Cider and Gummis

Expressionism / Gabriele Munter/ The Yellow House

The Summer Solstice Porter and the Autumnal Equinox Cider are both in fermentors, bubbling away.  So brewing is done for a while.  Place isn’t as clean as it could be, but I couldn’t really imagine caring less about that.  Tomorrow is early wake up and laundry as is my usual M.O.

Back to a discussion of Dmitry and his “Five Stages of Collapse”.  

As I discussed yesterday, I do see the staging that Dmitry has posited to be pretty doggone useful.  I have really went overboard on this to explain my take on the nature of the process.  Behold the “Doomometer à la Dmitry”

Now, when you have finished staring at my handmade graphic in either awe or disgust, let’s get started on thinking about the process of the shades/flavors of collapse.

Now, the simplest way of thinking about this is an arrow moving through the doomometer.  This method makes for a nice way to frame the discussion if you want to end up in a drunken, intemperate quarrel.  

See how easy that is.  We are only a little over 20% of the way.  Piece of cake…

But I just don’t think that it is that easy.  I want to propose a different way of looking at the problem.  First, I want to say that the nature of a large country like ours is going to be more complex than a simple arrow and a “you are here” sign.  

What I want to propose is a moving and changing spectrum moving through the “D-Meter”

The graph immediately above is my sense of where we are right at this moment.  As a whole the country is moving to the right, but only the bottom twenty% are feeling it hard right now.  The top 20% still is just barely out of the starting gate.  And since the top twenty owns the media and could really and truly not give a fuck about anyone else, no one is paying that close of attention. 

But I am thinking that there is going to be a joker in the deck here.  As we proceed through the D-meter, something funny is going to be happening to the moving, scaled marker showing where we are.  Where there were five divisions, there are only four once everyone in the society clears the first transition point into the next phase.

Every major stage will compress how the population proceeds through the D-meter.  Here in the third stage, there are only three subdivisions in the marker, when it gets into stage four, there will only be two, when we get to zombieland, there will be one and only one group.  

Now, there are two things to remember about the shrinking marker: It still contains the entire population.  So what I think will happen is that, unlike Ugo, I see the process effectively slowing down as things move along.

I kinda think that the process will start out peak and then decline along the lines of the most blessed normal curve (can’t really give a valid scientific reason, but it does appear that is the way that we roll).  The hard part is trying to guess in advance what measures will be taken and their effectiveness when deployed.  The normal curve doesn’t have to extend all the way to the endpoint, the measures deployed when the rich folk finally figure out that they are fucking things up can stop the train.  When they deploy them and their effectiveness will decide how far along the D-meter we will wander.  My best guess is that we will start turning things around when the bottom sixty-percent in “A Shrinking Marker Part Two” above is just about to nudge over into the “Societal Collapse” portion of the D-meter.   Here in the USA, as the old saying goes (and no, it wasn’t Churchill)  we eventually do the right thing, but only after we have tried everything else.  

My dinner tonight is rice and tilapia.  I have the beans and spices in the crockpot for tomorrow.  I am trying to stay within the economy of necessity and stay as far as I can from the economy of desire.   Paying off bills and clearing the decks.

Winter is coming.