Tuesday, December 30, 2014

The Imperial Collapse Playbook

[По-русски] [In italiano]

Some people enjoy having the Big Picture laid out in front of them—the biggest possible—on what is happening in the world at large, and I am happy to oblige. The largest development of 2014 is, very broadly, this: the Anglo-imperialists are finally being forced out of Eurasia. How can we tell? Well, here is the Big Picture—the biggest I could find. I found it thanks to Nikolai Starikov and a recent article of his.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Absolutely Positive now available in paper form

https://www.createspace.com/5204824
This book of essays was previously only available as an e-book. But since lots of people don't like reading books on gadgets, here it is in paperback form. It contains essays from 2-3 years back, all available for free right on this blog if you dig deep enough. But the book is much more convenient.



Table of Contents

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Alice Unspelled

https://www.createspace.com/5193884
Number Two in the series is ready for purchase. As with all Unspelled Editions, it includes a short but profound introduction and two not very full pages of reference material on how to read Unspelled English.


For those who forget what's in Carroll's amazing works, here is the TOC:

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

First Unspelled Edition available for purchase

https://www.createspace.com/5189858
I am very happy to announce that the first Unspelled Edition of a children's classic is finally out, so please go ahead and order it. This book, being the first, took 2.5 years to produce. The second (containing both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Beyond the Looking-Glass) took 2.5 days. The third (Treasure Island) is taking about a day. The tenth, I suspect, will take less than an hour. That's how it works with software: it takes a long time to get all the bugs out, but once they are gone it becomes more or less a matter of pushing a button.

Are Americans Prepared For A Soviet Style Collapse?

http://www.drescapes.com/2014/12/19/dmitry-orlov-are-americans-prepared-for-a-soviet-style-collapse-interview/
Last week I gave an interview to Barry at DR Escapes which is now up on Youtube. Please follow the link to listen to the interview. Barry's notes on it are pasted in below.

If the social and financial structure around you collapsed tomorrow, as it did for many people during the fall of the Soviet Union, are you prepared to survive and even prosper? In my latest interview with best selling author Dmitry Orlov we discuss lifestyle and how your lifestyle decisions may dramatically impact how your family will fare if times get tough.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Can anybody find me... a central banker to love?

Freddie
[По-русски]

[Final update: the ruble seems to have stabilized, for now, and China has declared its support for the Russian economy, but the problem with devaluing currencies is by no means limited to Russia. In the meantime, Russia has stopped grain exports, so we should expect Arab Spring 2.0, because Russia is where couscous comes from. Also, I hear Krugman has declared that the world is not only flat but only a bubble; I wouldn't know since I don't pay attention to him, so please stop asking me.]

[Early morning update: in case you had any doubts, the intervention didn't work. Ruble and oil are continuing to plunge amid increasing financial market turmoil throughout the world.]

[Last minute update: the repo rate has been just hiked to an eyewatering 17%! At the same time, the percentage of bullshit in the rationale given was lowered significantly: it is to prevent further ruble devaluation. Simply put (perhaps too simply), ruble liquidity for currency speculation has just dried up. At the same time, the central bank is backing long-term investments in industry at a far more reasonable 6.5% rate. Will this be enough to stop the slide?]

On December 11 Russia's central bank hiked its rate by one percent, from 9.5% to 10.5%. The rationale offered by the bank's governor Elvira Nabiullina was that this would stop the slide in the value of the ruble. But nobody laughed.

Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Defeat is Victory

John Holcroft
[In italiano]

On the wall of George Orwell's Ministry of Truth from his novel 1984 there were three slogans:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It occurred to me that these apply just a little bit too well to the way the Washington, DC establishment operates.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Minimum Viable Sociopathy

There are absolutely NO Nazis fighting for Ukraine!
If you agree, then just gouge out your eyes!
(Note NATO and Nazi flags side by side.
Isn't that just cute?)
I seem to be doing a lot of hyperproductive things lately: explaining to people how to kill the foul beast of Empire, revolutionizing the way English literacy is taught to both native English speakers and the rest... Somebody just emailed me to tell me that I have become “one of those significant commentators.” Yikes! If I keep going this way, then I will run the risk of making a Significant Contribution to Society (SCS). And that would be a mistake; not just for me, but for anyone.

Plus I'd be spending most of my time deleting blog comments from imbeciles. It's the blogging equivalent of scraping bugs off your windshield. (It's about 1% thoughtful comments from actual readers, and 99% senseless blather from idiotic trolls. I am serious. Very sad. But I liked the one I got the other day from a Ukrainian who said that his people will drown all the Russians in their (Ukrainians') own blood. That was cute, but I deleted it anyway because it's hate speech.

But allow me to explain about SCS and what the title of this blog post means.

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Tax Revolt Methods

Niccolò Macchiavelli
[This is a follow-up by Gary Flomenhoft on last week's post.]

“It is just as difficult and dangerous to try to free a people that wants to remain servile as it is to enslave a people that wants to remain free.”
Niccolò Macchiavelli

‘Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
Étienne de la Boétie, 1552

I am pleased that many people have expressed interest in getting more information about different methods of joining a tax revolt.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Unspeller now available in Japanese and Russian

Thanks to the efforts of Masayuki, Oji, Natasha and Mirra, Unspeller is now available in Japanese and in Russian. Click on the links to read the language-specific introductions.




Saturday, November 29, 2014

Peak Prosperity Podcast: Russia's Patience is Wearing Thin

My interview with Chris Martenson:



With the western propaganda flying thick and heavy, it's more important than ever to cut through the chaff and learn what we can about the most important geopolitical realignment (and renewed tensions) in recent memory.

Monday, November 24, 2014

You know, for kids...

Something for them to do while waiting for their copies of Unspeller to arrive: learn the names of all the animals featured in it.


Again, don't use Internet Explorer, or it won't work. This is not something I am ever going to fix, so please download and install Firefox or Chrome.

The Only Way to Stop the Empire

[In italiano]

Dear friends,

The final days of US empire are fast approaching. Perhaps its end will pass slowly and gradually, or perhaps the event will unfold rapidly and catastrophically. Maybe chaos will break loose, or maybe its demise will be organized well and proceed smoothly. This nobody knows, but the end of empire is coming as surely as day follows night and sun follows rain. Overexpansion, overreach and over-indebtedness will take their toll—as all past empires have discovered. Empires are like bacteria in a Petrie dish; unthinking, unseeing, unfeeling, they expand until they run out of food or contaminate their environment with their waste, and then they die. They are automatons, and they just can’t help it: they are programmed to expand or die, expand or die, and, in the end, expand and die.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

Unspell gets a glowing review

How To Teach Your Kids To Read Good In Bad Sitchuwayshins by Don Feathers. Long but heartfelt.

Unspell Sound Charts

The Consonants
Here is a nifty interactive tool to help people with learning Unspell. Click on a shape, and hear my careful rendition of the associated sound.


It was put together with all free software: OfficeLibre for design, Audacity for audio, Aquamacs for coding and Mozilla for testing/debugging.

The Vowels
If you are on a slow internet connection, the sounds will take a little while to load the first time you click on them.

It was tested with Firefox, Chrome and Safari. It probably doesn't work with Internet Explorer because it uses Wave files for the sounds, which are originally a Microsoft standard, so it makes perfect sense that it works with every browser except Microsoft's.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Calling all English teachers!


It's been brought to my attention that English teachers are not immediately receptive to Unspell. When presented with a copy of Unspeller, they ask the rather obvious question: Why do my students need to learn this? And so here is the answer. If you are an English teacher, please read this. And if you know any English teachers, please send the link to them, and tell them that this is something they need to read. Thank you.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

It's official: US stole Ukraine's gold

This just in: it turns out that the rumors were right after all. At least part of the reason the US State Dept./CIA staged a coup in Ukraine that overthrew its democratically elected government and installed a neo-Nazi puppet regime was to steal Ukraine's gold. Rumor had it that shortly after the coup the gold was quietly loaded onto a plane that took it to the US. And now comes the official revelation: Ukraine has no gold reserves left. The gold was sold to pay for a failed military campaign in Eastern Ukraine, and to prop up the fake paper gold market for a little bit longer. One would expect that once the fix is off, the price of gold will skyrocket, the US dollar will drop like a rock, and Americans will need to add the word “hyperinflation” to their list of national woes.

Happy talk about the climate

Mathiole
[Update for the rest of you: I've had smarter insects go splat on my windshield than these climate denialists whose comments I don't even bother reading. Do your best to learn to ignore them.]

[Update for climate change denialists: please save me the trouble of marking your comments as spam. This blog is not for the willfully ignorant or the scientifically illiterate, so a hearty good-bye to you all.]

The non-binding climate deal which the US and China just signed will allow the Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to go to 500ppm and beyond by the end of the century, far past the current concentration of 400ppm. Historically, this concentration was sufficient to produce an ice-free Arctic, significantly higher ocean levels, and an environment unlikely to be able to sustain large human populations.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Twilight of the Oligarchs

Michael Murph
Last week I published a brave prediction:

I see the political elites and their oligarch puppet-masters becoming endangered species in the United States before too long as the populace, including their own bodyguards, turns against them.

As usual, I made no attempt to specify what I mean by “before too long” because making predictions as to timing is a fool's game. And, as usual, I got a flurry of emails expressing a wide range of rationalizations but all adding up to the same sentiment: “not any time soon.”

Friday, November 07, 2014

Well that didn't take long...

Back in early August I made a very specific prediction as to the effect of US/EU sanctions against Russia:
I see tractors clogging the streets of Europe's capitals and dumptruck-loads of manure decorating the steps of government buildings before too long.
 Here's the photographic evidence from Toulouse, France: irate farmers fling poo.


In this case, ”before too long” = 3 months. But in other cases it may be a bit longer. This is, after all, only the beginning. Take this prediction, for example:
I see the political elites and their oligarch puppet-masters becoming endangered species in the United States before too long as the populace, including their own bodyguards, turns against them.

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Odds and ends

The last post produced a few comments and quite a few emails that I would like to respond to.

Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Is unlearning harder than unschooling?

Patrick Desmet
This blog has developed something of a split personality. The bulk of the readership (well over 10,000 visitors on a typical day) is here to read about the unfolding geopolitical tragicomedy, and the various and assorted stages of collapse which are to follow. A much smaller group (under 10% so far) is also interested in my effort to single-handedly solve a certain well-defined problem with the English language. And an even smaller group, numbering in the hundreds, is actually participating and contributing to this effort. Now, the geopolitical tragicomedy is certainly fun to watch, sort of like watching icebergs capsize, but since there is not a lot any of us can do about it, it's something of a time-waster; whereas fixing an actual problem, and making many people's lives better as a result, seems like a worthwhile pursuit—at least it does to me.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Putin to Western elites: Play-time is over

Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin's speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few days ago, and, chances are, those of you who have heard of the speech didn't get a chance to read it, and missed its importance. (For your convenience, I am pasting in the full transcript of his speech below.) Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don't think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946.
In this speech, Putin abruptly changed the rules of the game. Previously, the game of international politics was played as follows: politicians made public pronouncements, for the sake of maintaining a pleasant fiction of national sovereignty, but they were strictly for show and had nothing to do with the substance of international politics; in the meantime, they engaged in secret back-room negotiations, in which the actual deals were hammered out. Previously, Putin tried to play this game, expecting only that Russia be treated as an equal. But these hopes have been dashed, and at this conference he declared the game to be over, explicitly violating Western taboo by speaking directly to the people over the heads of elite clans and political leaders.

The Russian blogger chipstone summarized the most salient points from Putin speech as follows:

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Peak Empire, Take Two

[Many thanks to Gary for putting this update together.]

Based on the lessons of history, all empires collapse eventually; thus, the probability that the US empire will collapse can be set at 100% with a great deal of confidence. The question is, When? (Everyone keeps asking that annoying question.)

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

How to start a war and lose an empire

[Auf Deutsch] [En français] [日本語訳] [In italiano] [По-русски]

A year and a half I wrote an essay on how the US chooses to view Russia, titled The Image of the Enemy. I was living in Russia at the time, and, after observing the American anti-Russian rhetoric and the Russian reaction to it, I made some observations that seemed important at the time. It turns out that I managed to spot an important trend, but given the quick pace of developments since then, these observations are now woefully out of date, and so here is an update.

Monday, October 20, 2014

Unspeller World Edition

Hello, world! The World Edition is complete and CreateSpace is ready to take your orders. It is not very different from the North American edition, because, you see, it doesn't have to be. Why that is requires quite a bit of explanation; after all, English can sound so different.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Unspeller exercises

https://www.createspace.com/5055383
The 12 exercises, one for each of the 12 lessons in the Unspeller book, are now available as a free download, and also as a print-on-demand book. Thanks to Pleas Lucian Kavanaugh of Atenas, Costa Rica, for suggesting it. This document is designed for easy inkjet or laser printing, in color or black and white.

Also, since many of the people who have ordered Unspeller should have by now received it, and perhaps even given it a try, I want to take this opportunity to start an open thread devoted to your experiences with it, good, bad or confusing. Your experiences in learning and in teaching Unspell are particularly interesting. And, of course, any suggestions for how the book can be improved are always welcome.

Friday, October 10, 2014

Ebola and the Five Stages of Collapse

At the moment, the Ebola virus is ravaging three countries—Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone—where it is doubling every few weeks, but singular cases and clusters of them are cropping up in dense population centers across the world. An entirely separate Ebola outbreak in the Congo appears to be contained, but illustrates an important point: even if the current outbreak (to which some are already referring as a pandemic) is brought under control, continuing deforestation and natural habitat destruction in the areas where the fruit bats that carry the virus live make future outbreaks quite likely.

Thursday, October 02, 2014

An important announcement

[Update: the new book is now in its second printing, with a few typos fixed.]

As some of you may have noticed, I didn't crank out my usual weekly essay this week. I didn't even edit and run a guest post. This is not, I assure you, due to a shortage of interesting topics. I could have written on any of the following ones:

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

America—the Grim Truth

[This is an old reader favorite. Guest post by Anonymous. It's a bit embarrassing really; this is the all-time most popular post on this blog, and I didn't even write it! It's something for you to ponder while this blog is on hiatus because I am out at sea... sailing away...]

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world—by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Understanding Organizational Stupidity


Shintaro Kago
[Another re-run. Regularly scheduled blogging will resume once I've sailed far enough down the coast. Homework assignment: read this article and apply the concepts within it to the Obama administration's policies on Ukraine and Syria.]

Is it morning in America again, or is the bubble that is the American economy about to pop (again), this time perhaps tipping it into full-blown collapse in five stages with symphonic accompaniment and fireworks? A country blowing itself up is quite a sight to behold, and it makes us wonder about lots of things. For instance, it makes us wonder whether the people who are doing the blowing up happen to be criminals. (Sure, they may be in a manner of speaking—as a moral judgment passed on the powerful by the powerless—but since none of them are likely to see the inside of a jail cell or even a courtroom any time soon, the point is moot. Let's be sure to hunt them down once they try to run and hide, though.) But at a much more basic and fundamental level, a better question to ask is this one:

Thursday, September 11, 2014

9/11 After 13 years

[An excellent article by Paul Craig Roberts. In case you didn't know, Amerigo Vespucci was a big fat liar. And so are the leaders of the country that stole his name.]

The tragedy of September 11, 2001, goes far beyond the deaths of those who died in the towers and the deaths of firefighters and first responders who succumbed to illnesses caused by inhalation of toxic dust. For thirteen years a new generation of Americans has been born into the 9/11 myth that has been used to create the American warfare/police state.

The corrupt Bush and Obama regimes used 9/11 to kill, maim, dispossess and displace millions of Muslims in seven countries, none of whom had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11.

Tuesday, September 09, 2014

The Madness of President Putin

Juliette Bates
[This is a re-run. I originally published this article on February 18th of this year, and everything I said in it still stands.]

[In italiano. Grazie, Massimiliano!]
[日本語訳。大谷正幸、ありがとうございます。]

[Many thanks to Max who helped put this together.]

Of all the various interpretations Western leaders and commentators have offered for why the president of the Russian Federation has responded the way he has to the events in Ukraine over the course of February and March of 2014—in refusing to acquiesce to the installation of a neo-fascist regime in Kiev, and in upholding the right of Crimea to self-determination—the most striking and illuminating interpretation is that he has gone mad. Striking and illuminating, that is, something in the West itself.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

How can you tell whether Russia has invaded Ukraine?

[Auf Deutsch] [По-русски] [En français]

Last Thursday the Ukrainian government, echoed by NATO spokesmen, declared that the the Russian military is now operating within Ukraine's borders. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't; what do you know? They said the same thing before, most recently on August 13, and then on August 17, each time with either no evidence or fake evidence. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

You be the judge. I put together this helpful list of top ten telltale signs that will allow you to determine whether indeed Russia invaded Ukraine last Thursday, or whether Thursday's announcement is yet another confabulation. (Credit to Roman Kretsul).

Because if Russia invaded on Thursday morning, this is what the situation on the ground would look like by Saturday afternoon.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Propaganda and the lack thereof

With regard to the goings-on in Ukraine, I have heard quite a few European and American voices piping in, saying that, yes, Washington and Kiev are fabricating an entirely fictional version of events for propaganda purposes, but then so are the Russians. They appear to assume that if their corporate media is infested with mendacious, incompetent buffoons who are only too happy to repeat the party line, then the Russians must be same or worse.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Collapse Cafe Part II

Topics include supply chain cross-contagion, population decline, near-term human extinction, and community organizing. Click here for audio.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

It's the Saudis, Stupid!

[Just nine days after I pointed out that Obama's latest “humanitarian” bombing puts American lives in danger, we have the video of the journalist James Foley's beheading at the hands of Daash, a.k.a. Islamic Caliphate, a.k.a. ISIS/ISIL. Well, that didn't take long! But there is more to the story: what stands behind this event, and others, such as 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Benghazi massacre and numerous other acts of terror is none other than America's best friend, the House of Saud. Here is a post by my friend Idris to explain this vital connection.]

The recent rise of the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, along with its bedfellow Jahbat Al-Nusra (JN) is being viewed with alarm worldwide. It is the latest in a series of problems related to Islamic extremism for which Al Qaeda is the poster child. From Somalia to Yemen to Nigeria to the Levant to Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Chechnya to Xinjiang, China and even raising its head among the populations of western countries, both Muslim and non-Muslim are facing the ravages of the Salafi/Takfiri Nexus of Jihad.

Monday, August 25, 2014

Collapse Cafe Part I

Topics include the situation around Ukraine, the geopolitical blundering of the United States, and how you too can destroy your economy by imposing unilateral sanctions. Click here for audio.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

The thick façade of civilization

Michael Jaecks
[This is a guest post by Capt. Ray Jason. To read more of his essays, please visit his blog. (And to read more of mine, please buy the book I just published.)]

Most of the sky was clear and starry, but ten miles out to sea there was a cluster of clouds filled with lightning. I was anchored peacefully behind a low island that afforded me a perfect view of this dramatic spectacle. Sitting on the foredeck with my back against the mast, I sipped some hot sake and marveled at this exquisite display. Each burst of sky fire was contained within an individual cloud. Some would erupt in amber-colored brightness and others would shimmer in soft silver or lavender. The almost Japanese lantern quality of the clouds sparked a memory within me that I struggled to recall. A second cup of sake unlocked the remembrance vault, and the incident drifted back. It was a good one.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Permission to Steal Everything

There is a convoy of 280 gleaming white trucks moving through Russia toward Ukraine loaded with humanitarian aid for the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk. This isn't much, considering that well over a million people have been cut off from food, water, electricity and (soon) heat because of indiscriminate artillery bombardment by the Ukrainian military. But it's a start. But it seems like a rocky start; first, NATO's mouthpiece Rasmussen tries to characterize this humanitarian mission as a clandestine invasion. Then the Ukrainians start imposing various conditions. Let's consider these separately.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Obama risks American lives to save the devil worshipers

If you've been paying attention to the news, the US is bombing Iraq again, this time to avert a humanitarian crisis: a group of Yezedis is stranded on top of a mountain, driven there by those Daashing lads from the Islamic State (the Arabic name for them is “Daash”).

Now, if your reaction on hearing these news was “Who the heck are the Yezedis?” then you are in good company. This is a very obscure, fairly small, incredibly ancient cult, and few people have heard of them. I have, and so my reaction was “Oh no, they are killing the devil worshipers!”

Just Published: Societies that Collapse

https://www.createspace.com/4942819
CLICK TO ORDER

Dear Readers,

I am happy to announce that the essays I have written over the past three years are now available for purchase worldwide in book form. Of course, you can read these essays right on this blog, but I hope that having them all together in a single plump little book will make the experience more enjoyable. Presenting these essays as a single collection and juxtaposing the deadly serious with the downright whimsical makes difficult subjects a little bit lighter.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, I'd like to point out that it is your purchases of my books—nothing else—that make it economically possible for me to continue writing and for you to continue reading what I write.

Friday, August 08, 2014

German Stunner: “West is on the Wrong Path”

Gabor Steingart, the the publisher of Germany’s leading financial newspaper Handelsblatt, just let loose with an editorial directly challenging Washington's idiotic anti-Russian policies.

The appearance of this document is very timely: just yesterday Russia unleashed the first round of counter-sanctions, banning the import of foodstuffs from the US and the EU. These counter-sanctions are cleverly designed to cause pain in proportion to the level of anti-Russian activity of the country in question; thus, the three Baltic countries, which are virulently anti-Russian in spite of having large Russian populations and surviving largely through trade with Russia, face staggering losses, followed by equally anti-Russian Poland, followed by the rest of the EU, including poor Greece, which is friendly to Russia and should be considered collateral damage. The greatest beneficiaries of these sanctions are all those countries that opposed (11) or abstained (58) when the UN voted to condemn Russia's annexation of Crimea: they get to leapfrog over EU and US economically by exporting foodstuffs to Russia. Russia's consumers and Russia's agricultural sector are also among the winners: Russians will eat healthier food, with no GMO contamination, while profits that used to flow to the US and the EU will now be invested in domestic agriculture, making Russia more self-sufficient in food and aiding in the development of rural districts. Another clever element to these sanctions is that farmers tend to be politically vocal and influential. I see tractors clogging the streets of Europe's capitals and dumptruck-loads of manure decorating the steps of government buildings before too long.

As to his diagnosis of Obama's true motivation, I think he has it wrong. It's not all about pleasing the Tea Party. They, and American voters in general, are irrelevant, it makes no difference who gets elected, and Obama's policies are not Obama's. There is a deeper reason why the oligarchs who own and operate the country formerly known as America are currently attempting to enlarge every problem they see, be it stoking civil war in Ukraine or provoking ISIS into attacking Americans: they are desperate to avoid a scenario where the US collapses on its own, with no external enemy to blame. Not only would it be just too humiliating, but also the population, suddenly brought out of its stupor, might turn on those actually responsible rather than helplessly blame some foreign scapegoat. Putin has to fit the bill, reality be damned.

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Some facts on flight MH17

Finally, here are some facts. In spite of most of the “evidence” offered by the Ukrainians or the US being either a forgery or missing altogether, it's looking like the Ukrainian military shot down the plane in a coordinated attack. The black box recordings, the air traffic control records, the satellite surveillance photos—where are they? They have been hidden away. Why? Because they don't support the narrative that “it's all Putin's fault”?

Treeware

As some of you pointed out, there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance caused by the mismatch between the e-book format and the post-industrial subject matter, and so, by popular demand, Communities that Abide is now available in paper form. It should pop up on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, etc., in a few days and you can order it directly from the printer in the meantime. Enjoy!

Monday, August 04, 2014

Laughter can heal

Duarte Vitória
[Update: Makeda's playful take on a very serious ethical failing has elicited a surprising number of not-so-clueful comments. Many readers completely missed the point. Here is the point: “America has covertly adopted the crudest, cruelest, stupidest and most profligate form of eugenics conceivable: sterilizing and killing the poor while lavishing resources on unnaturally breeding the rich. When the rich cannot be bred by scientific means such as IVF, we are expected to suspend our disbelief and pretend that they can, celebrating every obviously stolen surrogate-born or donor-egg baby as if it were a scientific miracle.” Touché, anyone?]

[Another guest post by Makeda. Before you submit comments criticizing me for writing this, please know that I just love being mistaken for a young black woman-doctor, even if that makes you look silly.]

I recently caught myself snapping at a white-haired man who simply said hello to me. The context was a leftist gathering of sorts. I find such men, greying male leftists, unusually creepy. Perhaps I've been traumatized by men my father’s age making passes at me in the synagogue, or the surprising prevalence of borderline pedophilic academics who get caught sleeping with their students, but I’ve come to suspect that all old leftist men are acting politically involved only to try to pick up younger women.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Saving Face

The Americans are finding out the hard way that a fact-free zone is not a comfortable place to inhabit. The initial knee-jerk allegations, voiced by Obama, by the screechy UN representative Samantha Power, by John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and any number of talking heads, were that the downing of flight MH17 was all Putin's fault. These were swiftly followed by a complete and utter lack of official evidence of any Russian involvement but lots of strange, unexplained coincidences pointing to Ukrainian and American involvement. These were, in turn, followed by an uncharacteristically frank admission from US intelligence that there is no proof of Russian involvement. The newly installed Ukrainian oligarch-turned-president Poroshenko (code-name “Piglet”) switched from claiming that he had proof of Russian complicity to being very very quiet. Incompetently concocted fake “evidence” of this and that continues to appear on social media sites, only to be swiftly disproved. Once disproved, the fake evidence vanishes, only to be replaced by more of the same. The latest fake is of Russian artillery bombardment from across the border. All of this has added up to quite an awkward situation for the Americans. Barefaced lying may be fun and profitable, but it does not provide a solid foundation for foreign policy. Nobody wants to go down in history for blowing up the world over some fake Youtube videos.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Fact-Free Zone

The fog of war that has been hovering over eastern Ukraine has now spread to the shores of the Potomac, and from there has inundated every pore of western body politic. The party line is that pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine have shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17, using a surface-to-air missile provided by Russia, with Russia's support and complicity. The response is to push for tougher sanctions against Russian companies and Mr. Putin's entourage. None of this is based on fact. To start with, it isn't known that MH-17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile; it could have been an air-to-air missile, a bomb on board, a mechanical failure, or the same (or different) mysterious force that brought down MH-370 earlier this year. Mysteries abound, and yet western media knows it's Mr. Putin's fault.

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Education Delusion

Hermann Nitsch
[Guest post by Makeda.]

Recently I have run across a number of articles in American newspapers which emphasize the importance of higher education and reassure us that there is no crisis with the way it is being financed. The fact that such articles are written by PhDs speaks to some of the unfortunate aspects of the problem. I am probably being too kind in assuming that the authors of these articles are deluded; I could just as easily accuse them of being high-ups in a massive Ponzi scheme.

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

What if it all becomes obvious enough?


[An excellent submission from a reader. The topic is Ukraine, but the principle applies wherever emperors parade about naked.]

What if Putin, being a strategic thinker that he is in addition to being a master in judo, has an intention to make not just eastern Ukraine but the whole Ukraine a failed-state-showcase of what happens when the US, Nato, EU, and the IMF causes havoc in eastern Europe. Maybe he is giving a lesson to Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc. and especially his fellow Russians what happens when the US supports the rabid fascists in their region.

Village Medicine

[By popular demand, I am running this entire essay in its entirety.]

I am a family physician in Canada with an interest in what the future of medicine in Western societies might look like. I don’t subscribe to the mainstream narrative of ever more technically exotic and complex medicine, such as nanosurgery, individualized genetic medicine and growing replacement body parts in the lab. I think it is more likely that as we move past peak energy production to a world in which energy and resources are scarcer, society will de-complexify and medicine will follow the same overall trajectory.

I chose the title of this essay with some care. Initially I was going to call it “post-collapse medicine” but that brings to mind images of biker gangs roaming a post-nuclear wasteland and that wasn’t really the tone I wanted to set. Then I thought about “kitchen table medicine,” but this essay goes into the subject in rather more depth than that. So finally I settled on “village medicine” because I wanted to describe 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.

Health warning: you should seek the best available medical care at all times. This means that, generally speaking, where allopathic (conventional) medicine is available, you should use it. The tools and techniques described in this essay are only to be used in scenarios where conventional Western medicine is unavailable.

I can’t cover the whole of village medicine in this short chapter, so I’m going to refer to a some texts which are freely available for download from the Internet, and comment on the following areas which are likely to be particularly important or useful:
  • Keeping healthy
  • Stockpiling medications
  • Insulin-dependent diabetics
  • Immunization
  • Psychological medicine
  • Herbal medicines (legal and illegal)
  • Surgery
  • Making difficult choices  

Keeping healthy

The way many Westerners believe they can keep healthy is by visiting their physician once a year for an annual physical, during which the physician examines them from head to toe, orders for bloodwork and other tests, prescribes medication to keep them healthy and generally tunes them up like a car engine. This model of healthcare is promoted by medical boards and colleges, medical associations, guideline writers, medical advocacy groups such as diabetes associations and pharmaceutical companies. But it is very expensive and inefficient, and of questionable value in keeping people healthy. From my personal observations as a family physician, the patients who show up at my office regularly tend to be the least healthy, while the patients who remain healthy well into their 80s and 90s are seen rarely, if at all, and are usually on minimal or no medication.

The main problem with the “doctor knows best” narrative is that it places the responsibility for staying healthy on the physician rather than the patient. This type of health care is a luxury we can barely afford even in today’s affluent, technologically advanced society, and it will not be available in a post-peak village community. Maintaining your health in the future will probably come down to just this:

Look in the mirror. Are you obese? Are you undernourished? Do you smoke? Do you drink to excess? Do you engage in risky behavior?

People know these things for themselves without needing a physician or expensive tests to tell them. Nor should they need expert help in providing themselves with clean drinking water, sanitary human waste disposal, adequate shelter and warmth, and in avoiding preventable accidents (for example, gun, fire/stove and horse/animal safety). These are probably all the preventive health care arrangements which are will be needed and, coincidentally, the only ones likely to be available.

There are numerous books available on keeping healthy—so many that it is impossible to list them all—but most of what they have to say is common sense. Eat fresh food, not too much, mostly vegetables, take regular physical exercise and don't spend too much time worrying about your health.

Stockpiling medications

Like beans, rice and ammunition, it makes sense to stockpile important medications during good times for use during bad times. This section is intended to give you some guidance on shelf lives of medications and on what you can stockpile and what you can't.

Most medications have an expiration date stamped on them. The first and most important thing to understand is that this expiration date bears little if any relationship to the length of the medication's effectiveness. It has more to do with limiting the manufacturer's liability and with maintaining stock turnover and profits by unnecessarily replacing older medications with newer ones. I am going to explain expiration dates in more detail below, but here are some important general principles:
Dry solid medications in pill, capsule or powder form have a very long life if stored in a cool, dark, dry place (like rice and beans). Many of them will outlive you.
Wet medications (solutions or suspensions) decay much more rapidly, and in this case the manufacturer's expiration date really is a useful guide.
If you need to store children's medications which are usually in syrup or suspension form, ask the pharmacist to give you the dry powder and say that you will add the water yourself (normally, the pharmacist adds the water just before dispensing).
Old medications do not decay into something dangerous: they just decay into something less effective.
For several reasons, there is little point in diabetics trying to store insulin.

These are the basics. Here are the details:

The Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP) is a secretive US Government program which was set up to conduct research into whether pharmaceuticals which have passed their expiration date are safe and/or effective to use. Conspiracy theories aside, here is an example of an actual, non-theoretical conspiracy by certain self-interested parties to keep important information from the general public. The secrecy surrounding this program is illustrated by the following notice about SLEP which is posted on the US Army Medical Department website:

As a reminder, all testing and extension data provided to the Shelf Life Extension Program (SLEP) by the Food and Drug Administration is considered For Official Use Only and cannot be shared with anyone outside the user's organization. SLEP Administrators have fielded several calls recently from individuals wanting to share this information with local, civilian counterparts. That is not permissible, as it is not only a violation of the terms agreed to by the FDA but also a violation of the Memorandum of Agreement each participant organization signs prior to entering the SLEP program. SLEP website accounts of violators will immediately be terminated and inventories may be eliminated from the program, pending notification of the parent organization. Additionally, non-SLEP organizations that use SLEP information are in violation of Federal law that governs misbranded pharmaceuticals. Questions on this topic may be addressed to SLEP Administrators through the website.
SLEP Admin

When I discovered this I became curious about it. Why would the government apply such draconian penalties to disseminating what appears to be harmless information? After all, national defence and security are not threatened, government revenue is not affected, and if the research shows that certain pharmaceuticals are safe past their official expiration dates, why should this information not be allowed to enter the public domain? So I did a little reading around it and came up with the following explanation, which is part evidence and part hypothesis.

In 1985 the US government became concerned about the cost of replacing expired pharmaceuticals which had been stockpiled for civilian emergency and/or military purposes. The replacement costs in 1986 totalled $2.5 million (a large sum of money 26 years ago). Discussions took place as to how these costs might be reduced, and one suggestion was to test the products to see if they were still safe and effective to use, and if they were, to keep them instead of replacing them. Accordingly, in 1985-1986 the SLEP program was born.

However, savings and loss of profits are opposite sides of the same coin. The government was happy to save $2.5 million, but the pharmaceutical industry was no doubt unhappy to be losing the same amount in sales. The government needed the cooperation of the pharmaceutical industry to conduct the testing on the expired pharmaceuticals, and the pharmaceutical industry needed the cooperation of the government to ensure that the resulting information was restricted to as few organizations as possible, preferably only the medical procurement part of military. The last thing the pharmaceutical industry wanted was for the information to be released to, for example, civilian hospitals and pharmacies, and for them not to replace their pharmaceutical stockpiles, because not throwing away perfectly good medications would hurt their profits.

Almost certainly, there then followed several weeks or months of backroom horse-trading and saber-rattling between the government and the pharmaceutical industry, until the following deal was hammered out. The pharmaceutical industry would cooperate with the SLEP program provided the data was restricted to pharmaceutical companies and government departments. The government would enforce the restrictions by making it an offence under Federal law to disclose SLEP data to any unauthorized organization. That is the situation as it exists today.

Currently, the SLEP data exists as a database which is continually updated as new information becomes available. Access is restricted as per above, but occasionally small amounts of it leak out in the form of research papers published in scientific journals. Overall, the available evidence suggests, as stated at the start of this chapter, that most solid pharmaceuticals (capsules and tablets) are safe and effective to use long after their official expiration date provided they have been stored in cool, dark and dry conditions. The same cannot necessarily be said of liquids or of pharmaceuticals which have been stored in sub-optimal conditions. The maximum length of time for which pharmaceuticals can be kept is uncertain, but I understand that some pharmaceuticals which have been kept from the start of the SLEP program in 1986 may still be effective.

In terms of SLEP access restrictions, I have not heard of Federal law being used to enforce them, and think that it is unlikely to be used except in case of very gross violations. The US Government doesn’t really care who has access to the SLEP data, and the pharmaceutical companies probably don’t really care either as long as it doesn’t hurt their profits.

Insulin-dependent diabetics

This brings me to the special case of insulin, which Type 1 (insulin-dependent) diabetics need in order to stay alive. Without it, they will slip into a coma and die within days or weeks. Insulin, like vaccines (see below), can only be manufactured in a specialized laboratory backed by the resources of a complex technological society. If the complex technological society goes away, so will the insulin.

Should diabetics therefore stockpile insulin in the event of a societal collapse? There are several problems with this. First, the vast majority of insulin is sold in liquid form. Liquids, as explained above, decay relatively quickly even under optimal storage conditions. Second, it has to be kept refrigerated. In the refrigerator, a bottle of insulin may last for up to 18 months depending on its expiration date; at room temperature it will decay much more quickly. Third, there are practical limits to the amount of insulin that can be stockpiled. Even if it were possible to store insulin for long periods (see below) it would not be practical to accumulate and store a lifetime's worth of insulin. If you are a 20-year-old Type 1 diabetic you might need enough insulin to keep you alive for the next 60 years.

It is possible to get insulin in dry form, although I have never encountered it in my medical practice. It is used as a reagent in some laboratory processes and can be used by diabetics as a dry powder inhaler as an alternative to insulin injections. If you find a way to obtain it, it might be possible to store it for longer periods in dry powder form than in the more usual aqueous solution or suspension form. However, this still would not overcome the other difficulties mentioned above.

Regrettably, therefore, I have come to the conclusion that it not worthwhile for insulin dependent diabetics to attempt to prepare for a societal collapse. It is prudent to have extra insulin in stock for short term emergencies such as floods, hurricanes, fuel shortages, heavy snowfalls or localized civil disorder, when you might be cut off from your normal sources of supply for a few days or weeks. But long term, we have to accept that in a societal collapse, not everyone can be saved, and the default position for most of humanity's existence has been that Type 1 diabetics do not survive.

Immunization

Every schoolchild knows how immunization started, but in case you’ve forgotten I’ll remind you. In the 1790s in England, Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids often caught cowpox from the cows they milked, but rarely caught smallpox. Working on the theory that catching cowpox protected against smallpox, he inoculated many patients with the cowpox virus with good results. The two viruses are similar, so once the body has come into contact with the cowpox virus, it produces antibodies which are also effective against the smallpox virus. Cowpox is a mild disease, while smallpox is a much more serious disease with a high fatality rate, so it is worth while catching cowpox in order to be protected against smallpox. Inoculation with cowpox was simple: Jenner just took pus from cowpox blisters and scraped them onto the skin of uninfected patients.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Here is how a modern vaccine like the polio vaccine is made. Three wild virulent strains of polio are grown on monkey kidney tissue culture and then inactivated with formalin. Very careful quality control has to be maintained during all the steps of this process to ensure that no unwanted viruses or bacteria are grown on the tissue culture, that all the virus particles are then inactivated to avoid accidentally spreading the real disease while vaccinating, and that the vaccines are highly purified remove all unwanted chemicals and virus components to avoid causing reactions. There must be an unbroken chain of refrigerated transport and storage every step of the way from the manufacturing facility to the end user. Sterile syringes and needles are needed to administer the vaccine.

These processes can only be undertaken in the context of an advanced technological society with access to highly specialized tools and reagents and highly trained and specialized personnel. You cannot replicate any of this in your kitchen or workshop, just like you can’t make a microchip. Jenner was lucky to stumble across a “Goldilocks” virus: cowpox is not too mild, not too virulent and closely related to the target disease. His method cannot be replicated for any other disease because there isn’t an equivalent “cow-polio” or “cow-measles” virus which would produce the desired antibodies.

The bottom line is that if advanced technological society goes away, vaccines will go away too. They are all made by similar high-tech processes. Many more people will die of preventable diseases than do at present. The reason why I’ve gone into this in some detail is not because I wish to be pessimistic or defeatist, but because I feel it is important to make a realistic assessment of what can and can’t be done, and to act accordingly. The best that can be done is to pay attention to infection control and hygiene, and to get everyone vaccinated while the stocks last.

Psychological medicine

The factors which are likely to cause the most serious and widespread illness and mortality going forward are not physical but psychological. We had a sneak preview of what to expect during the Soviet collapse of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990 Russia, along with some other former Soviet republics, experienced a sharp spike in many causes mortality and a decline in the birth rate which, coupled with mass emigration, resulted in an overall decline of the population. It went on for several years. The reasons for it are not entirely clear, but many of the deaths appear to have been alcohol-related or suicides, pointing to the important role played by psychological stress caused by social disruption, high unemployment and the “shock therapy” of widespread and often criminal privatization.

A large proportion of the population of North America (probably around 15-25%, although precise figures are unavailable) takes antidepressants, anti-anxiety and/or sleeping medications—and this is during the supposed “good times”! We can expect to see this figure increase in the coming years as more people become subjected to acute psychological stress. What causes the psychological stress? There isn’t a simple correlation between psychological stress and living standards. For example, people in present-day “poor but happy” countries such as Costa Rica, with a much lower material standard of living than we do, enjoy happy, fulfilling, purposeful lives. It’s difficult to tell whether people today are generally happier than people in the past, but judging by our antidepressant and tranquillizer intake, this seems unlikely. The main factor seems to be the direction of change in living standards rather than the absolute level. People don’t seem to like change, especially change for the worse, and especially when they are unprepared for it. If this is the case, then if we are psychologically prepared for a fall in living standards, we may respond better if and when it comes.

Right now, we are not even remotely prepared for it. We don’t even have a dialogue about it in our political or academic institutions or in the media. The mainstream narrative is that every day, in every way, things will continue to get better and better, and economic growth will continue forever. If those things do not appear to be happening any more, we either manipulate the statistics so that we can continue to tell ourselves that they are happening, or we tell ourselves that we are experiencing a temporary setback, a mere speed bump on the road to ever greater prosperity.

The village healer’s toolkit is therefore going to need some tools to relieve psychological pain, whether through counselling (perhaps working alongside a full-time counsellor) or by using herbal medicines.

Herbal medicines

My heart sinks when I open a herbal medicine textbook and read the words “Herb X was believed by aboriginal people to be a cure for illnesses A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J.” I know immediately that the author of the book has made no attempt to fact-check his material—he has just copied it from another source—and it is very unlikely to be true because, generally speaking, one drug (whether herbal or conventional) doesn’t cure multiple diseases. Please don’t interpret this as disrespect for aboriginal traditional knowledge. I believe we have a lot to learn from First Nations peoples. I just think that traditional knowledge, including traditional knowledge of herbal medicines, should be a starting point rather than an end point. We should certainly ask “What did aboriginal peoples use to treat this condition?” but we should then also ask “Does it actually work?”

Modern pharmaceuticals are produced using complex processes which cannot be replicated outside a specialized laboratory (see Immunization, above). If modern technological society goes away, then modern pharmaceuticals will probably also go away, and we will be forced to rely on herbal medicines as in times past. I have looked into peer reviewed research papers into the effectiveness of herbal medicines which have been published in mainstream scientific journals and have come up with the following three short lists, which are not intended to be exhaustive:
  • Herbal medicines which probably work
  • Herbal medicines which probably don’t work
  • Herbal medicines which definitely work but are illegal to produce without a government license

A few general words about herbal medicines: they are plant extracts which may contain tens to hundreds of active and inactive substances. Their potency is generally milder and more variable than pharmaceuticals because much depends on the genetic makeup of the plant, the way the plant was grown and the way the extract was obtained. In addition, there may be genetic, environmental and psychological factors in the patient which make some patients more responsive than others to some herbal medicines—but this is also the case with pharmaceuticals. Because there is less funding for research into herbal medicines than pharmaceuticals, the research tends to involve smaller numbers of patients, be less rigorously conducted and the results are less reliable. With those caveats out of the way, here are the lists:

Herbal medicines which probably work
Harpagophytum Procumbens (Devil's Claw) for pain relief
Salix Alba (White Willow Bark) for pain relief
Capsicum Frutescens (Cayenne) for pain relief
Berberine for Type 2 diabetes
Ipomoea batatas for Type 2 diabetes
Silybum marianum for Type 2 diabetes
Trigonella foenum-graecum for Type 2 diabetes
Kava for anxiety
St. John's wort for depression
Valerian for insomnia
Echinacea for common cold symptoms
Black cohosh for menopausal vasomotor symptoms
Ginseng for angina pectoris and erectile dysfunction
Garlic for hypertension
Tea tree oil for acne

Herbal medicines which probably don’t work
Colloidal silver for ulcers and wound dressings
Glucosamine for osteoarthritis
Cinnamomum cassia for Type 2 diabetes
Saw palmetto for benign prostatic hyperplasia

Herbal medicines which definitely work but are illegal to produce without a Government licence

I have devoted extra space to this category of herbal medicines because they are the most potent and effective herbal medicines and are therefore the most restricted. After all, there would be no point in restricting a placebo. Nothing in this chapter is intended to encourage people to break the law or to use herbal medicines for recreational purposes. (On the other hand, all evidence points to the fact that nothing will stop them either.) These herbal medicines which have been used for thousands of years, and have only been made illegal in the comparatively recent past—the last century or so. They include pure alcohol (ethanol), opium and marijuana.

Governments tend to be quick at making restrictive laws but not so good at repealing them once they are no longer appropriate. For example, when the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, most of the Roman laws remained theoretically in effect even though there weren't any Roman officials left around to either enforce or repeal them (the Visigoths saw to that). What this means for our society is that as our energy supply contracts and our society spontaneously decomplexifies, a large number of laws will remain on the statute books but will be enforced with decreasing frequency. Some may never be formally repealed. A non-contentious example of this might be the common prohibition on drying clothes on clothes lines. People have been doing this ever since they started wearing clothes about 100,000 years ago, but in modern industrial society there are tens of thousands of local jurisdictions which have banned the use of clothes lines for esthetic reasons. If there is a widespread and prolonged electric grid outage, people will very quickly go back to using clothes lines, but the silly laws will remain on the statute books for many years, perhaps forever, because people will have more urgent matters to deal with than repealing irrelevant legislation. We can expect to see a similar situation arising with regard to some herbal medicines which are currently illegal. Practitioners of herbal medicine should therefore use their judgment to decide whether and when to use this category of herbal preparations.

Opium

Opium has been used for pain relief for millennia. The poppy plant was cultivated in ancient Persia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. The main active ingredient in opium is morphine, which was first isolated in 1804. Morphine is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. It became a controlled substance in the US in 1914.

Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum). There are several varieties of poppy but only this variety produces significant amounts of opium. Seeds can be bought by mail order from specialist suppliers, from garden centres (as ornamental poppies) or shaken out of dried poppies from a craft store. Once the poppy plants have grown and flowered, the opium is harvested by making vertical cuts in the immature seed heads. A brown resin oozes out and can be scraped off after a few hours. The opium can be smoked, eaten, drunk as tea or given in suppository form.

Opioids today are widely abused by addicts and traded on the black market. They include morphine, diamorphine (heroin), oxycodone and hydromorphone (Dilaudid). All are chemically related to opium. So, in a societal collapse, what will happen to the addicts? Nobody knows for sure, but my guess is that some of them will be forced to go without for periods of time, but that the problem of opioid addiction will not disappear, since no previous societal collapse has produced such a result.

In order to survive as an opioid addict, you need a society which is willing to support you and your habit. Some opioid addicts hold down jobs and contribute to society; most don't, and depend on welfare payments and doctors handing out free prescriptions. If the welfare payments and free prescriptions go away, the opioid addiction will not spontaneously vanish with them, and some other way will be found to continue feeding the habit. Withdrawal symptoms from opioids can be quite uncomfortable uncomfortable but are rarely dangerous—rather like having flu for two or three weeks—but few addicts will quit voluntarily. While most addicts will not have the skill or patience to cultivate their own opium poppy crops, the vast underground economy which invariably materializes in the course of a societal collapse will no doubt provide it for them.

[Further reading: Opium for the Masses by Jim Hogshire]

Marijuana

In Canada, until the law was changed recently, licensed medicinal uses of marijuana included severe arthritis, HIV/AIDS, terminal cancer, spinal cord disease and multiple sclerosis. The medical licensing requirements for marijuana vary from one country to another.

Hemp fibre has been used to make ropes and clothing for thousands of years. The first recorded evidence of medical marijuana use appeared over 4,700 years ago in the pharmacopoeia of Shen Nung, one of the fathers of Chinese medicine. In the 1800s marijuana preparations were widely used in many proprietory medicines. In the early part of the 20th century, legislation was passed in many countries making the use of marijuana illegal, even for medicinal purposes. This roughly coincided with similar prohibitions on the use of alcohol in some jurisdictions, particularly the United States. The alcohol prohibition laws were lifted after a relatively short time; the marijuana prohibition laws generally remain in place.

The growing and harvesting of marijuana plants is quite simple—the plant is a hardy weed—although achieving superior potency is something of an art. The plant is thought to have originated in India. It thrives best in hot, dry climates but it can be grown in most places in the world. Contemporary books on marijuana growing tend to emphasize indoor growing under artificial light, but in a post-collapse scenario this would probably not be relevant as outdoor and greenhouse growing would be the only option, with the likelihood of prosecution growing increasingly low. The flowering tops of the female plant contain the highest concentrations of resin and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active ingredient.

[Further reading: The Cannabis Grow Bible by Greg Green is a 429 page volume which contains all you need to know. It is available at multiple places on the Internet.]

Ethanol

Useful for disinfection of skin and wounds by topical application. Historically, it has also been given orally to patients before painful procedures such as amputations. For example, during the Napoleonic wars, officers were given rum or brandy before an amputation, while enlisted men were given a piece of wood to bite down on. However, I really wouldn't recommend it for this purpose. It is unlikely to be effective for pain relief except in doses so high that it would endanger the patient's life. Vomiting and aspiration of vomit are significant side effects. A safer and more effective choice for pain relief would be opium.

The first recorded instance of distillation of alcohol was by Arabian alchemists around 700 AD, but distillation had probably been performed in Arabia and Egypt much earlier. Distillation was made subject to registration of stills and payment of taxes in the 1790s in the USA, and in most other jurisdictions at around the same time. Failure to comply with these requirements after this date constituted a criminal offence.

Construction and operation of an ethanol still is a traditional art practiced in many parts of the world. The basic principles are as follows: vegetable material such as potatoes, corn or fruit is fermented using yeast (the “mash”) and ethanol is produced as a byproduct of the fermentation process. In order to separate and purify the ethanol, the mash is heated to just above the boiling point of the ethanol, at 173.1°F or 78.37°C. The ethanol vapor rises into a tube, is cooled and turned back into a liquid by means of a condenser and drips down into a second container.

There is a widespread belief that drinking homemade liquor from illicit stills may lead to death or blindness from methanol poisoning. Examples of this can be found in the media (“Homemade liquor kills 48”, Associated Press, 8 July 2009), PubMed (“Serious methanol poisoning from home brewed alcohol”, Crit Care Resusc, March 2012) and popular fiction (“Invasion,” Foyle's War British TV detective drama, Series 4 Episode 1). Surprisingly, the idea that home distilled ethanol can cause widespread accidental methanol poisoning appears to be a myth. Home distilled liquor (variously called “hooch”, “moonshine” or “poteen” depending on the country) is produced using a fermentation process. In this process, traces of methanol are produced along with ethanol, but the quantity of methanol is generally too small to be harmful. Methanol also occurs naturally in trace quantities in beer and wine.

Methanol, also known as wood alcohol, is produced in industrial quantities by completely different techniques such as catalytic processes acting on coal or natural gas, or the destructive distillation of wood. It is not produced by fermentation. It is true that methanol is a potent neurotoxin and can cause death, blindness and other neurological effects. There are numerous case reports of methanol poisoning on PubMed and it is a serious public health problem in some parts of the world, particularly India and Indonesia. However, as far as I can establish, all cases of methanol poisoning have resulted from the deliberate adulteration of fermented liquor with industrial methanol. Ethanol produced for automobile fuel is often deliberately adulterated with methanol to discourage people from drinking it.

The only theoretical way in which you could get methanol poisoning from an ethanol still would be to save up and drink together the first few drops of distillate from multiple distillation batches. This contains the naturally occurring methanol mentioned above, but in a high concentration, because methanol is more volatile than ethanol and evaporates first. The first few drops from the distillation process should therefore always be discarded. A good technique is to bring the still up to the boiling point of methanol (148.5°F or 64.7°C) for a period of time, discard the distillate, then bring it up to 173.1°F or 78.37°C to distill ethanol.

There are many good books about small scale ethanol distillation available for free download on the internet, but one which I found particularly readable was Making Pure Corn Whiskey – A Professional Guide For Amateur and Micro Distillers by Ian Smiley. [For a quick and easy method, search for “Grandpa Orlov's Vodka Recipe.”]

Surgery

There are many different types of surgery which a village healer might be expected to perform, from minor surgery such as digging out thorns and splinters to major surgery such as amputation, appendectomy or Caesarean section. The former is within most people's comfort zone, the latter probably not so much. I am going to talk about amputation, not because you will be doing it often, but because it illustrates some important points about post-collapse village medicine.

When might you need to perform an amputation? Most people would probably think first about crush injuries, gunshot wounds and bomb blasts, and indeed, these are all situations when an amputation might be necessary. The average person would probably not immediately think of diabetes, and yet this very common disease will probably account for the largest number of amputations going forward into the next few decades of the Long Emergency.

Diabetes is the most common reason for lower limb amputation today. One third of all foot amputations are performed on diabetics with foot wounds or ulcers. The reason why so many diabetics need amputations is because high circulating blood sugar levels over many years cause damage to the interior of blood vessels, making them them narrower and less efficient at delivering blood and oxygen to where they are needed. As the condition progresses, the flow of blood and oxygen drops below critical levels, at which point the tissue dies.

Let's look at a few statistics (from American Diabetes Association) and try to project them into the future.
Percentage of the population with diabetes: 10%
Size of US population: 313 million
About 65,700 nontraumatic lower-limb amputations are performed in people with diabetes annually (180/day)

Therefore, the number of diabetic amputations per head of total population per year is 0.0002. This might seem a small number. But suppose you are a village healer looking after 500 people in fairly isolated conditions for 40 years. The number of diabetic amputations likely to be needed in your community during your working lifetime is four. But then the future years are unlikely to resemble the past years. If modern pharmaceuticals become unavailable, we will have a large number of untreated diabetics developing complications much faster than they would have previously. The numbers are difficult to estimate, but let's say that the number of amputations needed may increase five-fold. Then, instead of looking at just four amputations in a working lifetime, you may now be looking at 20 amputations—one every couple of years. Whatever the exact numbers may turn out to be, there will be a significant number of these procedures needed.

Ideally you will be able to refer your diabetics to a surgeon at a hospital who has the necessary expertise and materials to perform these procedures. If this is not possible due to lack of funds, lack of transport fuels, lack of available personnel or some other reason, there are only two options: the patient slowly dies as the dead tissue putrefies and leaks toxins and bacteria into the bloodstream, or you perform the amputation yourself. Here is a quick guide to the general principles of performing an amputation under austere conditions.

Try to make the patient as comfortable as possible. A glass of whiskey and a piece of wood to bite on are helpful, but we should be able to do better than this. A good dose of opium will not be as good as a modern general anesthetic but will be better than the brandy or the piece of wood. Give enough to relieve pain, but not so much as to suppress respiration (an important side effect). Strap the patient down securely, because most people react badly to having their limbs sawn off.

Choose the level at which to perform the amputation. The aim is to remove both dead and compromised tissue. The latter, although not dead, has a poor blood supply and is unlikely to heal. If you try to be too kind to the patient and perform too low an amputation, the stump may not heal, necessitating a re-amputation at a higher level. You need to cut back to healthy tissue.

Tell the patient what you are going to do, why you have to do it, and the risks of either undergoing, or not undergoing, the procedure. This is called “informed consent.” Not undergoing the procedure means almost certain death; undergoing the procedure still carries about a 25% risk of death (American Civil War statistics). If they do not give consent, do not operate.

Maintain conditions as close to sterile as you reasonably can. Wash your hands, the limb to be amputated and all surgical instruments in hot soapy water, then swab them with ethanol. Use sterile gloves. Use a bone saw, but if you don't have one, any fine-toothed saw will do. Make sure that it is both clean and sharp. You will also need a scalpel or a very sharp knife, some suture material (sterilized fishing line), a piece of tubing to act as a drain, and lots of clean towels.

Think about what end result you are trying to achieve. You want the end of the bone to be covered by a reasonably thick layer of skin, muscle and fatty tissue. You can't just cut the limb off square as though it were a piece of timber: you have to cut the bone an inch or so shorter than the surrounding tissue, smooth off the end so it doesn't have any sharp or jagged edges, then close the soft tissues over the top of it. Tie off bleeding blood vessels as you go.

Place a tube in the operation field as you close up to drain blood and infected materials away. You don't want them building up in the end of the stump because this will lead to infection. The tube will be removed in a few days once the wound has stopped oozing. Suture the soft tissues together over the end of the bone to make a rounded stump.

After the operation, change dressings regularly, watch for signs of infection (fever, redness or swelling around the operation site, drainage of pus). If any of these signs occur, start antibiotics if available.

This concludes the section on surgery. There are many other surgical procedures which may be needed in a post-collapse village medicine scenario. Cesarian sections and appendectomies, for example, are not too difficult to perform (not really any more difficult than an amputation) and may be equally life-saving. The description of amputation is intended to illustrate some important lessons about post-collapse community surgery including:

It is possible to do simple surgery successfully and humanely, even in the absence of a complex technologically based society If preventive medicine (e.g. drugs to control diabetes) goes away, then rescue medicine (e.g. amputation) is likely to be needed more often

Some types of surgery may be outside the comfort zone of both the person performing the surgery, and the patient, but if the patient is almost certainly going to die without it, then neither of you have much to lose by trying

Some herbal medicines (opium, ethanol) can be a great help and should be stockpiled well ahead of the time when they may be needed

Surgery: suggestions for further reading

These materials can mostly be downloaded free of charge from the Internet. I suggest you do this now, rather than waiting until later, because the Internet isn't going to be around forever and you need to have local copies available.
Where there is no doctor by David Werner
Where there is no dentist by Murray Dickson
Surgery for victims of war (International Committee of the Red Cross)
Surgical Care at the District Hospital (World Health Organization)
The Survival Medicine Handbook by Joseph Alton
Giving Birth In Place (American College of Nurse-Midwives)
The Occasional Vaginal Delivery by Katherine Miller

Making difficult choices

In today's society, most of the choices we make are fairly inconsequential. Should I buy an SUV or a Prius? Should I order chicken wings or a hamburger? Should I watch the news or the sports? None of these are life-or-death decisions.

In contrast, many of the choices we make in the future may be much more significant. I have given one example above: Should I allow an untrained person to amputate my gangrenous leg without a general anesthetic, or should I succumb to gangrene? Other possible choices may include: Should I submit to the authority of the local warlord, even though he wasn't elected, or should I die for my high principles? Should I encourage my children join the military in order to battle to the death for access to ever-dwindling fossil fuel resources, or should I prepare for life without fossil fuels? Should I kill other people in order to survive a bit longer, or should I sacrifice my own life so that others may live? There are no clear right or wrong answers to any of these: the answer is always “It depends.” These are the kind of choices which our ancestors had to face, and which we will no doubt have to face again. The era we are entering into has been called “the Age of Limits.” It might as well also be called “the Age of Difficult Choices.” Good luck.