Just a quick note, keeping in mind that we live in an allegedly globalized world, which will allegedly prove more efficient etc. That’s all nonsense of course, globalization is all about corporations moving responsibilities and liabilities (such as environmental concerns, labor costs, and so on) to where they can generate the highest short term rates of return while generating the greatest possible social disruption and global destruction in the process.

So it strikes me, what is the first thing to go when this system starts to crack due to rising resource costs and peaked production levels of key resources, like oil? Airlines, of course. So it’s not surprising to see, after a disastrous last year, that World’s airlines in fight for survival (with 9 billion US dollars in losses this past year).

Faced with their biggest crisis in history, airlines from throughout the world gathered in Kuala Lumpur to take stock and swap survival strategies.

“Numbers can tell powerful stories,” International Air Transport Association director-general Giovanni Bisignani told his audience of 500 airline representatives at their annual summit.

Airlines are expected to collectively lose US$9 billion (NZ$14b) this year as falling demand, lower yields, broken consumer confidence and the swine flu pandemic threaten to wipe out US$80b in revenue.

Those losses will come on top of last year’s US$10.4b deficit thanks to the double hit from record high fuel prices and the collapse of the world economy.

“The ground shifted and our industry was shaken,” Mr Bisignani says.

Airlines are in survival mode and in desperate need of help to see them through the crisis and allow them to emerge with a business model that delivers a financially sustainable future.

Yep. Can you say: (re)nationalized airlines? In fact, can you say: the only countries that will have any chance of controlling the bumpy downhill slide are going to be the ones where the state controls resource allocation and pricing? Watch the ‘free market’, one of the greatest pieces of nonsense ever generated as a concept in human history, start to show more and more how pathetically unable it is to actually do anything other than serve as an excuse to funnel more money to the hands of those who control it.

This one is depressing, mainly because the Kogi people, like other native peoples I’ve heard or read, realize the problem is not at all complicated: we have violated the fundamental conditions for life continuing on the planet earth. Well, it’s also depressing because this was done in around 1990, when the early warning signs were becoming very clear to these people, who had watched the natural world for centuries, millenia probably. Now of course everything is worse, and growing increasingly bad by the month almost now.

Watch this if you don’t watch anything else. (Google Video Page)

What I really have to agree with is them calling us ‘little brother’. We are so completely arrogantly twisted in our views that we think our own ways, which are destroying the planet incredibly quickly, have anything to teach of value.

More film at nationalgeographic.com :: Keepers of the World (long flash video)

Personally, I’m getting tired of hearing people who are unwilling to engage in fundamental changes in our modern way of life talk about solutions etc when it’s those very ways of life that are the problem (you know, hybrids, wind power, high tech solar voltaic… all just ways to consume and destroy a little bit more before it all fails completely).

I’ll add a few of the better quotes from the first video, but I wanted to get this one posted first.

Any self-respecting doomer has to keep up with the latest from Jay Hanson, one of the first to connect the dots of peak oil and peak population.

Call him a doomer, he doesn’t care.

Check out the interview page (direct stream)

There’s a good interview with Dr. Dennis Meadows, co-author of the original Limits to Growth. It’s long, about an hour, and if you don’t understand the core concepts behind sustainability and population overshoot, you definitely want to give this a listen.

I had to take a break from writing for a bit. Things are really moving fast, if you’re really interested, the best sites I know of are on the link bar to your right. For the economy, theautomaticearth.blogspot.com is doing a really solid job day in and day out. Nice work Ilargi and stoneleigh.

There’s not a lot of point at this time in repeating what others are doing well, although I have to admit, sometimes I come across an article that really makes me think. I mean, all this money floating around, it’s really not real. It never is physical at all. In fact, when I think back on what the best religious and philosophical systems have always said, this whole idea of money actually having meaning is pure delusion, in a very real sense, not as an abstraction, it simply doesn’t even exist today as anything at all substantial beyond some bits moving around computers, as that article correctly notes.

The entire way of moving money around is just a way to distribute power, to grab hold of a thing that some believe to be real, but which could be turned off literally with a few switches. Try it. Just turn off all the key banks’ systems, and suddenly those webs of credit, debt, etc, all vanish. They have no substance, and exist only as relationships, faith more than anything else.

Personally, I prefer more physical states of reality, at least when it comes to our day to day existence. I’m also a big fan of real free markets, you know, the ones where big corporations don’t control every phase of distribution and consumption. Sometimes when I hear these ‘free market’ psychopaths babble on about the ‘free market’, meaning for example the GM, Ford, Toyota, Hyundai, and so on, corporations manipulating trade, consumer minds, politicians, and so on, as an example of a free market. What a joke.
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