The Book Page -- Systems Collapse And Complexity -- April 9, 2025

Locator: 48447COLLAPSE.

Triple fracking: Chevon, Permian, link here. Reuters here, paywall. Will use a technique to fracture rock in three wells at a time. Morningstar here. It looks like this may be the full Reuters story without the paywall.

Wind, US, link here: even without Congress codifying this, this seems pretty much like the end of the road for wind energy in the US. It was dying before Trump was re-elected according to this story and now Trump's policies will likely be the final nail in the coffin. Not that we won't see more wind energy development and more wind energy stories, they will simply be more and more irrelevant. Notice that Charles Kennedy did not write this story.

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The Book Page

These are the four books I am reading, and re-reading. I've pretty much completed all four books but will probably "study" them for the next four to six weeks. 

I started these books about four weeks ago: I had just completed my most recent "Shakespearean phase" and was back into studying the history of the Bible, stimulated by an urge to re-read Edmund Wilson's The Scrolls From The Dead Sea. One review of Edmund Wilson's writing. The Masoretic Text.

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Cline, c. 2021. Notes here. It's funny how things turn out. I bought this book, sight unseen. Bought it simply based on citations and subject matter in conjunction with what I was already reading. Turned out to be one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. Highly, highly recommended.

 

From chapter six,"Sea Peoples, Systems Collapse, and Complexity Theory," which I think would have been better simply titled, "Systems Collapse and Complexity Theory," or to bring it up to date, "The Trump Economy, Systems Collapse, and Complexity Theory," LOL.

 

From page 169 of chapter, 

It would not have taken long for the globalized, interconnected world of the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean and Aegean to grind to a halt, with economies disrupted and cities destroyed [Ukraine, Gaza]. Misery and migrations followed. Undoubtedly many were bewildered by the speed with which this happened, and some surely sought to explain the rapidity of decline by invoking angry gods [Trump, Musk].

At this point, we should recall the definition of collapse provided by Joseph Tainter (1988) which was cited at the beginning of this book: "Collapse is fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity." 

However, I have also mentioned "transition" several times in the pages above, because collapse and transition can be two sides of the same coin. This is exactly what occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age.

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it," paraphrased by George Santayana.