Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[Higgenbotham]

The stuff I've posted in the past couple pages might be compared to Swiss cheese. It's not rigorous. Not enough thought was put into it. It lacks clarity and some pieces of the puzzle. There are obvious holes in it. That refers to my own thoughts, not those of others. Yet, at the same time, it provides enough information to be a starting point for assessing how serious the situation is and that it's not The Fall of Rome II or The 1930s II - there are problems that likely will matter that go beyond that.

Number one being that, as collapse begins, the nuclear powers will be strongly impelled to turn the planet into cold radioactive cinder.

The Swiss cheese I was referring to was an incomplete description of the ongoing decline of renewable resources, especially soil and water.

As far as the threat of nuclear war, you follow news and I've noticed your news posts have had frequent references to that of late. That brings up a couple things in my mind.

One is, while back, I posted some chronological surveys from Pew asking survey participants to name the most pressing issues facing the country. Some consistently appeared over time, some not. In the most recent survey, inflation was right at the top, but hadn't appeared in any of the previous surveys.

Another is, when covid struck, nuclear war news receded into the background as leaders focused on issues in their backyard. Then once Russia invaded The Ukraine, nuclear war got into the news again.

I expect the future to look more like the time when covid was in the news.

There are two divisions (obviously not the only ones) I see on this forum. One division is that some posters discuss the ongoing and long term decline in the nation state and state power on a relative basis for the past approximately 5 decades while others discuss topics as if this long term decline has not taken place at all. The second division is in the proximity of threats with some posters (many Guests contributing to this topic) believing the most serious threats are right in their backyard with others convinced that the most serious threats are on the other side of the world (namely China).

That's not to say nuclear weapons aren't an issue. I quoted something a few years ago from Spengler at Asia Times that I believe could be important as state power declines.

I would expect the beginning phases of a descent into a Dark Age to be milder than if an actual cleansing and regenerative process were to occur instead. In a descent into a Dark Age, one way to look at it is we continue to borrow more from the future instead of stopping at some point and replenishing the future. That is what clearly continues to happen, as we can see. There are many symptoms of that, but an obvious one is the failure to have enough children to replenish the population and we see that across all of the Western societies with Japan taking the lead. As Peter Drucker has commented, this is unprecedented.

The fifth horseman of the apocalypse
By Spengler

The essay below appears as a preface to my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).

Population decline is the elephant in the world's living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. [1] If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates - indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere - in the Muslim world. The world's population will fall by as much as a fifth between the middle and the end of the 21st century, by far the worst decline in human history.

Population decline, the decisive issue of the 21st century, will cause violent upheavals in the world order. Countries facing fertility dearth, such as Iran, are responding with aggression. Nations confronting their own mortality may choose to go down in a blaze of glory. Conflicts may be prolonged beyond the point at which there is any rational hope of achieving strategic aims - until all who wish to fight to the death have taken the opportunity to do so.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Eco ... 3Dj05.html

[Higgenbotham]

One division is that some posters discuss the ongoing and long term decline in the nation state and state power on a relative basis for the past approximately 5 decades while others discuss topics as if this long term decline has not taken place at all.

Below is one data point out of many. I intend to get around to the many at some future time.

47% of West Coast Dems, 66% of Southern Republicans Want to Secede From U.S.
BY AILA SLISCO ON 7/14/21 AT 10:01 PM EDT

Two-thirds of Southern Republicans say they support breaking away from the U.S. and forming their own country with nearby states, while nearly half of Democrats on the West Coast would do the same.

A 66 percent majority of Republicans in 13 Southern states including Texas and Florida are in favor of seceding from the union, according to a poll released Wednesday by Bright Line Watch. Half of all independents in the South agreed, while only 20 percent of Southern Democrats were on board.

Support for forming a breakaway country reached 47 percent among Democrats in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. One-third of West Coast independents, or 33 percent, were in favor of succession, along with 27 percent of West Coast Republicans.

https://www.newsweek.com/47-west-coast- ... us-1609875

This is a joke but it's fun watching you guys whip yourselves into a frenzy about secession.

I'm not trying to predict the future of secession; my post was about what is happening in Texas that points to the people who are currently in charge having thought about secession for many years and apparently making preparations for secession. In other words, it doesn't appear to me that Allen West's comments came out of the clear blue sky.

As far as the futures goes, that gets really tricky, particularly in Texas, as your post points out. And I'll state my usual disclaimer: I believe at this time in history everyone should develop their own view of the future based on their unique experiences, rather than just pick someone else's view. And so you have yours. My view is that the overwhelming driver of the future will be depopulation and it will happen really, really quickly and catch everyone off guard. The most likely vector of that on a worldwide basis will be pandemics, which I talked about well before covid hit, and I believe covid will be just the beginning and relatively mild in comparison to what is coming. In addition to that, in Texas, a big problem is likely to be starvation. The soil in Texas is crap and I don't think the natural habitat of Texas can support more than about 1/10 of its population without importing food from outside the borders of Texas, so if trade within a few hundred miles is very limited for a period of time, Texas is in deep trouble in that regard. Only a tiny fraction of the food in Texas grocery stores comes from Texas. Out of that mess, I think Texas will actually be one of the few places that can cobble together a government that has jurisdiction over a territory that approximately resembles the size of a US state. As you state, the borders of Texas will be redrawn, but I believe they will give some of that territory back to Mexico or to whichever Mexican strongmen or gangs that want it.

[Higgenbotham]

The above 2 posts illustrate another reason for this Dark Age Hovel. I would estimate that in the general population between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000 people would be interested in most of the topics covered in this Hovel. Among readers of this forum, perhaps between 1 in 100 and 1 in 10.

When the majority in the mainstream consider this topic, it gets really nutty, as in the following. And most people with my background are either busy creating "great technology" to destroy the world with or are just busy destroying the world directly, as the early posts in this topic document.

For a dark age to come about, it must be thus.

Are we headed toward a new dark age, like John Michael Greer thinks?

No we are not, nor do I believe John Michael Greer actually thinks that. He is basically a doom prophet — he makes money by telling people that The End Is Near! Most of the problems he points out are quite real, but he consistently ignores or dismisses any possible solution, often solutions which are very obvious and in many cases already implemented.

And I suspect he does not even take himself seriously. I mean, he calls himself by a D&D character class title!

https://www.quora.com/Are-we-headed-tow ... eer-thinks

I suppose there are people on Quora or otherwise, maybe even a majority, who believe you can transition over to regenerative agriculture and keep your yields up right from day one. Probably if you selectively pick some test cases where the soil is not too dead and spend a great deal of time and effort getting it just right, you can.

[Higgenbotham]

Today the S&P made an outside day reversal bar down. Meaning, compared to yesterday, there was a higher high, lower low, and a down close. Normally, on a day like today, I would have reduced my short position, but today I did not change it. I believe (probably wrong) that this could be the kickoff of the greatest financial crisis ever. Hence, another reason for this Dark Age Hovel and the reason I am no longer posting most of this in the Financial Topics thread.

Once the greatest financial crisis ever hits with force, this (once again) is what I believe our future will look like. There may be a 22% chance or so that this scenario comes about in any way that those with believe that it will happen will benefit in any way. In these posts, I am trying to provide more detail about what these words mean. I will underline what I've been intending recent posts to clarify.

My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

[Cool Breeze]

Well, once the economy loses between 20-50% in the coming 6 months, Higgie (like you and I both think), the question then becomes do we have stagflation that is obviously coming with the QE and printing in various ways that will accompany it. IF that's the case, of course the issues will be such that tensions are flared here and everywhere, and "they'll take you to War" (as Celente says) or rather, war just becomes a result of other issues boiling to points that are from the causal nonsense and policies that have been around for so long, with their lies.

There's a good case that no one benefits at all from nuclear war, so it won't come in. Cyber wars and pandemics could continue, so at what point does the pandemic nonsense get "tried" again, but this time with actually a lethal agent? I don't see it, but I'm open to it. I think food and welfare running out (with war in the background) are plenty to depopulate, especially since at least 50% of the population here got the jab, which was the weakener. In Europe, it's generally worse than that, up to 80% probably got it, and closer to 100 in many places including concentration camp Australia and NZ.

[Higgenbotham]

My more specific predictions would be:

• There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
• The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
• There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
• Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
• The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
• Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.

Since the covid related supply chain disruptions, some literature has appeared which describes what the problem is and how the underlined sentences relate to each other. This is the immediate problem that the financial crisis will cause, if it is severe enough. He mentions the interbank lending market in the article.

THE TRANSACTIONAL DYNAMICS OF
MARKET FRAGILITY

MATTHEW JENNEJOHN *

Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Jennejohn.
This Article is also available online at http://lcp.law.duke.edu/.
* Professor of Law, BYU Law School. Many thanks to Mark Gergen, Cathy Hwang, Juliet Kostritsky,
Jeff Lipshaw, and Jonathan Lipson for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks to Glen
Thurston for excellent research assistance.


INTRODUCTION

One way to frame the post-Cold War era of U.S. economic history is as a
revolution in contract design. If the vertically integrated company was the
hallmark of the mid-twentieth century economy, then complex contractual
arrangements are the essence of early twenty-first century economic
organization. Contractual innovation underpins everything from the rise of
private equity to the financial products that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
Contract’s revolutionary role has not, however, been isolated to Wall Street.
The less glamorous world of procurement has also undergone a similar
transformation. The time where the modal procurement transaction involved a
routine call, to be later memorialized in a purchase order, by a purchasing
manager at a large conglomerate to the sales office at a supplier to request a
shipment of commodity parts is a largely distant memory.
Supply relationships are less unidimensional now. Before, a significant
amount of production was handled in-house at the vertically integrated
manufacturer, and so procurement was rather straightforward, limited largely to
raw materials or other commodities. That changed as growing global product
market competition caught producers between demands for faster technological
innovation and rapid cost reduction. Many producers responded by “de-
verticalizing.” 1 Mid-century corporate monoliths simultaneously shed
subsidiaries, exiting the internal production of sub-systems, and expanded their
contractual relationships with suppliers. Replacing internal production with
contractual relationships gave producers both greater access to technological
innovation and flexibility. Instead of developing a product internally, one could
buy it from a third-party supplier fully invested in innovating in their area. And,
if the development relationship did not work out, then the supplier could, more
or less, be replaced. As a result, vast and carefully articulated supply chains grew.
The thousands of suppliers, sub-suppliers, and sub-sub-suppliers from all corners
of the world developing systems for Boeing’s commercial airplanes are a
canonical example.
Shifting production to contractual relationships introduces new types of risk,
however. Just as new contractual innovations brought us the financial products
that fueled crisis a little over a decade ago,2 the contractual remaking of modern
supply chains has resulted in profound social costs.
We experienced particularly tragic versions of those costs as COVID-19
closed production facilities around the world in early 2020. As the supply of key
components was disrupted, lifesaving items, such as masks and other protective
materials, were scarce. Disruptions spread across the exchange networks on
which modern life relies, amplifying the consequence of outbreaks in different
localities. In a word, the distributed markets of twenty-first century capitalism
can be extremely “fragile,” in the sense that they are systemically sensitive to
disturbances.
Proposals for improving market resilience fall into a number of categories.
Economic commentary has focused upon re-verticalizing production within firms
and, relatedly, re-shoring production within national boundaries. Others argue
that public lending—ad hoc versions of which were deployed during the
pandemic to shore up struggling companies—should play a larger role. Appetite
on both sides of the U.S. bipartisan divide for industrial policy has been renewed,
a possibility all but unthinkable a decade ago.

1. Matthew C. Jennejohn, Collaboration, Innovation, and Contract Design, 14 S TAN. J. L. B US. &
F IN. 83, 91 (2009); see generally Ronald J. Gilson, Charles Sabel & Robert E. Scott, Contracting for
Innovation: Vertical Disintegration and Interfirm Collaboration, 109 C OLUM. L. REV. 431 (2009);
Jonathan C. Lipson, Promising Justice: Contract (as) Social Responsibility, 2019 WIS. L. REV. 1109 (2019).
J ENNEJOHN (DO NOT DELETE) 4/24/2022 7:53 PM
282 LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS [Vol. 85: 281]

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/vi ... ontext=lcp

No worries, they're on it now!

[Guest from Tx]

Out of that mess, I think Texas will actually be one of the few places that can cobble together a government that has jurisdiction over a territory that approximately resembles the size of a US state. As you state, the borders of Texas will be redrawn, but I believe they will give some of that territory back to Mexico or to whichever Mexican strongmen or gangs that want it.
at want it.

Any territory reclaimed by Mexicans will become just like Mexico-->impoverished, crime ridden, dysfunctional, and diseased The Mexicans would be border jumping immediately. Hopefully, as you predicted earlier on this thread, the illegals would be shot dead as they attempt to cross the new borders.

[Guest]

The above 2 posts illustrate another reason for this Dark Age Hovel. I would estimate that in the general population between 1 in 10,000 and 1 in 1,000 people would be interested in most of the topics covered in this Hovel. Among readers of this forum, perhaps between 1 in 100 and 1 in 10.

When the majority in the mainstream consider this topic, it gets really nutty, as in the following. And most people with my background are either busy creating "great technology" to destroy the world with or are just busy destroying the world directly, as the early posts in this topic document.

For a dark age to come about, it must be thus.

Are we headed toward a new dark age, like John Michael Greer thinks?

No we are not, nor do I believe John Michael Greer actually thinks that. He is basically a doom prophet — he makes money by telling people that The End Is Near! Most of the problems he points out are quite real, but he consistently ignores or dismisses any possible solution, often solutions which are very obvious and in many cases already implemented.

And I suspect he does not even take himself seriously. I mean, he calls himself by a D&D character class title!

https://www.quora.com/Are-we-headed-tow ... eer-thinks

I suppose there are people on Quora or otherwise, maybe even a majority, who believe you can transition over to regenerative agriculture and keep your yields up right from day one. Probably if you selectively pick some test cases where the soil is not too dead and spend a great deal of time and effort getting it just right, you can.

JM Greer is woke. I used to watch and listen to interviews with him, but it became tedious with him always mentioning in every interview that in his novels the future president of the new US is black. Okay. Okay. Virtue signalling noted.

I also hate the way he talks; obviously he enjoys exaggerating his voice for some effect I suppose.

My name is John Michaeeeeeeeeel Grrrrrreeeeerrrr.

[Guest from Tx]

The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.

Not centuries, 1-2 years. Max. The average African lives off of foreign food donations. The average illegal or urban dweller, welfare. Look at the state of the US medical system. It's horrible. There will be no ERs. The cities will burn. They're burning now. I know a veterinarian and he knows how to treat humans, if necessary. If I get shot, I'm driving to his house (or I'll send someone to get him) to get my wounds dressed.

[Cool Breeze]

The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.

Not centuries, 1-2 years. Max. The average African lives off of foreign food donations. The average illegal or urban dweller, welfare. Look at the state of the US medical system. It's horrible. There will be no ERs. The cities will burn. They're burning now. I know a veterinarian and he knows how to treat humans, if necessary. If I get shot, I'm driving to his house (or I'll send someone to get him) to get my wounds dressed.

I don't think things will be as drastic as either of you two do, but the state of the world is currently much worse off, in terms of a precipice, than 98% realize. Even the markets are quite a good example, or harbinger of things to come. Guest from TX is right that Africa has exploded due to global supply chains, and even the Middle Eastern countries have benefited among their general turmoil from this. I think John sees this, or many have commented on it (Navi?) in the past. I think the rest of the decade will see a 25% decrease in global population, easily.