Davin, the interviews I’m posting are necessarily brief, aiming mainly to expose the work of people like Robb. Read his book, go to his blog, or take any number of other steps to research his prognostications for yourself.

Also, note that Robb is an independent consultant and has to promote himself in order to make a living, ie self-promotion can be confused with self-importance.

He says that for a glimpse of the future we should “Think Argentina, Greece, Spain, Iceland”. I’ve been on holiday to most of them recently. I did not see any evidence of people shifting “their loyalties to any local group that can provide for their daily needs” or “crime fueled local insurgencies and militias.”

It’s pretty apparent to most people that things in the West can’t continue on the same basis as they have been. Many people look at that and start trying to figure out how to replace Capitalism with a more sensible way to run society. This would be much more useful than trying to figure out how to fortify your bunker against the mob from the next village.

But local, sustainable movements are basically an awesome thing regardless of if the rest of the US collapses into a Warring States period. ;)

How to bring real security – to an illegal occupation of a sovereign state? Do you mean leave? Because you can’t oppose an occupation by helping it succeed.

So he’s advocating an end to the US empire? An immediate and complete withdrawal? Drastically cutting the military budget? Abolishing the CIA? Withdrawing Special Ops from the 75 countries they operate in? Actually, RTFA.

He writes: “Back in 2004, the US military was getting trounced in guerrillas in Iraq. Worse, the US military establishment didn’t know why. Didn’t have a clue. To correct this, I began to write ”

Again, “To correct this, I began to write “.

Again, to correct what? “the US military was getting trounced in guerrillas in Iraq”.

Again, RTFA.

He was not assisting them in those tasks my friend,
what he was basically telling them and also the congress is that they are fucked if they continue
with the doctrine that you mention, and how to
bring real stability to the region.
Of course they are not interested in that,
and didn’t listen. Now he’s just trying to
help communities to prepare for the consequences
of such doctrine.

This is a leading question with a false premise. And the interviewee is speculating wildly without sufficient evidence to support his assertions against Westphalian sovereignty and prediction models (especially of the realist variety).

Good luck with those figures on Nigeria’s oil production. It’s easy to go astray with hasty research.

For example. From a recent article in OGJ.

“From a peak of 2.6 million b/d in 2006, production fell to as low as 1 million b/d. Since the government’s recent amnesty program came into effect, however, production has risen to 2 million b/d.”

http://www.ogj.com/index/blogs/oil-diplomacy/blogs/OGJ/oil-diplomacy-blog/post987_6083664137213851315.html

A couple of things. There is a difference between the gross leverage that made the collapse possible and the mechanism that initiated the crash. The financial collapse started in subprime mortgages. The speed of the deterioration in this segment amplified its impact.

ahyep..

You are not taking into account that what is extracted doesn’t necessarily get delivered,
especially when transportation lines are blown up.

Hmm, let me see if I can explain this in simpler terms to you:
1)A sub-prime loan is a loan extended to someone
that barely can pay it.
2)If oil and gas prices rise mostly everything
rises because oil and gas are used to make and transport almost everything.
3)When everything rises, wages and salaries
don’t rise with them.
4)When people have to pay more for everything
they have less disposable income and consumption
in certain industries dips, this causes employees
to be fired.
5)Some people that could barely pay the loans,
facing a price hike in almost everything,
and having the same wage, less or being fired
stop making the payments and thats how the bubble explodes.

Because you were wrong before about all that future stuff.

Get ready to be poor.

It’s really a horrible, barren place. Everything to the contrary are just filthy, filthy lies.

I don’t particularly agree with everything Robb has to say, but I can guarantee that he is probably more qualified to speak on these issues than most BB commenters. I don’t remember the DoD, CIA or NSA asking any of us for advice, do you?

The elites in the nation-states have increasingly moved the globe toward a system in which financial predators run loose and national and global economies suffer wild boom-and-bust cycles. This allows what is in essence a looting of the poor and middle class. In an unstable financial system they are the ones who by far suffer the most. If you don’t believe me, read up on Latin American history. The wealthy stayed wealthy, the middle classes shrank, and the poor got even poorer.

Faced with these conditions, there is a small proportion of any population for which armed guerrilla action is an attractive alternative. Some of these are aggrieved masses, some are criminal elements seeking to carve out their own little kingdoms. The author is saying that the tools now exist for them to be very effective in undermining the conventional nation state.

Think of these elements as packs of wolves and the nation states as very large herbivores. The large herbivores are very secure against the wolves as long as they are healthy. When they are weak or sick they become vulnerable.

The global elites have made the nation-states increasingly weak through allowing predatory behavior by financial firms, racking up huge trade imbalances, over-dependence on dwindling resources, and national factions that work against each other to the detriment of the whole (think Democrats and Republicans in the US).

2008 is the year the world reached peak oil production, the sub-prime debacle was a function of the lurch that occurred as a result of hitting an energy shortfall – like a car in fifth gear being suddenly jolted into third – in an instant the global financial system recoiled in shocking fashion.

If Nigerian production did indeed fall by 1mbd in 2007-2008 than I would have to say that it played a contributing factor to the energy shortfall, alongside depletion rates in oil fields such as Mexico’s Cantarell.

“Those high prices had a negative global economic impact: the start of a global recession and a spike in default rates in US sub-prime mortgages (due to higher driving and food costs).”
NO: The Sub-prime crisis was a speculative bubble on securitized mortgages that burst under it’s own over-leveraged weight. No serious economist or business leader has or would attribute it to high energy costs.

It’s statements like these in which he lost any credibility, and that was before the locavore/survivalist theme began.

You could just research it… you know… that way you wouldn’t have ended up looking like such a fool. From the NYtimes: After one of Shell’s big export sites was bombed in February 2006, the company abandoned its operations in the Western part of the delta and shut half its production, or 500,000 barrels a day.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=980CE7D9163EF932A15757C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

So… if Shell alone lost 500,000 BPD, I’d say his figure of 1m BPD across the Nigerian oil industry is feasible. Futhermore, you do realise that the DOE has a vested interest in making it appear that oil supply is steady, right?

Also, re the production figures, Nigeria often says it has capacity to produce 3 million bpd but actual production is around 2 million bpd at the moment. It has been lower still, at around 1.6 million bpd in July 2009, according to OPEC’s figures.

Part of the problem also is that it’s unclear how much is being produced. The government relies on the producers and substantial amounts are bunkered from pipelines.

I think he’s actually half-right. He’s seen the power of flexible, small-to-gigantic ‘open-source’ (that term gets stretched ever further with every step away from program code) groups, empowered through technology. He sees how they might cause tremendous harm.

…And stops there. Why?

By analogy, I think this guy would have said, in 2002: “Wikipedia is DOOMED TO FAIL because of vandals!” ….Like most people did.

Or in 1994: “Linux is DOOMED TO FAIL because of haxxors and chaos and laziness!” ….Like most people did.

IOW, being as he’s a pessimist, he sees only the harm that connected individuals can do; but their capacity for good grows, likewise. So the question is, which is greater: our capacity for good, or for evil?

Wikipedia, Linux, and other large shared projects lead me to feel warm and fuzzy.

So, why not open source companies? Open source government? Why ONLY open source terrorism?