized authority?

3. How can we transform our physical selves into ones that will stand a chance, by eliminating lifestyle diseases, bad habits, luxuries and comforts, and by finding maximally independent and resilient ways to provide the necessities?

4. How can we make use of ritual and spiritual practice to transform a group of individuals into a community?
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Review: Age of Limits 2014

I got back to the boat late last night, after an intense three days of presentations and discussions. This was my third year presenting at this conference, and I am at this point quite heavily invested in this annual event and have started to take on roles I didn't even know existed when I first showed up there three years ago not knowing what to expect.
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Death by Political Correctness

RafahuLater this week I am traveling to Artemas, Pennsylvania, to attend the third annual Age of Limits Conference at the Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary. I am scheduled to present on the same subject as last year: Communities that Abide, the subject a collection of articles I just published with the help of four illustrious co-authors. Although the subject is the same, I hope that the substance of this year's discussion will be different. I hope to move beyond principles, which I explained out last year, and which I have since spelled out in the book, to practice. I hope that this year we will be able to focus the discussion on the physical, organizational, cultural and psychological problems that must be solved in order for resilient, self-sustaining communities to form.
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Interview on Signs of the Times Radio

New Current Events Internet Radio with SOTT Talk Radio on BlogTalkRadio
A wide-ranging discussion with some particularly well-informed and thoughtful commentators.

Resilience in the face of genocide

The book is at the printer's and approved the final proofs this morning. Also as if this moment there are exactly 72 copies yet to be claimed, so please place your order if you haven't done so already.

This week we showcase an article by Jason Heppenstall, a travel writer. He wrote about his experiences in a small riverside village in the world's poorest and most heavily bombed country on earth, showing us how its people survived and recovered, with their traditional culture intact.

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Moneybag logic

In case you missed it, the US is not a democracy. A Princeton University study by Gilens and Page performed a regression analysis on over a thousand public policy decisions, and determined that the effect of public opinion on public policy is nil. That's right, nil. It doesn't matter how you vote, it doesn't affect the outcome in any measurable way. By extension, that also goes for protesting, organizing, dousing yourself with gasoline and setting yourself on fire on the steps of the US Senate, or whatever else you may get up to. It won't influence those in power worth a damn.

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