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The Potential Dystopia
The US national debt now stands at $16,000,000,000,000. That's right. Sixteen trillion dollars. That's some $52,331 (£33,060) for every American now born. And remember – many of these Americans are either children or losers; they don't have a pot to piss in. If you told them they owed you 20 dollars, they'd probably burst into tears. So the more exact number, once you've excluded Americans who are out of work, wear a name badge at work, work in the cocaine retail industry or work as professional children, is probably closer to 100k per person. No American would ever give the government $100,000. After all, The American Dream is to meet the guy responsible for your tax bill, buddy.
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As David Icke can tell you, if there's one thing that the powers behind the powers-that-be want, it's to move everyone towards a unified global currency and one world government. Which is obviously a fantastic idea.
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The Potential Dystopia
Pakistan is one of the silliest countries on Earth. Don't believe me?

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A New Golden Age Of Economic Development. With a billion people wiped off the global population ticker at a stroke, everyone will suddenly be able to kick back a lot more. Not in Delhi, obviously. No. We'll just build a few thousand miles of razor wire round the whole sorry mess, wait for the survivors to eat each other and try not to play our George Harrison records too much. But everywhere else, the price of so many essential commodities – rice, wheat, meat, oil, corn, copper, wool, wood, coal – will drop by about a third, as the great plains of Canada and Russia and the American Midwest no longer have to feed all those hungry mouths.And that will allow the rest of the world to spend more of their income on other items and to save more. Economics is pretty linear in this department: the more you save, the more your nation can invest, so the net effect would be to stimulate a massive boom in the Third World in productivity-enhancing technology. The sort of productive savings this could bring us would make the 1950s look like piss. Really, it is no understatement to say that the selfish desire of 1.2 billion people to go on living is what's stopping Africa from finally becoming an economic powerhouse. Yet it could so easily happen. All we would need would be to inaugurate this new Age of Aquarius with 20 kiltonnes of explosive power.
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The Potential Dystopia
Mainly George Monbiot, if we're honest. Oh, and we may run out of – well, I've not quite paid it enough attention, but apparently it's gonna be quite bad and you should eat less/more bran?

What is the biggest country in the world? Yes. Russia. And the second? Still Canada, so far as anyone can tell. So what are the three most under-populated countries on Earth? Yup, Canada, Russia and Greenland. Today, 90 percent of the world's most vast and thrillingly open expanses remain clamped beneath a northern permafrost. It's a shocking waste. Frankly, you just want to get the guy who designed our land masses, grab him by the lapels and go: “Did you ever think of putting the big ones in temperate zones, buddy? Huh? Did you? We're not fucking polar bears, you know?” But whatever. Fuck that guy.With another five-degree rise in global temperatures, all that wonderful open expanse becomes the new frontier-towns. At the moment, 80 percent of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of America. At the moment, 97 percent of Russians wouldn't go near Siberia if you paid them. That could change almost overnight. These hardy immigrant frontiers-people would invoke the can-do spirit of America's drive westward 150 years ago. Along the way, they'd probably discover lots of nice new minerals buried under the earth. They'd see a virgin world untouched by human eyes and build bold, forward-looking chrome and glass cities in their shiny new mining ports. Those lucky, lucky people.
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The Potential Dystopia
Anyone who has spilled a small amount of liquid over a laptop will know the strange, far-off tingling of recognition at the back of the brain when you realise that all that separates the motor of your life's entire productive capacity from a rather well-designed lump of useless metal is a minor environmental change. Well, as you may have noticed, our entire society now operates thanks to this new-fangled sorcery. And we may be just months away from a metaphorical Big Spill.Solar flares are big bursts of energy that shoot off the sun towards us, and when they hit us, they cause interference. Which is fine, if it's 1800 and you haven't rigged the world with wires and cables and circuit boards and chips and electromagnets and disks of every shape and flavour imaginable. And if it’s 2013? Well, the high-street is going to start getting a even less busy.The nearest example we have – the 1859 "Carrington Event" – was a magnetic storm that struck Earth and caused telegraph systems all across Europe and America to fail. It was so dark that The Northern Lights were reportedly seen as far south as Florida. So, there was that one, when there was a pifflingly small number of wires on Earth – and it was a fucking catastrophe. Now? In 2009, a report funded by NASA claimed similar storms today would lead to "planetary disaster". This isn't paranoid, "what if" millenniallism, this has actually already happened. And statistically, it is only a matter of time until it happens again.
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But wait. Assuming we could get through the initial shock and manage to reboot everything, all we would have lost was an awful lot of data. Overnight, what you might call The Digitisation Years – 1990 to 2012 – would become a collective hole in the global memory banks. And freed from our photos, our stories, our emails and the enormous weight of data, we would have a collective, planetary moment of zen. Yes – why were we stood at the back of the concert, videoing everything on our Sony Ericsonn K800i in 2006? Why weren't we just living in the moment that The Young Knives had given us? Why did we spend hours every week combing Tumblr for pictures we could reblog to our audience of no one? And our Wordpress? And our Instagram? How did we let our obsession with archiving and the weight of our collected instant nostalgia drown our sense of what it is to be alive?A whole generation, chastened and awakened by the loss of the entire life they had so monastically documented, will never buy another recording device again. Culture will become almost instinctively instant, social, collectivist. Rather than wanting to affirm the profile-you through cheap, postable ego-hits, the world's youth culture will become about developing the only thing that a solar flare can't tar: the fathoms-deep inner you. Third eye. New world. Nirvana. Boom.
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