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Final chapter posted in Chris Martenson’s “Crash Course” (audio)
Chris Martenson
The final section to this wonderful online series has just been posted October 22:
Chapter 20: What Should I Do?.
Ready to learn everything you need to know about the economy in less than two hours?
The Crash Course is a condensed online version of Chris Martenson’s “End of Money” seminar. The first chapters of the Crash Course are already available; additional chapters will be added as quickly as time allows. Watch the Blog home page to find out when new chapters are posted.
What is it?
The Crash Course seeks to provide you with a baseline understanding of the economy so that you can better appreciate the risks that we all face. The Intro below is separated from the rest of the sections because you’ll only need to see it once…it tells you about how The Crash Course came to be.
You will learn about:
* Intro (on this page, above)
* Section 1: Three Beliefs (Time: 1:46)
* Section 2: The Three “E”s (Time: 1:38)
* Section 3: Exponential Growth (Time: 3:07)
* Section 4: Compounding is the Problem (Time: 3:06)
* Section 5: Growth vs. Prosperity (Time: 3:40)
* Section 6: What is Money? (Time: 5:55)
* Section 7: Money Creation (Time: 4:19)
* Section 8: The Fed – Money Creation (Time: 7:13)
* Section 9: A Brief History of US Money (Time: 7:14)
* Section 10: Inflation (Time: 11:48)
* Section 11: How Much Is A Trillion? (Time: 3:28)
* Section 12: Debt (Time: 12:32)
* Section 13: A National Failure To Save (Time: 12:06)
* Section 14: Assets & Demographics (Time: 13:41)
* Section 15: Bubbles (Time: 14:10)
* Section 16: Fuzzy Numbers (Time: 15:52)
* Section 17: Peak Oil (Time: 17:52)
* Section 17 PART B: Energy Budgeting (Time: 12:15)
* Section 17 PART C: Energy And The Economy (Time: 7:05)
* Chapter 18: Environmental Data (Time: 16:22)
* Chapter 19: Future Shock (Time: 8:02)
* Chapter 20: What Should I Do? NEW! – October 22 (Time: 19:48)
(22 October 2008)
The emphasis in the last chapter is on personal finance and preparation. Chris sounds logical and reasonable on a subject that for many is laden with anxiety.
It is a rather left-brain approach (hyper-rational) that would appeal more to readers of The Oil Drum, than to the followers of Sharon Astyk.
The last chapter is based on a variation on Pascal’s Wager: “even though the existence of God cannot be determined through reason, a person should “wager” as though God exists, because so living has potentially everything to gain, and certainly nothing to lose.” In Chris’s view, even though we cannot foretell the future, certain courses of action have much better outcomes than others.
UPDATE (Oct 24) – some comments
EB contributor Christine Robins writes:
Thanks for the ref. to Chris Martenson’s final chapter “Crash Course”. I know you’re just trying to characterize Chris’s approach, but I found this comment unhelpful and even somewhat offensive: “It is a rather left-brain approach (hyper-rational) that would appeal more to readers of The Oil Drum, than to the followers of Sharon Astyk.” As a devoted regular reader of BOTH TOD and Astyk, I resent your implication that one can’t learn from any good source, whether the fact-laden TOD or the practical and personal Astyk. I’d highly recommend BOTH Martinson and Astyk to anyone concerned about the current crisis. Please don’t discourage anyone from reading either.
Editor BA:
Good point. I know what you mean about reading both TOD and Astyk. I am one of those people who like both too. I just know that there are many people who just can’t relate to a different approach. What struck me about Chris’s last chapter was that it was VERY left-brain. I guess I’m sensitive about this because I am a recovering hyper-rationalist. It reminded me of when I went overboard on that approach in college and did a systems analysis of the question of whether I should get married.
Christine Robins replies:
Thanks for your prompt and thoughtful (“left-brain”?) response. Now that I’ve actually viewed the final Martenson presentation, I agree that its analytical approach may turn some folks off. I personally don’t intend to sit down and do detailed lists and priorities the way he recommends.
But he makes three general points that are extremely important and should be considered by every EB reader:
1. The analogy with insurance: It’s very important to prepare for low-probability events that would have highly negative effects. I think this is our strongest argument to the mainstream population.
2. Once you’ve decided to take action, you can become overwhelmed with all the things you could do to prepare. Focus first on what’s easiest and will protect you in case of the worst developments (a “crash”). Whether you agree with Martenson about putting a substantial portion of your financial assets into cash and gold is a another question.
3. Community is key. No one family can do everything that’s needed, but a community can provide essential emotional support and practical help. For example, I occasionally need a truck for hauling supplies to our urban homestead. But I don’t need to buy one, because I have two neighbors who will loan me their vehicles, and probably assist with the physical effort needed as well!
Financial Permaculture Goes Viral
Phil Cubeta, Gift Hub
Wall Street is not the only system that crashes:
Due to the immense amount of interest in financial permaculture and the upcoming workshop in Hohenwald, TN the www.financialpermaculture.com server crashed. The crash was triggered by an appearance on Coast to Coast radio by Catherine Austin Fitts, Albert Bates and Debbie Landers to discuss financial permaculture.
Ethan Roland has a bit more at his blog: Permaculture Designs
The server is back up and running!
The Financial Permaculture event will be blogged live by bloggers from Gaia University.
What is it all about? At its simplest the idea is to withdraw time, money, and attention from Wall Street and DC and to invest locally among family and friends in start-ups that do business the old fashioned way – without fraud, graft, lobbying, malfeasance, fuzzy math accounting, or even a think tank. The event teaches people in rural communities how to start homely green businesses in niches like Ethanol, Incubation, Farm and Food, or Building. You can learn more here.
(21 October 2008)
Pointed out by Albert Bates.
Apocalypse, Not! (interview with permaculturalist Toby Hemenway)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast #125
KMO welcomes Toby Hemenway to the program to talk about the virtues of rural and urban living. Does living in the boonies do Gaia any favors, or are rural homesteads basically just suburban McMansions with bigger yards and longer commutes? Listener email, music from Andy Warren, and a preview of a talk given by Fred Alan Wolf at the Coalessence Festival.
Show notes: http://kmo.livejournal.com/377663.html
(22 October 2008)
Pieces of Advice for the New Paupers
John Dolan, AlterNet
I just went through the hell of going from grad school-level poverty to the real thing. Here are my lessons learned.
—
Little did I know that when I lost everything last year, I was doing research. At the time I thought it was just stupidity or bad luck or both. But now that the economy’s crashing, it turns out I’ve been out there gathering valuable tips for millions of new paupers. And let me clarify, I’m talking real poverty. My wife and I fell through many layers of poverty in a few months. First we revisited the genteel poverty known to grad students, the sort of poverty where you have scary dreams about the rent and eat a simple, wholesome diet toward the end of the month. But we fell right through that into the sort of Dickensian privation that spoiled first-worlders like me never expected to experience. That’s the kind of poverty a lot of people are going to be experiencing soon — and I’m here to tell you, it can happen here and it can happen to you. And it’s remarkably unpleasant. You may be saying “Duh!” here, but you’re probably not imagining the proper sort of unpleasantness. So I’ll try to lay out what to watch for, how to hunker down when it’s not just a matter of cutting back or selling your second car but having no car at all, having no money for heat or food.
All the things we learned are going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that it’s very hard to think clearly when your life has collapsed. These are what they call the old verities, the truths of life before the middle class was (briefly) in session:
Warmth
Above all, you need to have a dry, warm place to sleep. We had only an unheated boat, and that was not enough. We woke up to the thump of sea ice banging against the hull and realized that the old world was still very much in session. When we finally fled to stay with family, we stayed in our blankets up against their gas fireplace for weeks. You won’t even want food much after a while. You’ll want heat itself, not the chemical middleman. You are going to realize that cold is the most frightening thing in the world. In older English dialects, “to starve” meant “to freeze.” You will see why.
… But you lose more than that. You change completely, more than you realize, to the point that even if you get a break you can’t grab it. After months of applying for teaching jobs without even getting answers, the perfect job opened up for me at a local college. It was half creative writing, half teaching literature and composition — all my specialties. But when the interview started I realized I was no longer someone who could talk the quiet, polite, oblique version of self-promotion demanded by academic hiring committees. I was too deeply, permanently spooked by our condition. I was just plain wrong, unhireably wrong in every way. No hot water on the boat, and I needed to shave the graying wisps of hair on my big bald head, so I’d shaved in the McDonald’s men’s room on the way to the interview, with a cheap Bic shaver. You can guess the results: I looked like a bobcat had tried to roost on my scalp and been evicted after a violent struggle.
… If you have an out — a relative or friend who can lend you money to find a place to live — take it now. And as soon as you get an offer — some old friend has a ski cabin nobody’s using, or a small unit behind their house — take it, as long as it’s heated.
The old world is very much alive, and has it in for you. Do anything to keep it from killing you. The only reason I haven’t endorsed crime here is that from what I saw, paupers are not in a good position to try it. Like so much else, crime is for the big people.
(15 October 2008)
Yep. As John Dolan says, there is all the difference in the world between “genteel poverty” and living on the street.
From my experience, the key to staying off the street is to maintain connections with family and friends, and to be willing to do whatever work turns up. -BA
Hard times have some flirting with survivalism
Kari Huus, MSNBC
… With foreclosure rates running rampant, financial institutions teetering and falling, prices for many goods and services climbing, and jobs being slashed, many Americans are making preparations for worse times ahead. For some, that means cutting spending and saving more. For others, it means taking a step into survivalism, once regarded solely as the province of religious End-of-Timers, sci-fi fans and extremists.
That often manifests itself as a desire to secure basic emergency resources — what survival guru Jim Wesley Rawles describes as “beans, bullets and Band-Aids.”
… Rawles, a self-described Christian conservative, said most of his readers had similar backgrounds when he started his blog in 2005. But he said that as the financial crisis has unfolded — particularly when oil prices began to soar — he started hearing from a much broader segment of the population.
“Now it’s the entire political spectrum — far right, far left and everything in between,” said Rawles. “I’m getting over 200 e-mails from readers a day. Now it is quite apparent how many more liberals are writing. Same concerns, different outlook. Greens, for instance, put less emphasis on self-defense and guns.”
(21 October 2008)
