Higgenbotham's Dark Age Hovel

[aeden]

The EDAC (Elimination of Duplicative and Antiquated Committees) mechanism, while not specifically named in the provided information, relates to efforts aimed at reducing government waste through identifying and eliminating redundant or outdated programs.

[Higgenbotham]

First of all, why read a far left Democrat, as John characterized David Kaiser? I mean, I haven't read anything from David Kaiser in quite some time, so why the sudden change? It's because every presidency since 2000 has been an utter disaster and if I want to get a handle on how the next disaster will unfold, the best way to do that is to read what the other side is saying.

As an example, this reddit (r/collapse) has a leftist slant. I've started reading it regularly. Yesterday, there was a long discussion about a topic brought up here recently:

I've seen posts sparingly about Dark Enlightenment or Neoreactionary thought, adopted by people like Peter Thiel and founded by Curtis Yarvin.

In essence, Dark Enlightenment is anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic, neocameralist (economic policies that are meant to strengthen the ruler). They believe that modern states should be replaced with corporate city states à la Singapore, where you "vote for your feet", essentially the idea that if you don't like the city state you're being governed by, you move to another, creating an incentive for development. It's like our current economic system if it was applied to governance. No freedom, no voting, essentially absolute monarchy while the rest of the populace are serfs in a corporate-feudalist system.

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comme ... ration_is/

There are a couple snippets in the comments that caught my attention.

Simply put, I don't think they are good people.

They are broken unlovable men that thrived in a ruthless corporate environment by throwing others under the bus and now they want to expand that type of "ruling" to a scale of a governing body. Why? Because they are deeply miserable people that hate being imposed with duty or responsibilities maintaining civil society. It's boring and ungrateful necessary work that those who grew up as spoiled catered nepo children hate with a passion. Capitalism rewards those with money so in their minds they are simply playing by the rules without any regard for morals or ethics.

But I agree with you 100%. we are economically governed by spoiled, irresponsible nepo babies who have not done a single hour of work in their lives. Soon, they will truly govern us, and that is terrifying.

This contains a grain of truth in that it captures a subset of the mindset that our current system produces. To say that the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have never done an hour of work in their lives doesn't capture the idea correctly, but it would be accurate to say that they have never done an hour of work in their lives within the collapsed system that is coming and they will be lost when it comes. They are trying to set something up within the framework that they are familiar with and that won't work in the long run.

By the way, I don't comment within this subreddit and would not be interested in doing so.

Everybody who has lived within this system has to varying degrees a mindset oriented toward producing collapse. That mindset is required in order to survive in the current environment while, at the same time, it moves the group toward the cliff. Some of the components of that mindset have been discussed here; overreach as an example. The big winners and influencers will have a mindset that is geared toward extreme overreach and within this system that mindset is on net rewarded and is therefore almost universally considered to be a positive attribute. A mindset geared toward overconsumption, lack of accountability, entitlement, etc., etc., would be other examples. The collapse comes about due to this orientation. Also discussed here were the children who were raised by packs of wolves, etc. Within differing extreme environments, humans are shown to be surprisingly malleable. Out of a collapsed environment will come the people who have the needed attributes to build a new civilization. It will not come from the current environment and the mindset it has produced. If a large group of people who are extreme products of the current environment decide to band together for the purpose of using that group to create a bridge across the coming dark age, it will certainly fail. The larger the group beyond what's needed, the more maladapted it will be, as the larger group will tend toward having the mindset that ensures success in the current environment but is not fit for success in whatever unpredictable future stage of collapse they find themselves in. These groups can be useful though because they can act as precursors for future breakaway groups. These are some very general theoretical thoughts about high tech communities, ecovillages, survival compounds, etc., as the system moves through collapse to the bottom of the dark age several centuries hence. Though I expect the bulk of the collapse to come over the next several decades.

You mentioned the billionaires building bunkers. Someone brought that up over the holidays. I said billionaires are billionaires because they operate by using other people's productive efforts for their gain. That has worked well for them but how well it works in the future for them remains to be seen. My guess is they will be better off relying on themselves and blood relatives than a retinue of numerous, maybe too numerous underlings.

Looking at the scale of the raw numbers, the 1918 pandemic killed roughly 3% of the world population and WWII killed roughly 3% also. The bloody dictators in Europe and Asia killed a similar sized percentage of world population. This all happened over about a 50 year period. Despite this, world population continued to increase - there was no lasting reduction in population as occurred during the 14th Century.

The raw figures bring up an interesting observation, though. The longer lasting population reduction in 14th Century Europe (defining 14th Century Europe as a region relatively or completely unconnected from Asia and the Americas) was approximately 10 times the temporary world population reductions in the 20th Century.

A longer lasting reduction in population over some time scale of, say, a saeculum seems to be characteristic of a Dark Age as opposed to a normal crisis period. Naturally, this is a case of arbitrarily defining something as opposed to something else and giving it a name.

So how could a scale of population reduction that is 10 times that of the prior saeculum occur? My thesis is that a Dark Age scale population reduction can only come about through large scale individual moral and institutional failure. This is harder to quantify, but my previous post describes what that looks like as opposed to typical crisis period failure.

Most people think that the solution to this is easy - just get Democrats in everywhere, or just get Republicans in everywhere, just get rid of Trump (or Putin or Xi), or just get Biden out of there, or plug in your favorite available solution. Maybe it's the Greens, maybe it's the Libertarians, or what have you, Marine Le Pen in France, but the belief is it's out there right now.

What will stop the decline in population is putting appropriate morals and institutions in place that are compatible with the times and technology, which then translate to good governance. I've already described the only available solution for good governance that exists in the world today - the village elders. Even though that's the best available solution, getting to that is also a prescription for my predicted population loss. Until there is something better than that, and there's nothing even remotely on the horizon, the population loss will march on decade after decade. Meanwhile, every available governance method will be tried and they will all fail.

To solve the problems that are discussed in this Dark Age Hovel will require a massive redirection in thinking on a scale that is larger than ever before in the history of the world, and humanity is nowhere close to thinking that any redirection whatsoever is even necessary. The few who do think that are cast off to the side so the oligarchs who have circled the earth can continue to capitalize on the collapse.

If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.

Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry's military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.

The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.

Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th Century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

The concept of institutional failure is also highlighted by the MIT professor in the quotes from his article on the previous page.
viewtopic.php?p=90365#p90365

[aeden]

For tracing treasury payments, you would use the Treasury's specific routing numbers and additional identifiers like check numbers or ACH trace numbers. The Treasury Check Information System (TCIS) can be used for this purpose, providing payment tracking capabilities.
To link this to inventory control with security in mind, you might hash transaction details (including the routing number) with SHA256 for data integrity checks, but this would be part of a broader system design involving financial and inventory management software.

The shell gui program can be done in days now if/then in this measure for sanity.
thread: isa55

ataxpayer
thread: miryclay

[Higgenbotham]

Intersects on several recent posts. And some not so recent posts that had to do with multiple converging events.

Surviving an Invasion during a Pandemic in the 14th Century
by Nicole Archambeau, Ph.D.

Simultaneous crises can cause a cascade effect, where seemingly separate problems trigger and amplify each other. The impact of a cascade on human physical and mental health can be enormous, but very hard to articulate. Studying stories is one way to see how people understand and try to solve the problems created by multiple crises occurring at the same time.

As a medieval historian, I stumbled on a trove of crisis stories while studying a canonization inquest – a large legal procedure to determine if a local holy person should be made an official saint of the Catholic Church. (This inquest process took shape in the 13th century and still exists in the Catholic Church today.) In this inquest, a group of 70 witnesses testified in 1363 to events in the life of a local holy woman. Reading witness testimonies about dangers they faced and miracles they received through their saint, it became clear that these people were living through a cascade of catastrophes.

Crisis 1
The cascade of crises started in December of 1360. Thousands of mercenaries, unemployed during a truce in the Hundred Years War, attacked Provence. They were lured to the region by rumors of barges carrying the French king's ransom north up the Rhone river. The mercenaries missed the money, but did capture, loot, and ransom towns and cities. Hearing of their success, other mercenaries joined them. By summer, tens of thousands of professional unemployed soldiers were living in the region, looting towns and monasteries, ambushing travelers, and stealing livestock and crops.

Crisis 2
Towns and cities had few ways to fight these mercenaries. They could repair and defend their walls, but much of the city existed outside the walls. A common tactic was to destroy buildings and resources that could not be encircled, so that mercenaries could not use them. Marseille, for example, abandoned and partially destroyed its own suburbs. Other cities chose to destroy churches, monasteries, fields, orchards, and grain storage. The loss of infrastructure combined with constant attacks left people unable to grow food safely or store enough of it. This triggered a famine.

Crisis 3
In 1361, as mercenaries continued to pour into Provence from all over Europe, the local population was overcrowded inside city walls and enduring famine. Unsurprisingly, a second wave of plague, which had first struck in 1348, spread through the region. Although we cannot know the exact chain of events, the multiple displaced soldiers and refugees in contact with disturbed and hungry rodent populations likely had an impact.

The people in this inquest knew, however, that not just anyone received a miracle. Testimonies reveal how the witnesses changed their own behavior in order to be worthy of the miraculous solutions they prayed for. They worked to improve their own spiritual “health” in multiple ways, like giving alms, spending less money on luxuries, and confessing sins.

People in the 21st century may not share the same cultural attitudes as these 14th century witnesses, but by suspending our judgment...

https://magazine.libarts.colostate.edu/ ... h-century/

Brief excerpts from posts related to this:

The discussion began with the idea that by pushing off the financial crisis back in 2008, Ben Bernanke was setting things up for the crisis to hit on all cylinders, all at once, instead of being spread out over several decades as it was in the early 20th Century, which could cause the world to go into a new dark age instead of a typical crisis.

Spending 15 years debasing the world reserve currency and kicking the can down the road during a crisis era is not the path to glory. It's the path to massive multiple converging events hitting all at once from which there is no recovery.

You can make all sorts of disaster possibilities, but the fact is that you can't find precedent for it in history...It's all if you decide to be a pessimist or pay attention to history.

The main need for people when the collapse happens is SECURITY. This is because those unable to produce anything will be looking to take it from others. This is why the dark/middle ages looked the way they did. Castles provided security for smaller societies.

Out of a collapsed environment will come the people who have the needed attributes to build a new civilization. It will not come from the current environment and the mindset it has produced.

The ills and disorders of the 14th Century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years, until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
1978

[Navigator]

I understand your logic and belief that we will enter a new dark age followed by an eventual resurgence of humanity.

My belief, and obviously it is a religious one, is that the upcoming crises are a part of the collapse of secular history and are part of the biblical prophecies pertaining to the return of Christ and his millennial reign as king on earth.

If you start to see signs and wonders, I hope you would begin to consider that this might actually be trajectory of events

[Higgenbotham]

1:15:08 your perspective Martin on the gburg cycle and and how that impacts we weather climate but also some are
1:15:16 talking about a potential drought cycle ahead.
well yeah look there
1:15:23 are um we're showing you're you're looking at food shortages things of this
1:15:29 nature particularly after 2032.

https://youtu.be/LAoQyya0HzE?t=4509

gburg cycle = Gleissberg Cycle

The Meaning of Cycles and Beyond | Martin Armstrong Feb. 15, 2025
Foundation for the Study of Cycles (FSC)

[Higgenbotham]

Over the past month, the stock market has made a few false starts to the downside before going back up to or near all time highs. My guess is that Friday's move down is the start of the real move which leads to the first longer lasting wave of a bear market. This first wave may last a few months.

[vincecate]

Over the past month, the stock market has made a few false starts to the downside before going back up to or near all time highs. My guess is that Friday's move down is the start of the real move which leads to the first longer lasting wave of a bear market. This first wave may last a few months.

Thanks. Was wondering what you thought. Does seem like it may be starting.

Seems a more extreme everything bubble than ever before. Also more algos and AIs than ever before. I think it will move down faster than ever before. We will see.

[Cool Breeze]

I've told you, it's managed and the new liquidity as well as Fed maneuvers will maintain the price. Of course, that doesn't mean purchasing power is retained. Quite the contrary. This is yet another good example of what I've been telling you all for years, that you apparently won't entertain.

[vincecate]

I've told you, it's managed and the new liquidity as well as Fed maneuvers will maintain the price. Of course, that doesn't mean purchasing power is retained. Quite the contrary. This is yet another good example of what I've been telling you all for years, that you apparently won't entertain.

So you don't think that in nominal terms we will get a stock market crash? That they will devalue the dollar fast enough that the S&P500 number does not go down?

If they devalue the dollar by a factor of 2 in a short time then inflation is out of control. The price of oil and everything else will double. So everyone gets out of bonds and the Fed has to buy all the bonds with newly printed money. So you get a death spiral: the faster the fed prints the faster people sell their bonds, the faster people sell their bonds the faster the Fed prints. Very soon you have $37 trillion in newly printed cash. The cash is worthless.

The bond market is much larger than the stock market. I think the Fed would rather see stocks crash than see the bond market and dollar destroyed.

So Anguilla is having an election next week. Some politicians think taking the operation of .ai and giving it to a foreign company was a bad move. So the politician that did it attacked me to justify this move (was moved Jan 15 from me to Identity Digital). I responded with a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTOxTY2t-A4