roman meal

ROMAN MEAL

Don’t you just hate how you always have the perfect verbal retort after the fact?  Some douche gets in a great one liner and you sputter and stammer and go away in a huff.  Then as you are falling asleep that night, or showering the next morning, the perfect response suddenly pops into your head and you feel like a complete idiot for lack of timely delivery.  Well, that’s how I feel right about now.  All these years listening to Optimistic Ollie’s go on and on about the Stair Step Collapse and all I can do is get pissed off and try to say ANYTHING except “yeh, well this time is different” because if you say that you sound like the idiot who bought a half million dollar house in San Francisco, which you got cheap because it is on the San Andreas Fault, for no down negative interest rate balloon payment mortgage.  Which included as a bonus a three hour round trip commute to your job.  Which was just downsized.  I’ve always hated the Stair Step Collapse theory.  Not because it isn’t possible-I understand that my extra paranoia, cynicism and hate isn’t ALWAYS a positive trait.  Anything can happen.  I hate it because it is a big steaming pile of complacency.

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I’ve read a lot on the collapses of the Roman and Mayan civilizations.  Enough to know there are as many opinions and theories so as to confuse everyone.  It is like a democratic and republican debate on Gore Warming.  It seems like the best sources of information are when you AREN’T reading about the collapse per se.  Any book genre will flog the dead horse of its own expert, so for instance a military historian will ONLY focus on the sad financial straights of the Legions and the barbarian invasions.  Economists only focus on inflation.  Organic permaculture broccoli huggers focus on soil denuded famines and solar cycle advocates only drought.  Reading on other subjects which only mention the collapse in passing seem to deliver less biased hints.  Of course, no one should be all that confused.  Every civilization in the history of ever has crashed and burned from overpopulation and resource depletion.  That is NOT rocket science 101.  Common damn sense is what it should be but too many folks are too specialized and flailing about for fame and recognition and they allow themselves to attribute overly complex theories and solutions to any and all problems. 

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So aren’t you the lucky one, because here at the Bison Global Empire Publishing, LLC, fame and fortune are the last things that will ever happen.  In fact, there are better odds of a mermaid popping out of my toilet and wanting my babies than there is, ever, of any kind of recognition or worshipfulness.  That’s okay, don’t beat yourself up for not buying my books or telling your friends about me.  I’m okay.  I’m used to it.  But as a bonus to your selfishness and inattentiveness, what you get here is the very opposite of complexity.  I like simple.  My whole life’s work is simplifying complexity.  That quest is what makes my nipples hard and my sphincter tingle.  If fame and fortune came knocking I’d tell them to hump off.  I’m aware I need to be dead before my greatness is acknowledged.  I’m not saying that is fair, just that it is inevitable.  Only after the collapse will you slap yourself on the forehead and proclaim, wow, I could have had a bucket of grain and Jim was right and my AR is jammed and I feel like a douche.  I’m hoping with my last breath I can toast you all with a last shot of whiskey and tell you I told you so.

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Okay, let’s get back to the perfect retort I finally thought of.  Ready? “If Romans lived life as usual in a stair step collapse, and the depopulation of the capital was so complete sheep were grazing in the ruins of the Coliseum but happened so gradually no one noticed, how were they fed that whole time?”.  Got that?  Rome was dependent on imported grain.  The ocean dockworks created with concrete, an engineering marvel as they were cast on site with some of the worlds best cement, enabled the capital to be overpopulated.  Records exist relating the needed quantity of grain arriving daily.  So, once the hyperinflation and military contraction and the collapse of the overseas garrisons was underway, how exactly did the grain get to the capital?  Buuuuzzzz!  Wrong answer.  It didn’t!  Oh, that isn’t a problem, you proclaim, they just moved out to the countryside.  Buuuuzzzzz! Wrong answer!  The grain had to be imported because the farms both couldn’t create enough for the overpopulated cities, but also production was decreasing from fertility loss.  Overproduction of crops over time, the go-to answer always for increasing population. 

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Now, riddle me this, batass, why were there so many plague outbreaks at the time?  DINGDINGDING!  Correct answer!  Malnutrition.  Yes, less food because imports didn’t go 100% one day and zero the next.  It was a gradual decrease, even if it was in the form of a waterfall or Seneca collapse.  Less calories don’t usually kill off the population from famine but from other factors “fed” by malnutrition.  Before the ships stopped bringing grain, just not ever enough, they also brought plague preying on a weakened population.  Now, what was that about business as usual?  Easy adaptation to a slow collapse?  How do people eat when the centralized food importation system crashes with the economy and alongside the end of its protecting military?  They don’t.  That is the simple friggin answer.  How is a stair step collapse possible when the food stops being delivered, while at the same time people drop like flies from disease?  Remember, a new disease, loosed upon a sick populace, typically can initially wipe out 90% of the population.  It quickly drops in fatality as the stronger or further immune increase as a percentage of the population, but the first wave of casualties is brutal.

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The government has collapsed.  As has the military which relied on a central state for funding.  Like all failing empires, the military had been so reduced in size it was at the end largely ineffectual, even if it could have been independently supported by the surviving elite of the day.  No more food was being imported as the economy has collapsed.  No surrounding farmland is productive due to soil exhaustion and few plots were even worked due to taxes.  As the population died off from plague.  And you think this picture represents a stair step collapse?  Buuuuzzzz!  Wrong answer, bitches!  This is a waterfall collapse.  Decentralization is not a pretty process, as the centralized organization collapses and the population was fed by that organization.  Empires collapse from resource contraction.  The soil is already exploited once central power collapses.  Only a very small percentage of the population can survive on the denuded topsoil.  How do you do the math that only a very small percentage die off every decade after that?

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Let’s do the calculations.  The petrodollar is abandoned by all but Mexico and Canada.  The US instantly bankrupts as oil imports stop and we are suddenly faced with 30% less oil.  As the economy fails, truckers can’t get fuel and companies can’t get paid as the credit and redemption system fails.  Food imports into New York City ( or, fill in the blank for the metropolis of your choice ) are cut drastically.  The National Guard can’t escort or replace enough trucks as most units are still overseas and there aren’t enough troops.  Now, after a couple of months of this, less food, plus garbage piling up and sewer main leaks not being fixed, disease breaks out.  This is what you call a stair step collapse?  The first winter and more population is rotting away than moving about.  At the same time, PG&E can’t get enough coal shipped to it as the banking payment system which had used the Internet fails alongside it.  Lack of electrical power generation leads to the system being overloaded when the power does come on at random times ( remember, the system is past replacement date and suffers from decades of maintenance avoidance ) and before you know it, the Los Angeles basin isn’t getting water pumped over the mountains to it, nor are gasoline pumps working.  The mass exodus must be on foot.  Well, guess what surrounds L.A.?  Desert, and lots of it.  How do most of the fleeing population survive?  That is a stair step collapse?

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Empires are food importers.  First the conquered territories provide the extra food and population explodes.  Later, you conquer more land and use your new wealth to buy even more food.  Your military safeguards the food shipments.  Then, your nearby farms fail as they were overworked trying to feed even more people and the inflated currency buys less food imports and the military can’t get more land or protect enough shipments.  That is how empires rise and fall.  There might be exceptions, such as the Egyptian empire rising and falling over and over with the level of the Nile, but they are exceptions.  Most Agricultural Age empires follow the same pattern.  We are also, just that oil is substituting for food right now.  The soil is gone, and as soon as the oil is gone so are food imports and domestic food and food transportation.  That is why the US cannot last as a viable entity.  The only part of the country able to feed itself is so overpopulated it won’t feed itself and without petroleum inputs the Midwest can’t feed everyone else.  Without oil, they are NOT our breadbasket as the soil is dead and the well irrigation some places need along with it.  Greece fell along with grain imports, as did Rome as will we with the inevitable oil import cessation.  That is why it is so important to believe that Fracking will save us all.

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Stair step collapse, bite my ass.

END ( article related link http://amzn.to/2eIyrwb )

 

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