Bureaucratic Insanity is Progressing

Six months ago, when my book Bureaucratic Insanity went to print, I couldn’t imagine how the social climate in this country could get any worse, and yet it has. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that large segments of our society are under intense psychological stress. That might be typical in an election year, but the sense of desperation is more profound than I can ever remember.

When individual identity and self-esteem are undermined, people become quick to anger. Society’s rules provide a kind of safe haven for approved behavior. Lashing out at innocent people, even children, becomes acceptable if it’s done in the name of “following the rules.”

Throughout Bureaucratic Insanity, I documented numerous examples where rule enforcers chose to act without mercy, to put people – often children – in their place. Nowhere is this more visible than in our rule-ridden school system, where students are cruelly punished for even the most minor offenses.

Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness is now available as an e-book and at a reduced price for the paper edition.

Let’s consider a few new examples that have come to light since the book was published just a few months ago:

• The State of New Mexico criminally charged a 13-year-old for pretending to burp in class. According court documents, the student “had generated several fake burps, which made the other students laugh and hampered class proceedings.” The police were called. The student was handcuffed and held in a juvenile detention center. School officials decided to suspend the student for the remainder of the school year and charged him criminally with interfering with the educational process. As of this writing, the case is still making its way through the courts.
• A teacher in a New York area Charter School was suspended for a week after a video emerged of her ripping up a student’s paper and shouting. “There’s nothing that infuriates me more than when you don’t do what’s on your paper,” the teacher yelled on the video. The school said it was an anomaly, insisting she was a “model teacher,” but a report by the New York Times cites a number of other teachers who abused students at the school. In one case, the principal mocked a student’s low test score in front of her and another adult. The Times also described how a kindergarten teacher made a girl cry so hard she vomited after she stumbled reciting a math problem.
• Police in Tennessee arrested and charged a six-year-old with a misdemeanor for merely watching a fist fight. The child and at least nine others, none of which were older than 11, were arrested nearly a month after the incident. According to one parent interviewed by the local ABC affiliate, the fight was “no more than a scuffle of children pushing each other back and forth.” Those children now have arrest records which will follow them for life.
• Two honor roll students were threatened with 30 days in an alternative school after one of them lent the other an inhaler during a severe asthma attack. She may have saved her friend’s life, but the school says the two possessed, used, and shared a controlled substance.

Of course, all of this insanity isn’t limited to the United States, but is prevalent in most highly complex societies where rules governing behavior are numerous.

• In July 2016, nursery workers in the UK referred a four-year-old to police after he mispronounced the word “cucumber.” They thought it sounded like “cooker bomb” even though the child was pointing to a picture of a man with a cucumber. UK teachers are required to report any suspicious behavior to authorities after the recent passage of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. Thankfully, child social services decided not to take action.

When a government worker considers referring a four-year-old to a counter-terrorism program, I think it’s safe to say the situation is beyond parody.

It may be tempting to ascribe all this paranoia and vindictiveness to the criminalization of our society. Clearly, our governing institutions benefit more from criminals than they do from law abiding citizens, and so they are incentivized to make more criminals. But this does not explain the apparent gleefulness exhibited by the state’s front line bureaucrats who seem to jump at the opportunity to punish good people for failing to observe arcane rules.

Throughout the book, I argue that this venomous spite is used as a coping mechanism by bureaucrats who feel powerless. Because of the deteriorating economy and uncaring bosses, mid-level bureaucrats cannot successfully challenge the forces that rule their lives. Instead, many of them choose to live with the rules as faithfully as possible and rule obedience itself becomes a part of their self-esteem. Their suppressed rage comes to the surface, usually at the expense of people they perceive as weaker than thy are. The more controlled and stressful our society becomes, the more we will see bureaucrats lash out.

This craziness didn’t form in a vacuum: it’s the end result of a society that doesn’t provide people with a meaningful identity. So much of modern life seems directionless. The nuclear family has broken down and it’s difficult to get ahead economically. Some people try to find belonging and purpose by segregating themselves into ideological or social groups. But many bureaucrats resort to violence as a way to vent their frustrations at a system that is unable to provide them with a reason to live.

Where does that leave us now? The economy is teetering on a precipice. The wailing and worrying about a looming political catastrophe has reached a delirious pitch. The sound of war drums echoes in the distance (which is not so distant anymore). If 2016 has shown us anything, it’s that there’s good reason to think the social climate is going to get worse before it gets better.

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Sean Kerrigan is the author of Bureaucratic Insanity: The American Bureaucrat’s Descent into Madness. He has been a writer and public social critic for the last 15 years, concentrating on issues of economic, political and social decay in the United States. Educated at Temple University in Philadelphia, he worked for several years as a journalist focusing on hard news coverage. Disillusioned by the economic crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, he refocused his attention on political and spiritual matters, with most of his subsequent writing challenging the accepted mythology of American society. His work has been featured on the BBC World Service Radio, popular blogs such as Zero Hedge, and several daily newspapers including the Bucks County Courier Times. He maintains a regularly updated website at www.SeanKerrigan.com and a Twitter account @SeanJKerrigan.

Interview on Global Research

There is no question that technology has been key to humanity’s mastery and domination of the planet.

Thanks to these marvels of innovation, humans have transformed their natural surroundings to their service, leading to larger numbers of people, reliable and greater supplies of food, and the ability to extend lifespans.

There is of course the other edge of that sword.

Thanks to the powers they have harnessed, humanity is currently facing a multitude of interconnected dilemmas and problems stemming from population overshoot, climate change, and resource depletion. Thanks to human ingenuity applied on an industrial scale, human agencies threaten destructive wars and military interventions capable of destroying all life on the planet.

In a brilliant new book, author and past guest Dmitry Orlov postulates the existence of something called the technosphere, analogous to the biosphere, which came into existence as soon as human inventions started transforming the natural world. This artificial construct appears not to embrace life as we know it, nor does it have any affinity for the human species, beyond what can be manipulated into the technosphere’s service!

In one of our program’s most provocative interviews yet, Dmitry Orlov further explains the characteristics of the technosphere, the shortcomings of techno-fixes for our ecological crises (e.g. “renewable energy”), how organized religion and progressive social movements are enabled by and are artifacts of the technosphere, and how this force imperiling all life on Earth can ultimately be overcome and human freedom secured.

Orlov ends the interview with a review of the history behind the current Russia-US tensions, prospects for a larger war, and what, if anything, the diplomatic breakdown signifies.

Link to the audio.
(The interview starts at 7:55.)

Originally posted at GlobalResearch.ca

Video: Women on the Verge

Piero San Giorgio has recorded a video about his book, Women on the Verge of Societal Breakdown, which I just published through Club Orlov Press, asking you to read it and to provide feedback.

For Purely Technical Reasons

Cedric Sacilotto

It is tempting for us to think that our technological choices—whether we choose to live in a city, a suburb or out in the country; whether we want to drive a pick-up truck, a gasoline-electric hybrid or ride a bicycle; whether we take a train, drive long distances or fly—are determined by our tastes. We may flatter ourselves that we are in control, and that our choices are reflective of our enlightened, environmentally conscious values. This view rests on a foundation of circular reasoning: we behave in enlightened ways because we are enlightened, and we are enlightened because, to wit, we behave in enlightened ways. As to why what we consider enlightened is in fact enlightened rather than a question of possibly questionable personal taste—that is not to be discussed: de gustibus non est disputandum.

But there is an alternative viewpoint, which seems more realistic in many ways, because it rests on a foundation of physical, technical specifics rather than fickle and arbitrary consumer preference, whim or taste. From this viewpoint, our technology and associated lifestyle choices are dictated by the technical requirements of their underlying technologies, both physical (the operation of the energy industry, the transportation industry, etc.) and political (the operation of political machines that segregate society by net worth and income, relegating wage-earners to a global disenfranchised underclass).

A few years ago I found out that I needed to replace the diesel engine on my boat (the old one blew up definitively) and looked at a number of options, one of which was to replace it with an electric motor and a large bank of batteries. The electric option was touted as being quiet, non-polluting, and having just enough range to get in and out of the marina and to get back to dock if the wind died during a typical daysail. It turned out to be more than twice as expensive as a replacement diesel engine. As to what one might do to take such a boat any great distance (that involves many hours of motoring) the solution is to… add a diesel engine hooked up to a very large alternator, at triple the cost of just replacing the diesel. And so I just replaced the diesel.

Diesel engines have a lot of positive qualities: they can run continuously for tens of thousands of hours; they can be rebuilt many times just by replacing the bearings, the cylinder sleeves, the piston rings and the valves; they are exceptionally reliable; the fuel they use is energy-dense. For these reasons, they are found throughout freight and construction industries and are used for small-scale power generation. They can be very large: the larger ships have engines that are as big as houses, with ladders welded to their cylinder walls, so that servicemen can climb down into them to service them after the cylinder head and the piston assembly are pulled out using an overhead shop crane. Small diesel engines make a lot less sense, and the silliest of them are the ones found on small yachts. There are many aspects of their design that make them silly, but there is also an overriding reason: they use the wrong fuel.

You see, diesel is a precious commodity, used in the transportation industry (by trucks, locomotives and ships), and in construction equipment, with no alternative that is feasible. A cousin of diesel fuel is jet fuel—another petroleum distillate—that is used to power jet engines, again, with no alternative that is feasible. And then there is a fuel that is only really useful as a small engine fuel: gasoline, that is. Gasoline engines beyond a certain size become much more trouble than they are worth.

Each barrel of crude oil can be distilled and refined into a certain amount of diesel and jet fuel, a certain amount of gasoline, some tar and some far less useful substances such as naphtha. The diesel is spoken for, because it literally moves the world; but if enough small engines cannot be found to burn all the gasoline that is produced, it becomes a waste product and has to be flared off at the oil refinery, at a loss. Indeed, prior to Henry Ford coming up with the brilliant plan to build cars cheap enough for his workers to afford, gasoline was dumped into rivers just to get rid of it, because while everyone burned kerosene (a distillate, like jet fuel and diesel) in lamps, cars remained playthings of the rich, and there simply wasn’t a market for any great quantities of gasoline.

Therefore, it became very important to find ways to sell gasoline, by finding enough uses for it, no matter how superfluous they happened to be. And although some people think that the private automobile is a symbol of luxury and freedom and feel the thrill of the open road, the reason they think that is because these ideas were implanted in their heads by the people who were tasked with finding a market for gasoline. Alongside cars, great effort was put into marketing all sorts of other small engines: for lawn mowers, jet skis, motorcycles, ATVs, boat outboard motors… The only semi-industrial use of gasoline is in chainsaws, small generators and air compressors, service and delivery vehicles, and outboard engines.

And so people were sold on the idea of driving their own car, whether they needed to or not, and spending lots of time stuck in traffic—all so that they would pay for gasoline. By causing all that excess traffic congestion, they also created the need to widen roads and highways, generating demand for another borderline useless petroleum product: road tar. And since there was a problem with cramming all these cars into cities (where cars are generally not needed if the cities are laid out using proper urban design, with sufficient numbers of tram, light rail and subway lines, etc.) the solution was to move everybody out to the suburbs. And so the reason half of the US population now lives in suburbia and drives has nothing to do with their needs, and everything to do with the need to sell them gasoline.

Some people may react negatively to the idea that their suburban castle and their magic chariot are all just part of a plan to make them spend much of their life paying for the right to dispose of toxic waste in unsafe ways. Rest assured, their preprogrammed negative reaction is part of the plan. Every effort has been made to program people to think that this waste disposal job—carried out at one\’s own expense—is, in fact, something that should be considered a sign of success. The most efficient way to motivate a slave to perform is to convince him that he is free. To this end, driving is celebrated in music and film and portrayed as a way of life. Calling it what it is—being a slave to a machine—is bound to cause cognitive dissonance, all the more so because driving a lot destroys one\’s mind: in the immortal words of a character from the movie Repo Man, ”The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.” In this respect, most of the people living in the US are far past the point of no return, and it is pointless to attempt to impart to them any ideas that are discordant with the dead-end lifestyle into which they have been unconsciously coerced.

Getting back to electric vehicles, such as what my boat would have ended up if I were gullible and made of money: they are obviously a defective idea. Their range is limited, they take longer to charge than it takes to fill a gas tank, and they use expensive and dangerous lithium-ion batteries that need periodic replacement. There is not enough lithium available to continue making batteries for laptops and smartphones (which periodically burst into flames), never mind providing for a giant expansion of battery-building to support lots of electric cars. Perhaps most importantly, they shrink the market for gasoline. So, what’s the reason behind the push?

It certainly isn’t part of any particular effort to electrify transportation in general, because no electric solution exists for ships or planes, and electrifying rail freight is an impossibly expensive proposition. It certainly isn’t part of an effort to cut greenhouse gas emissions, because most of the ways electricity is currently generated is by burning coal and natural gas—and will be, while supplies last, because electricity is hard to store, and no matter how many solar arrays and wind farms are installed something will be needed to power the electric grid on overcast, windless days.

No, the push for electric cars is motivated by a different sort of technology—political technology. You see, the oil age is drawing to a close. Last year the oil companies only discovered 1 barrel of oil for every 10 barrels they produced; at the turn of the century it was closer to 1 for every 4. At the same time, most of the easy-to-get-at oil has already been produced, and now it takes 1 barrel’s worth of energy to produce something like 10 barrels, whereas at the dawn of the age of oil it was closer to 1 for every 100 barrels. Such a low level of net energy production is turning out to be insufficient to maintain an industrial civilization, and as a result economic growth has largely stalled out. And although large investments in oil production have succeeded in keeping large volumes of oil flowing, for now, this is turning out to be an ineffective way to invest money, with many energy companies, once so profitable, now unable to pay the interest on their debt. And even though constant injections of free money are currently keeping developed economies from cratering into bankruptcy, it has been clear for some time that each additional dollar of debt produces significantly less than a dollar’s worth of economic growth. Growing debt within a growing economy can be very nice; but if the economy isn’t growing as fast, it’s fatal.

As the oil age winds down, personal transportation, in the form of the automobile, is bound to once again become a plaything of the very rich. But then, when it comes to electric cars, it already is! And I don’t mean Tesla: the most commonly used electric vehicle worldwide is the golf cart. And who uses golf carts? Members of golf clubs; guests at resorts; residents of posh gated communities; employees at corporate and academic campuses… And what do all these people have in common? They are all members of the salaried elite; they are definitely not members of the wage-earning class. To them, the electric car offers a way of preserving a semblance of the status quo for themselves while setting themselves apart (in their own minds) from all of the gasoline-burning riffraff. Let the great unwashed in the flyover states, with their pickup trucks complete with gun racks, burn what’s left of the gasoline while overdosing on synthetic opiates while the salaried elites and individuals of high net worth, ensconced in their campuses and gated communities, will create a different future for themselves, replete with wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars (until they all get shot by all those they have disenfranchised).

A Safe Space for Survivors

In spite of nature’s best efforts to derail my plans, in the form of Hurricane Matthew, they are proceeding apace, including the plan to design QUIDNON—the houseboat that sails. The hurricane provided a teachable moment on surviving hurricanes aboard boats, confirming many of my intuitions about what makes QUIDNON a safe design for any situation, hurricanes included.

We were in a mandatory evacuation zone, and although we could have sheltered in place, I decided to avoid subjecting my family to such an ordeal. And so we jumped in a rental car, drove away from the coast and sat out the hurricane in a motel room. When we got back, picking our way between piles of debris that were littering the roads, we found that the boat had suffered zero damage, but that the entire marina came within a foot or so of being annihilated: another foot of storm surge, and only some concrete pilings would have been left, with the rest of the marina, boats included, washed up on shore, with the boats crushed underneath the floating docks. In fact, this is what happened to many of the other marinas in the area. Since the height of the pilings was set a long time ago, when ocean levels weren’t rising as quickly and catastrophic storms were less frequent, this is going to be happening more and more frequently. Everyone here considers the fact that the marina survived something of a miracle.

More…

“Oops!”—A World War!

Over the past week or so I’ve been receiving a steady stream of emails demanding to know whether an all-out nuclear war is about to erupt between the US and Russia. I’ve been watching the situation develop more or less carefully, and have been offering my opinion, briefly, one on one, to a few people’s great relief, and now I will attempt to spread the cheer far and wide. In short, on the one hand, all-out nuclear annihilation remains quite unlikely, barring an accident. But, on the other hand, such an accident is by no means impossible, because when it comes to US foreign policy “Oops!” seems to be the operative term.

One reason to be cheerful is that any plan to attack Russia is bound to become mired in bureaucracy. Battle plans are developed by mid-rank people within the US military establishment, approved and forwarded up the chain of command by higher-rank people and finally signed off on by the Pentagon’s top brass and their civilian political accomplices. The top brass and the politicians may be delusional, megalomaniacal and inadvertently suicidal, but the mid-rank people who develop the battle plans are rarely suicidal. If a particular plan has no conceivable chance of victory but is quite likely to lead to them and their families and friends becoming vaporized in a nuclear blast, they are unlikely to recommend it.

Another reason to be cheerful is that Russia has carefully limited the Pentagon’s options. One plan that, in the popular imagination, could lead to an all-out war with Russia, would be the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria. What many people miss is that it is not possible to impose a no-fly zone on a country with a sufficiently powerful air defense system, such as Syria. As a first step, the air defense system would have to be taken out, and the air campaign to do so would be very expensive and incur massive losses in both equipment and personnel. But then the Russians made this step significantly worse by introducing their S-300 system. This is an autonomous, tracked, mobile system that can blow objects out of the sky over much of Syria and some of Turkey. It is very difficult to keep track of, because it can use “shoot and scoot” tactics, launching an attack and crawling away in a random direction over rough terrain.

Last on my list of reasons why war with Russia remains unlikely is that there isn’t much of a reason to start one, assuming the US behaves rationally. Currently, the biggest reason to start a war is that the Syrian army is winning the conflict in Aleppo. Once Aleppo is back in government hands and the US-supported jihadis are on the run, the Syrian civil war will largely be over, and the rebuilding will begin. This outcome seems increasingly inevitable, and the American plan to see a black flag waving over Damascus is in shambles. Now, since Americans are sore losers, this line of thinking goes, and since sore losers may sometimes do random and self-destructive things, this development may result in some crazy adventure to salvage their five-year mission to overthrow Assad. Yes, there is some evidence that Americans are sore losers: just look at the half-century-long trade embargo they have maintained against Cuba. But sour grapes are yet to cause them to turn full-retard suicidal.

The most common reason people seem to give for thinking that a war with Russia is likely, or even inevitable, comes down to the phrase “anti-Russian hysteria.” Indeed, if you bother to pay attention the mainstream press in the US (which I rarely do any more) you may notice that the hysterical noises are starting to overpower the usual stench of disinformation. But to me it seems that anti-Russian hysteria is a sideshow of anti-Trump hysteria. The corporate press is all-in behind Clinton, you see, and Clinton’s strategy, pathetic though it is, is to claim that Trump is Putin’s errand boy, so the strategy is to demonize Putin, and hope that some of the demonization rubs off on Trump. This isn’t working; recent opinion polls in the US show that Putin is more popular than both Clinton and Trump. This factoid neatly points out the real problem in the US: in the immortal words of the inimitable Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of Russia’s Liberal Democrats, Clinton isn’t even qualified to manage a public bathhouse, while Trump has even less national leadership experience than she does. On the other hand, Clinton’s national leadership experience has been, as Trump would put it, “a disaster,” and so Trump could do much better than Clinton by delegating all presidential responsibilities to a particularly pretty bush in the White House’s rose garden.

To summarize: the reasons war with Russia is unlikely are that:
1. The US military experts are not suicidal
2. There is no military strategy for them to pursue
3. There is no compelling reason for the US to go to war against Russia
4. Russia is not the enemy; Alzheimers is.

But the concern that a war with Russia could erupt by accident remains. You see, when it comes to American foreign policy, the operative word seems to be “Oops!”

Let’s take a short trip down the memory lane. The Americans successfully thwarted Soviet efforts in Afghanistan by arming and training Moslem extremists (at the time called mujahideen, or freedom fighters). This is the only example where American “terrorism by proxy” has worked. Invented for that occasion by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter, it was a plan to destroy Afghanistan in order to save it, and actually worked, but only as far as destroying Afghanistan. Since then, it has failed every time on every level, but this has not stopped Americans from continuing to try to use it.

They tried it in Chechnya, by funding and arming Chechen separatists, but there Russia prevailed, and Chechnya is now a peaceful part of the Russian Federation. And, of course, they’ve been trying it in Syria for the past five years, with similarly poor results. If Syria follows the Chechen pattern, in another decade it will be a unified, secular republic, with free and democratic elections, rebuilt with Russian and Chinese assistance and with Aleppo featuring a gleaming skyline to rival the rebuilt Grozny in Chechnya. Meanwhile, Americans will no doubt continue trying to use “terrorism by proxy” elsewhere.

You’d think that after their failure in supporting the “freedom fighters” in Chechnya, American strategizers could have internalized a simple lesson: “terrorism by proxy” doesn’t work. But they hardly ever learn from their mistakes, and so they haven’t. Instead, they have been continuously doubling down on this failing tactic. While using terrorists to thwart the Soviets in Afghanistan, they accidentally created the Taliban; then they invaded Afghanistan and have been battling the Taliban for the past 15 years, less and less successfully over time.

Since “terrorism by proxy” has failed as a strategy against their enemies, the Americans decided to use it against themselves instead. A terrorist attack supposedly committed on 9/11 by the people they had trained and equipped in Afghanistan, rebranded “Al Qaeda” prompted them to attack Iraq. There were no terrorists in Iraq at the time, but the Americans quickly remedied this problem. First they disbanded the Iraqi army, locked up many of its senior officers, and attempted to form a new Iraqi army, which they fortuitously called NIC, for “New Iraqi Corps,” blissfully unaware that “nic” happens to mean “fuck” in the local slang. Meanwhile, the Iraqi officers they imprisoned were given ample opportunity to fester, network and brainstorm, and upon their release they founded ISIS, which then took over a large part of Iraq, then Syria… I could go on and on rattling off lists of details on America’s never-ending adventures in terrorism; the point is, this is all a comedy of errors, and the operative term seems to be “Oops!”

The Americans are now without national leadership (neither Obama, nor Clinton, nor Trump qualify), without a plan (Plan B for Syria is no plan at all), and being carefully corralled and thwarted by other nations, which realize that even in its senescence and decrepitude the US remains dangerous. In response, the US will no doubt continue to make minor mischief around the world, continuing to try to make use of “terrorism by proxy” while periodically hurting itself and claiming that it was all the terrorists’ fault in order to be able to play the victim. These efforts are likely to be as self-defeating as the previous ones, but some of them may accidentally get out of hand and trigger a wider conflict.

And so I feel it safe to conclude that the largest remaining possible cause for a major war between the US and Russia is yet another American “Oops!” However, Russian diplomats, foreign policy experts and military men are consummate professionals, and are dedicated to preventing just such an accident. They remain involved in negotiations with the American side on multiple levels, keeping channels of communication open at all times. Although some people somehow got the erroneous notion that the US has broken off diplomatic relations with Russia, what in fact has happened is that the US has suspended bilateral negotiations with Russia over Syria, while multilateral efforts continue.

But Americans shouldn\’t labor under the misapprehension that the Russians will remain infinitely accommodating. Recetly, the Russians took the Americans to the woodshed over their “accidental” bombing of Syrian troops at Deir-ez-Zor, which was clearly coordinated with ISIS, who went on attack immediately after the airstrike. This incident, which was a clear breach of the cease fire agreement, prompted the Russians to label the Americans with a particularly hurtful Russian word: ”недоговороспособные”—incapable of honoring an agreement. Some observers thought that the Deir-ez-Zor fiasco signaled that the Obama administration was no longer in control of the Pentagon, which was now running around like a headless chicken around a barnyard. This claim was bolstered when the Americans, or their terrorist proxies, then bombed a humanitarian convoy and attempted to pin the blame on the Russians.

The Russians have also cancelled a deal—the only arms reduction treaty Obama has managed to negotiate during his entire eight-year tenure—for getting rid of excess plutonium because of American failure to burn their share of plutonium in a fast breeder reactor which they had agreed to build for this purpose at Savannah River in Georgia. Fast breeder reactors are tricky, and most of the nuclear nations have failed at building and operating them. They make no economic sense, and, like fusion reactors, will forever remain an “energy source of the future.” Still, the Americans signed up to build and operate one; so much for that.

The Americans accepted their punishment with hardly a whimper to be heard in the national press, which was in any case probably too busy being hysterical. Perhaps these are ineffective ways of insulting them. Still, I prefer take this as a hopeful sign that the patient remains at least somewhat rational.

As far as the nasty medical problem of anti-Russian hysteria… I am sure that some highly trained Russian psychologists and psychiatrists are standing by to help with that as well.

Women on the Verge of Societal Breakdown

I am very happy to announce the latest release from my diminutive but thriving publishing house, Club Orlov Press: the publication in English of Piero San Giorgio\’s international bestseller that addresses the problem of preparing to survive the spreading disorder and unrest specifically from the viewpoint of women. This remarkable book fills a major gap in the available literature on this subject, most of which is written by men and infused with a male-centric perspective. This gap is a major disservice to women and causes a major problem for men when they attempt to explain the nature of unfolding developments to their partner and to get her involved in preparing for them.

Piero\’s book is unique in that it directly speaks to women and addresses their specific interests and concerns in a way that is neither gloomy nor sensationalist, but constructive and practical. He illustrates the crucial role which women need to play, as traditional keepers of home and hearth, to keep the family together and doing well during treacherous, turbulent times. But he also recognizes the great difficulties women will face as the societies they depend on decay and fall apart, and the precariousness of the major gains women have made over the past century, which he rightly calls the Century of Women. While recent social progress has made women independent and men somewhat superfluous, these trends tend to quickly reverse as society begins to regress. Piero calls on men to start acting like men once again, and to once again become strong, reliable defenders of women and of their families.

The book is itself a testament to the effectiveness of Piero\’s approach: close to half of it is filled with testimonials from his female readers, who speak of their own preparations and their hopes, fears and wishes, their successes and frustrations, as they work toward achieving a level of autonomy and preparedness that will allow them to survive perfectly foreseeable calamities that are bound to become more frequent as this century wears on.

You men who are reading this: you owe it to the women you care about to tell them about this book.

Women on the Verge of Societal Breakdown:
Preserving Hard-Won Freedoms during an Age of Uncertainty

Order link
Here is the back-cover text:

In thinking about the evolution of the role of women in society over the past hundred years, Piero San Giorgio appeals to women as wives and mothers, calling on them to appreciate the fragility of our world and the impermanence of our civilization. Piero is attuned to the reality that as our contemporary society collapses, a woman will find herself in an extremely vulnerable position: the law will no longer protect her or her children, while the males battle for survival. Piero explains the specifics of survivalism for women, teaching them how to independently cope with the looming catastrophe and survive. The practical sections on preparation are followed by testimonials by 23 real women, of different nationalities, ages, social strata, sexual orientations and marital status, who have already embarked on the path of survivalism. They give advice—very practical and realizable, and not just to women but also to men—on becoming autonomous and independent from the system, and on becoming prepared for all things and at all times.