And after we Mad Max the place...

I stumbled upon a speech, Social Collapse Best Practices, posted at the blog ClubOrlov, written by Dmitry Orlov, aka kollapsnik. He predicts what my wife and I call the Mad Maxing of America, or the collapse of the US government. Having seen the collapse of the Soviet Union first hand, Orlov is not some nut on speaker's corner. I'm sure most people will want to dismiss his reasoned thesis as survivalist rantings. I suggest you give this speech a read, keep an open mind, and think.

In a big way, what's been happening to me is a kind of microcosm of what's going to happen to us all, eventually. I was a cog in the entertainment industry, riding big ladders and scissor lifts, hoisting big lights and scenery to create a world of make-believe, calling it art, and selling it for big bucks. Well, the "owners" got big bucks. I got decent bucks, and even though I was never much more than a daily hire, I had a good career at free-lance stagehand work for 20 years.

Well, this cog wore its gears out, and has been tossed aside. My pension, if I ever see it at all, is shrinking. Social Security Disability will deny that you're disabled for years, while your doctor tells you not to dare lift anything over 20 lbs. The house I'd invested in turned out to be worthless when I couldn't afford to pay for it anymore. My skills as a hard laborer who understood stagecraft are now useless. My writing skills still scrape up some cash, in the internet marketing world, but that's internet dependent.

In the social collapse scenario, though, I do have one skill that will make me a valuable person. I'm a skilled organic gardener. And in the world of collapsing social order and government control, the farmer will be king.

Internet Marketing with Bald Mt. Press

Am I a blogging fool? Well, in the best sense of the word, yes. I started this blog back in 2001, before 9/11, in fact, so I've been blogging longer than most. In a kind of effort to learn as much about different blogging platforms as possible, I started little blogs here and there: testing the systems, seeing how much Google PageRank a new blog could get, and how much linking power those particular blogs would have in boosting the sites to which they linked.

In the process, I watered down a lot of good information that I had written. Little bits and pieces of important internet marketing information were scattered in the wind. More than once a blog would get wiped out by some administrative maneuver on the host's part, and I'd have to re-post everything from back up, when it wasn't lost completely.

So, I started looking for a basket to put all my internet marketing eggs in: a central blog for my company that would handle all aspects of my internet marketing business. Clients and potential clients would only need to go to one place to see a whole host of information about internet marketing and what I can do to help their businesses.

So, here it is: Internet Marketing with Bald Mt. Press. Good reading.

Look on the Bright Side

It's rare that I read something that drops my jaw, but check this out, from Dmitry Orlov's speech at the Long Now Foundation (h/t to John Robb of Global Guerillas):

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their [the government's] realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Baby pictures! My daughter is visiting from California, where she's a hairstylist (please note, all you theater hair people who might need some new blood in your union). She spent some serious "awwwww" time going through the big plastic bin o' pictures, and came up with a handful to scan. So now, from the could-you-be-any-cuter files, here's Jasmine's favorites: