On the Avengers and Denial

Thanos

I finally got around to watching the top grossing movies of 2018 and 2019, Avengers: Infinity War ($2.1 billion) and Avengers: Endgame ($2.8 billion).

This type of movie, with extreme fantasy super heroes and over the top special effects, is not my cup of tea, but I decided to watch them to get some insight into what our culture is thinking.

The bad guy, Thanos, understands that the universe is in overshoot which will soon cause extreme suffering from wars and starvation, so he acquires a technology to humanely vaporize 50% of life, without causing any suffering, so that the remaining 50% can live in peace and plenty, with new found awareness to constrain their populations going forward.

The good guys, played by the largest and most expensive collection of movie stars ever assembled, think Thanos’ plan is evil, and spend the next 5 hours of multi-million dollar special effects to thwart his plan.

In the end the good guys “win” by vaporizing Thanos and his thousands (millions?) of evil helpers. The outcome for civilization is vague but it seems technology solved the overshoot problem by providing more stuff so everyone had plenty. There was no tying up of loose ends to explain why Thanos’ all powerful technology could not have done the same.

Sadly, two of the heroes are killed in the final fight, but we are promptly and explicitly informed that their spirits live on, and that they know their sacrifices were not in vain.

I skimmed a few fan forums that debate the plot and motives of Thanos. As you might expect there was lots of heat and noise.

Fortunately, one of our most respected and well known scientists, Neil deGrasse Tyson, stepped up with a tweet to comfort the world that brilliant physicists think we’ll be just fine as long as we push on to Mars:

It’s a reasonable assumption that popular movies reflect the current zeitgeist of our culture and I observed the following:

  • The fact that the Avengers explicitly discussed the perils of overshoot suggests that many people must be thinking, at least subconsciously, about our predicament.
  • Which role was assigned to the bad guys, and which to the good guys, demonstrates how exactly wrong our culture is about reality.
  • The movie’s finale demonstrated once again how strongly our species denies death.
  • Neil deGrasse Tyson demonstrates that our best and brightest deny reality as strongly as the common man.

 

In a similar vein, a top grossing movie of 2014, Kingsman: The Secret Service, is a Tarantino’ish version of James Bond whose bad guy understands that the only way to address climate change is to rapidly reduce the population. The wrong guys win again in this movie.

 

The 2013 TV show Utopia, was cancelled after only 2 seasons, perhaps because it had a little too much reality.

50 thoughts on “On the Avengers and Denial”

  1. It turns out that all you really need to do to reduce the population is give women a choice about bearing children, and offer them employment. Distract men with Internet porn. Capitalism drives wages down, work becomes mandatory, child-care unaffordable, and soon reproduction rates fall below replacement. It took a few decades, but the trend is so clear that the next big crisis (so they tell us) is the forecast collapse of pension funds due to the shrinking pool of taxable workers.

    Like

    Reply

    1. That’s no panacea because the “all you really need to do” part requires burning diminishing fossil fuels and being capable of modernity that some cultures can’t achieve. They’ve had as much time as anyone to do it and they keep squandering aid thrown at them. It has to be an innate thing they can sustain without meddling.

      Population growth momentum also assures continuing environmental damage for many decades, especially with “clean energy” schemes ruining what’s left of open space. I’m far less concerned about Man’s unnatural pyramid scheme economy falling. It’ll have to shrink anyhow. Too bad people can’t do it voluntarily and prevent a lot of misery.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    2. It’s much much too late for a painless “empower women” strategy, or a mildly painful one-child policy.

      The only humane policy that might help now is a birth lottery in which any woman wanting a child must apply for a permit, and once a year a “sustainable” number of permits will be randomly issued. For the next couple generations only about 1 in 200 woman will be permitted to have a child. Thereafter the lottery can be eliminated because the remaining few hundred million people, with their modern comfortable lifestyles, will choose to have children at a sustainable rate.

      In a nutshell, a couple generations of our species need to voluntarily agree to make a sacrifice so that thousands of future generations can have modern comfortable lifestyles. The alternative, if you are an optimist, is generations of suffering arriving at a subsistence medieval lifestyle. Pessimists can easily imagine worse outcomes.

      The birth lottery idea, and many more details for what it will take to retain an advanced human civilization, were developed by Jack Alpert, which you can read about here:

      https://un-denial.com/?s=Alpert%3A

      Like

      Reply

  2. At least Thanos struck a chord, as you can see by looking up “Thanos was right.” But beyond the abstract, few would volunteer for his plan!

    Some other films with related quandaries:

    “Z.P.G.” (even with Paul Ehrlich still popular) had a plot about people rebelling against necessary birth control. “They Live” blamed consumerism on aliens, with people as hapless victims. The viral-humans speech in “The Matrix” told the truth but a virtual reality cure was deemed unacceptable. “WALL-E” was praised for its environmental message but the director oddly said it was just a subplot.

    “Soylent Green” was one of the few films that stayed on topic, and needs a sequel. The “…nobody cares!” scene in “Silent Running” was spot-on about human apathy.

    Regarding Neil deGrasse Tyson: He also perpetuated denial about energy sprawl, claiming “Unlike solar collectors, wind farms take up very little land, and none at all, if offshore, where the winds are strongest.” (Cosmos episode 12). Imagine looking at millions of skyscrapers and pretending to only see their basements, or thinking the mere fact of putting huge machine arrays on water nullifies their impact.

    He also failed to mention that we can put solar panels on existing buildings, and his whole Cosmos series made no mention of nuclear as a sprawl-stopper.

    Like

    Reply

    1. most people are either in
      stage 1 (denial) or
      stage 3 (bargaining)
      which is where degresse’s “solar and wind will save us” nonsense comes from.

      hint: “renewables” are not renewable… and technology is no savior.

      Like

      Reply

      1. You are right. An honest accounting of the energy used to manufacture, install, maintain, replace every 25 years, and compensate for the intermittency of renewables would show that they are helping us burn up our much more valuable non-renewable energy faster, and therefore renewables are adding to the CO2 fire, rather than displacing the fire.

        Renewable energy does contribute to economic growth, which we need to keep our mountain of debt (and economy) from collapsing, makes us feel like we are doing something good, and gives us an excuse not to change our lifestyles.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    2. Thank you False Progress for the movie tips. I had not heard of Z.P.G. and will check it out.

      LOL! Rotten Tomatoes has only one critic review: “The film was so forgettable that, for me, at least, the picketers outside the theater did more to harm Z.P.G.’s image than the movie inside.”

      I’m still going to watch it. 🙂

      Like

      Reply

      1. I started watching it many years ago and can’t recall if it was good. I must have started skimming when the plot became obvious. It could deserve a 2nd chance. “Children of Men” also made me think of VHEMT more than anything!

        Disclaimer: One kid here, and not a nihilist. Just tired of seeing nature ruined by sheer numbers of people and machines.

        Like

        Reply

    1. Your essay is excellent. Well done!

      You present many facts and wise conclusions, such as the following paragraphs, and yet the vast majority of citizens who read it will reject it outright, without meaningful debate, despite having the brain power to comprehend and fact check your message. This is why I am so fascinated by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

      This seems to be the implicit message of the Avengers movies, that we can transcend all limits with technology (when combined with gritty resolve and plucky optimism). After all, hasn’t it worked for us in the past? The Industrial Revolution came along and saved us from Malthus’ predictions. And a century and a half later, the Green Revolution saved us from Paul Ehrlich’s predictions.

      The problem is that each of these revolutions came with a cost—one that is left uncounted by the capitalists and technocrats alike. The Industrial Revolution was built on the availability of cheap fossil fuels—first coal, then oil. But we have now passed the point of peak oil, and the availability of easily obtainable fossil fuels is on the decline. While there still is plenty of oil and gas in the ground, the cost of extracting them is going up—so the net energy output is going down. Since the efficiency of renewable and nuclear energy sources is a fraction of cheap fossil fuels (which are disappearing), the unavoidable outcome will be a drastic reduction of economic production (whether voluntary or compelled by collapse).

      Similarly, while the Green Revolution allowed us to feed billions more people, it has also come with a cost. Grain yields have gone up, but the efficiency of the food production system has gone down, meaning that the amount of energy required to produce the same amount of grain has actually increased. It’s taking more and more energy to keep the whole thing running, and eventually, it has to collapse. It’s elementary thermodynamics: You can’t draw infinite energy from a finite system.

      Like

      Reply

  5. Celebrity physicists seem to have a problem with the concepts of finite and infinite, in fact, their core ideas are based on the observations and theories of the finite” known” universe that has no knowledge of the remaining infinite unknown universe. Why? first, because the remaining infinite universe and its laws may be beyond human detection or comprehension, and secondly – physicists either ignore or do not fully understand the meaning and implications of infinity itself.

    Describing infinity metaphorically aids us in understanding how modern physicists are locked into a paradox similar to the infamous Greek philosopher – Zeno. – that leads to these failures. Consider if all the time since the Big Bang (alleged start of time) to this moment was just a single drop of water in a 12-ounce glass of billions of water drops – and then the glass is poured into the planet’s oceans to be mixed with a finite – but undefinable mix of untold mega-billions of ocean water drops. Picturing this tells us that our little water drop of time and observations would be of no relevance in the ocean’s immeasurable water drops of time.

    Thus through this metaphor, we get a slight glimpse of understanding into what is meant by the infinity of anything, (time, data, energy, materials) and thus for physicists to draw conclusions based on just one small drop of time segregated from the vast ocean of time is not statistically sound nor conclusive in any way because the sample size is just too small to be utterly meaningful about any theory or hypothesis.

    Which then boils down to that old quote-

    “There are the known knowns,
    The known, unknowns,
    The unknown, knowns,
    And most importantly -the unknown, unknowns…”

    For these reasons I give little credence to such celebrity thinkers, and moreover because they cannot further comprehend or acknowledge the urgency of our situation – in that you cannot have infinite growth in a finite context – as our little drops (resources, climate, time ,etc.) in the ocean are not just a mere academic abstractions, but we are truly exponentially running out of these drops.

    Thus the existential price of their celebrity failings is surely not just unacceptable but it is an unprecedented and undefinable human atrocity.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Some wise person whose name escapes me said something like:

      “To understand a man’s beliefs you must look at how he makes a living.”

      Neil deGrasse Tyson is a celebrity scientist making lots of money. Dennis Meadows is not.

      Like

      Reply

    1. Thank you. I agree with the author that beliefs are strongly influenced by your tribe. But I don’t think this is the whole nor the most important part of the story.

      Take climate change for example. The right tends to deny and the left tends to accept the reality of climate change. But here’s the key point, neither tribe accepts the reality of what it would actually take to do something about it, and neither tribe is willing to reduce their lifestyles in any meaningful way.

      Or take wealth and inequality. The right favors less government and is less concerned about inequality. The left favors more government and prefers less inequality. But both tribes make economic growth a top priority, neither acknowledges the reality of limits to growth, and neither is willing to make do with less.

      Or take population. The left tends to favor empowering woman to make responsible family planning choices. The right tends to encourage fecund families. But neither tribe acknowledges the severity of our overshoot predicament, let alone the policies required to reduce our population quickly.

      You can find a tribe for almost every belief. Except one. There is no substantial tribe that accepts the reality of human overshoot and that supports the policies necessary to do something about it. Why? Because these beliefs conflict with core behaviors evolved over billions of years.

      Humans simultaneously evolved an extended theory of mind that denies unpleasant realities which enabled our uniquely powerful intelligence to emerge and dominate the planet. Our genes’ core behaviors, in the presence of temporarily abundant resources, as we enjoy today, results in overshoot. Our denial prevents our intelligence from being used to override our genes’ behavior, and our intelligence could not exist without denial.

      Viewed from the perspective of the universe this all makes sense. Life exists to accelerate the reduction of energy gradients. If a one-time windfall of energy exists then life will expand to use it as quickly as possible, and then contract when it’s gone.

      I must say, however, that I still find it sad and hard to accept that we are unable to break through denial and use our amazing intelligence to preserve more of the earth’s diversity of life, and to retain some of the best human accomplishments, and to reduce future suffering for a lot of species including our own.

      Like

      Reply

      1. Thanks for the reply. I’ve certainly found it easier dealing with people in denial (and recognising my own denial) since stumbling across your website and then reading Varki’s book. It really has helped me come to accept the way the world is.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    1. He’s seen as drumming up fear because the word “coronavirus” is only new to the public as a direct designation, not something fundamentally different from SARS-CoV (2002) and MERS-CoV (2012). Both were controlled by the same strategies in play now.

      If this were a radically different virus I’d be more concerned. It’s noted that plain old flu kills far more people in similar time-frames (typically the old) but many still don’t bother with vaccines. Risk perception is a strange thing and skews toward the unfamiliar.

      Like

      Reply

    1. I could relate to his life journey which entailed putting together all the pieces that make sense of how our world is put together, grappling with that reality and then finding some peace with it. My wife died 15 years ago and it taught me a lot about death and grief but also about what connectedness and love are all about. Paul’s such a humble and thoughtful person.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  11. Tim Watkins is good today.

    Put simply, there is not enough Planet Earth left for us to grow our way to sustainability. And even if there was, the environmental damage of constructing an entirely new infrastructure would likely destroy what remains of the human habitat anyway. In any case, without further economic growth and in the absence of a radical redistribution of wealth of a kind that would have made Lenin blush, it is hard to imagine increasingly impoverished populations voting for ever more expensive energy bills. There is a reason why Luddites like Trump and Morrison are currently getting away with dismantling environmental laws and regulations – and they are the relatively benign face of a nationalist populism that will get a lot worse if current levels of inequality continue to grow.

    The challenge of a zero-carbon civilisation only appears realistic when one of its elements is viewed in isolation. Once it is seen in its complete energetic, material, technological, environmental, economic and political dimensions it is an obvious fiction. There is simply no way in which we get to continue with business as usual simply by swapping one energy technology for another. And attempts at channelling the ghost of John F. Kennedy will not change this.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/02/05/the-make-believe-future/

    Like

    Reply

  12. Nice essay today by Charles Hugh Smith on genetic reality denial except he doesn’t know that’s what he’s writing about. Same phenomenon as people flying to COP conferences to protest fossil energy use.

    It’s easy to mistake conspiracies for denial.

    Will we recall how content that didn’t parrot the approved narrative that everything was under control and the global impact would be near-zero was suppressed, banned, de-platformed or marginalized? Will we wonder at the complacency of all those who accepted this orchestrated suppression with such obedient passivity?

    http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/02/pandemic-lies-and-videos.html

    h/t James @ Megacancer.com

    Like

    Reply

  14. Steve Ludlum explains that the crevasse we can survive in is narrowing. Today $60 is too low and $75 is too high.

    Direct government intervention would be the least popular but is actually most likely. In the drilling industry, nationalization is the rule rather than the exception, the bulk of the world’s petroleum resources are owned- and extracted by governments rather than by private firms. Nationalization in the United States would likely occur after the breakdown of price allocation although some other external trigger such as a pandemic is possible. Nationalization would be accompanied by hard rationing. Being too poor to import and with money dear due to price allocation breakdown, Americans would be limited to reserves found within our own borders. To make these last, output could only be a fraction of what is available, today. This would be the end of happy motoring, perhaps all motoring along with the reduction of overseas shipping and air travel. If authorities are wise, agriculture, emergency services, some military and rail transport would have access to fuel. More likely, fuel would be allocated to the well-connected supporters of newly empowered political bosses to sell on black markets. Other claims would follow along as best they could, to be entertained or not arbitrarily, in- or out of some order, then chaotic and violent disorder.

    https://www.economic-undertow.com/2020/02/09/lucky-vs-good/

    Like

    Reply

  15. Another example of how reality denial has (temporarily) inverted what should be true.

    The health of the economy is now inversely proportional to stock prices. A virus shuts down the world’s factories? No problem. Everyone knows central banks in response will print more money and buy more stocks so everyone buys stocks on every bad news story, often by borrowing money, because it’s so cheap.

    What could possibly go wrong? And the idiots in the mainstream media will report no one saw the “correction” coming.

    Like

    Reply

  17. Two months later the mainstream media begins to pile on. Here is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with a summary of the economic impacts of the virus. h/t Panopticon

    My working assumption is that China will lose its battle against the 2019-nCoV viral enemy. At some point the Communist Party leadership will switch tack after much agonising, conclude that it is less disruptive to manage the disease, and shift to total economic mobilisation instead – as the lesser of evils.

    If this is correct we must therefore all brace for a global pandemic. It may already be too late to stop it. The task will then be to tame the virus and hope to buy enough time for warmer weather to slow the spread. It is not the end of the world.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/11/china-cannot-fight-coronavirus-avert-economic-crisis-time/

    Like

    Reply

  19. Steve St. Angelo explains that we’re burning the cheap stuff way faster than we’re finding it, and the remaining expensive stuff can’t generate enough growth to keep debt cheap enough to keep the money losing expensive stuff flowing.

    Can you spot the self-reinforcing feedback loop?

    Inquiring minds wonder how long the expensive stuff can be forced to flow if governments nationalize the oil industry after it goes broke? And what will happen to purchasing power when printed money is used to subsidize a huge unprofitable industry? And how will a suburbia suburban owner with a 40 mile commute and no public transit options react when they’re at the bottom of the priority list for gasoline rations?

    So many questions and so few people thinking about them thanks to genetic reality denial.

    Due to conventional oil production peaking and remaining flat for the past decade, in order to allow the global economy to continue growing, the world brought on much more expensive, lower quality, lower EROI, unconventional oil sources such as Oil Sands, Shale Oil, and Ultra-Deep Water.

    While this unconventional oil supply has allowed the global economy to grow, it has done so with one CATCH. The world needed to increase the debt at a higher pace to offset these lower EROI oil supplies. With U.S. Shale oil production accounting for 75% of global oil production growth since the 2008 financial crisis, the United States was responsible for 75% of Global GDP growth over the same period.

    …The world should be very worried that 75% of the global oil production growth that came from U.S. Shale oil is declining at 10 times the rate of the worlds mature oil fields.

    The top four U.S. Shale Oil Fields added nearly 10,000 wells in 2018, and the overall production is down 45% as of October 2019. It will likely be close to 50% when the data is released for December 2019.

    As the late great George Carlin stated in one of his comedy routines, “NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE, and NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE.”

    Unfortunately, when we head over the ENERGY CLIFF, the world will be in for one hell of a RUDE AWAKENING.

    https://srsroccoreport.com/red-warning-light-the-world-is-rapidly-burning-through-its-conventional-oil-reserves/

    Like

    Reply

  20. Alice Friedemann summarizes the latest signs of peak oil and decline.

    Meanwhile the idiots that lead us and the media that inform us deny all of it.

    Nothing is more important to our future than affordable fossil energy, with the possible exception of climate change, an honest assessment of which they also deny. It’s head shaking amazing.

    The following comment is by JT Roberts. When he/she writes, I read.

    Looking at the social unrest at the periphery it’s clear a contraction is already happening.

    The industrial economic system is basically a dissipative structure. At its core is the Anglo American empire that has maintained control of resources particularly energy. Those who play nice allowing their resources to be exploited to feed the machine are rewarded with power and kept in power. Anytime some country of value breaks rank they suddenly have US military occupation. Which more often or not is permanent. This works as long as growth is achievable.

    Once the system starts contracting the peripheral substructure that keep the barbarians at bay, or dare we say migrants, starts collapsing it puts pressure on the core. In a desperate attempt the core super inflates in an attempt to preserve the previous order however there is not productive gain so the costs can not be recouped so a Wall is needed.

    The system continues contracting because of the failure to recognize the sub feeders to the core. Cheap energy Cheap labor Cheap resources. By the time the core realizes that it’s protectionist stance is unbearable because it infrastructure can’t be sustained without the inexpensive replacement parts it is too weak to reinflate the structure. Overwhelmed by internal collapsing systems it expends it’s last energy equity trying to stave off internal social unrest through distractions.

    Once the lights go out everyone is left with what ever their perception was molded to think.

    For the racist whites it was immigration. To the anti Semitic it’s was the Jews. To the racist blacks it was the whites. To the extreme right it was the left. And to the extreme left it was the right.

    When it was simply time to pay the piper.

    The system simply is unsustainable and what can’t be sustained won’t be. Eventually someone has to pay for the street in front of my house.

    https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/102413857/posts/9491

    Like

    Reply

  21. Iñigo Capellán-Pérez et. al. – Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies

    A novel methodology is developed to dynamically assess the energy and material investments required over time to achieve the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in the electricity sector. The obtained results indicate that a fast transition achieving a 100% renewable electric system globally by 2060 consistent with the Green Growth narrative could decrease the EROI of the energy system from current ~12:1 to ~3:1 by the mid-century, stabilizing thereafter at ~5:1. These EROI levels are well below the thresholds identified in the literature required to sustain industrial complex societies. Moreover, this transition could drive a substantial re-materialization of the economy, exacerbating risk availability in the future for some minerals. Hence, the results obtained put into question the consistence and viability of the Green Growth narrative.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335609618_Dynamic_Energy_Return_on_Energy_Investment_EROI_and_material_requirements_in_scenarios_of_global_transition_to_renewable_energies

    Like

    Reply

  22. Good interview of Charles Hall today by Sam Mitchell.

    Ecologists and climate scientists who think that education is the key to positive change, deny reality as strongly as the citizens they want to educate.

    Nevertheless Hall’s still one of the good guys.

    Like

    Reply

  23. Dr. John Campbell explains the latest COVID-19 statistics and concludes we would be prudent to assume it will be everywhere soon.

    Pay attention to what they do, not what they say. 760 million people are quarantined in China.

    My plan is to stay home.

    Like

    Reply

  24. The New York Times on the economic collapse of Venezuela. Several times they mention that Venezuela has the world’s largest reserves of oil. Not once do they mention that their high cost of oil extraction exceeds what the global economy can afford to pay and still grow. Nor do they question why Venezuela’s abundant hydro electricity, by far the best type of renewable energy, is not powering them to prosperity.

    Once again the most important things to discuss are the only things that are not discussed. It’s amazing.

    Like

    Reply

  25. Ilargi with a nice summary of what we know about the coronavirus and the idiots in charge.

    https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2020/02/go-forth-and-multiply/

    We will now start to see the economic effects (you haven’t seen anything yet in that regard). More on that later. Rule of thumb: companies have 1-2 weeks of supplies in stock. Just-in-Time. Then they need more delivered. But the Chinese economy is on its last legs. Please don’t think it’s about Apple or some other major company. This is about a million smaller companies and (chain) stores in the west. What was it, 80% of US drugs come from China? Or was that just antibiotics?

    There are ways to minimize the damage a virus can do. Mankind as a whole, in the places where the proverbial chain literally is as strong as the weakest link, has not minimized it. Instead it has told the virus: “Go Forth and Multiply”. Prepare accordingly. If we’re lucky, this will die down and pass. But that’s the problem: it’ll happen only if we’re lucky, not because we’ve done all we know we could.

    Like

    Reply

  27. Hi Rob
    Talking of collapse themes in popular culture I am convinced that Game of Thrones was saturated in them. It was sold as a fast moving power struggle fantasy drama with surprising plot twists and quite a bit of the old how’s your father (not that that’s of much interest to a man of my advanced years).
    It was all of these things but as became increasingly clear over the series there were less obvious themes playing out. The power of fossil fuels and what they enable and what happens when they go, infrastructure collapse, climate change and the resulting migrations, incurable diseases, the absolute power of the central banks, diminishing returns on mineral deposits and the wars that result (I’m sure that there were more) all wrapped up in a big blanket of denial.
    I’ve not been able to bring myself to watch (must toughen up) the final series as apparently it has a surprisingly happy ending. It was not written by the original author. I don’t know why. Perhaps he couldn’t deal with what seemed to be the inevitable arc of the story? Anyway the product must get made.

    On another subject, and I would have thought as a Canadian of more direct interest to you, do you remember a couple of months ago when the Iranians shot down that Ukrainian plane. If I remember correctly many of the passengers were Canadian citizens of Iranian descent. Thinking about the Iranian Covid 19 outbreak I wonder how many of those flights there have been recently. I agree we’re getting better info from John Campbell (and Chris Martenson) than any other source.
    Anyway take care and thanks for continuing with the righteous fight against denial.

    Like

    Reply

    1. Hi Mick, thanks for stopping by.

      I’ve not yet watched Game of Thrones. It’s interesting and can’t be a coincidence that the top movie and the top TV series both have overshoot themes. I suspect that billions of years of evolution exposed to periodic scarcity bottlenecks has given our genes the ability to sense trouble.

      It would be interesting to compare common movie and TV themes from the 50’s and 60’s when climate change, peak oil, species extinction, and runaway debt were not yet things to worry about.

      With regards to the virus, here in British Columbia most everyone I talk to says “it’s no worse than the flu”. Seems our idiot officials have been successful at reinforcing denial. They should have shut down Vancouver airport to Asia a month ago, but they didn’t. Shame on them. There are now 7 cases confirmed in B.C.

      I screen capped this from Chris Martenson’s YouTube video yesterday…

      Like

      Reply

  28. With health and social unrest stories drawing our attention it is easy to forget that the climate is spinning out of control.

    If you’re looking for a good place to stay grounded in climate reality, my friend Panopticon publishes a daily summary of global climate weirdness.

    Panopticon in 2012 encouraged me to create this blog and write with my real name. I chuckle that he created his blog a few years later using a pseudonym.

    With just weeks left to go, the world is heading toward the warmest winter ever recorded as a strange brew of weather patterns at the top of the world combines with the mercury-boosting influence of climate change.

    https://climateandeconomy.com/2020/02/25/25th-feb-2020-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/

    Like

    Reply

  29. Dr. John Campbell explains that the WHO (World Health Organization) is a perfect example of reality denial.

    Those of us who have followed this outbreak from the beginning know that the WHO is primarily concerned with protecting their high paying comfortable jobs by telling our leaders what they want to hear, but is NOT concerned about public health.

    Isn’t it amazing that genetic reality denial can cause a health organization to disregard health?

    Like

    Reply

    1. Ilargi today also focuses on virus denial.

      Me, I don’t think the biggest issue with the virus is the number of deaths and cases, at least not in the short term. The biggest issue is that there is a virus on the loose than has proven it CAN be lethal, and for which there is no vaccine.

      The biggest issue is that we are stumbling woefully unprepared into the future, and therefore our only defense is to lock each other, and ourselves, up in our homes, (and our communities and cities if we’re lucky) until we can’t, social animals that we are.

      The biggest issue will not be the cases or even deaths, it will be that ever more of the things we have come to rely on far away lands for, will slowly cease to arrive on our shores. Some of it will be trinkets we never needed, but some of it will also be things without which our lives and communities can no longer function the way we’re used to.

      It will be a slow process. Or will it, nothing really moves slow with this virus; it appears to move in virus time, not human time.

      https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2020/02/its-the-virus-stupid/

      Like

      Reply

  30. This is a fascinating discussion of the repo market problems by some intelligent financial analysts who work near the epicenter. Pay attention to the wide array of fancy terminology they use for printing money without ever saying “printing money”. Not one of these rocket scientists understands what caused the problem, and not one of them understands the relationships between energy, wealth, growth, and debt. The monkeys in charge don’t know what they are doing.

    Like

    Reply

  31. Helicopter money begins. h/t Panopticon.

    Hong Kong is handing most of its residents a pile of cash to spend as it tries to save its slumping economy from the aftermath of protests and the coronavirus outbreak.

    The Asian financial hub said Wednesday that the measure — the cornerstone of a 120 billion Hong Kong dollar ($15.4 billion) stimulus package — will involve giving 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $1,280) to all permanent residents in the city who are at least 18. About seven million people will benefit from that program.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/hong-kong-is-giving-7-million-people-dollar1200-in-cash-to-boost-its-recession-hit-economy/ar-BB10pms1

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment