What are our leaders doing?

What force is powerful enough to synchronize every leader in almost every country to do the wrong thing on almost every covid action without assuming every leader is evil and/or stupid?

Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?

Let’s assume that most of our leaders are normal people, of average intelligence, with good intentions, and they care about the future of their children.

By normal I mean they are decent people with flaws, just like you and I.

By average intelligence I mean they probably have some high school level science, have read a few popular books, and maybe watched a few documentaries, but are not well grounded in the laws of physics, and their mathematics skills are modest at best. Like most people, they do not have a good understanding of energy and its relationship with everything, nor do they have a good grasp of what is technically feasible.

By good intentions I mean they want to do a good job for the people that elected them, while of course making a living, and perhaps providing some extras for their family if a benign opportunity arises, just as you or I would.

By caring about their children I mean they are genuinely worried about:

  • The threat of an economic crash caused by unsustainable debt and its associated everything bubble that is now flashing red and impossible to ignore.
  • The reality and threat of climate change that is now obvious to anyone that has been alive for more than a few decades.
  • Limits to growth. Our leader’s understanding of energy depletion is probably a mixed bag, as it is with our next door neighbors. Most leaders probably understand that fossil energy growth is no longer desirable, some may understand that fossil energy growth is no longer possible, most probably still hope the green energy story is true but are getting worried it may be false, and a tiny minority may understand the reality of peak oil and its implications.

Overlaying all of the above, our leaders, like most humans, have a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, which manifests as an optimism bias, and an inability to grasp the reality and implications of human overshoot. We can be fairly certain that none of our leaders have defective denial genes, which would permit them to see overshoot, because that would have prevented them from winning their election.

Given these assumptions about our leaders, which are probably true, what would we expect them to do?

Let’s start with what they’ve done to date:

  • Increased the debt and lowered the interest rate to buy time for someone to think of something.
  • Signed free trade agreements to squeeze more efficiency out of the global economy.
  • Subsidized surplus corn to stretch gasoline with ethanol.
  • Subsidized green energy and electric cars in the hope it would reduce fossil energy use. They don’t understand why, but they can see this strategy is not helping.
  • Invested a lot of money into nuclear fusion returning zero prospects of success.
  • Agreed with good intentions to many climate change protocols and subsequently learned it is impossible to fulfill those agreements without damaging the economy.
  • Continued heavy military spending, just in case.

I expect our leaders now understand that:

  • We are between a rock and a hard place. They don’t fully understand why we have reached limits to growth, nor can they due to their normal denial genes, but they do understand something must change soon.
  • Debt is a bomb waiting to explode. They can see the end of the runway with rising inflation.
  • Climate change is a really nasty problem. Consumption must go down, but that will crash the economy. Even with CO2 reductions, it’s too late to avoid refugees and starvation.
  • Avoiding damaging social unrest, and mitigating/reducing the coming suffering will require sacrifice and sharing between countries, which will require some form of global cooperation with tight control over citizens.

Those of us that have paid attention and not listened to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense. To be blunt, almost every action and policy has been wrong, in almost every country, and all of our leaders are synchronized, including their political opposition, almost without exception. How can this be? It’s simply not possible that all of our leaders are evil and/or stupid.

What force is powerful enough to have caused a diverse group of big ego leaders from many countries to cooperate on a secret plan that no one discusses? What force is powerful enough to have caused them to do things that under normal circumstances would have been blocked by their good ethics and character?

We know the various central banks have been working as a team since at least the 2008 GFC to keep the global wheels on. Recall that in the 2008 aftermath it was disclosed that we were hours away from a collapse of the banking system had the US congress not approved the bailout. The stresses and pressures in the system today are MUCH higher than they were in 2008 because we fixed a too much debt problem by adding a lot more debt.

In 2019 something in the global plumbing was beginning to break and it came to a head in September with a crisis in the repo market. The central banks together decided what needed to be done and the head of each central bank sat down with the leader of their country and spelled out the reality that an imminent “recession”, if not averted, would likely take out modern civilization due to the global debt bubble and lack of growth.

I imagine they said something like, “we need an excuse to print a gazillion dollars, and we’re going to need a digital currency soon that restricts many freedoms, and we might fail so you should think about a plan B for controlling social unrest. We think a not so serious global pandemic exaggerated into a panic is the perfect cover to accomplish all of this.”

No other force is powerful enough to explain the behavior we observe. It explains everything, including why no one talks about it, because if they did it would cause panic in the markets, which would harm themselves and their children. This also thankfully means we can continue to assume that most (not all) of our leaders are decent people like you and I.

The covid pandemic provided:

  • A reason for everyone from all political persuasions to support printing and handing out trillions of dollars to avoid a “recession”.
  • A means via lockdowns of reducing energy and materials consumption, and restricting freedom of movement and assembly, that can be invoked as needed without causing the panic that disclosing the end of growth would cause.
  • A reason for creating the infrastructure and social behaviors necessary for a digital currency via vaccine passports. A digital currency will be very helpful for implementing negative interest rates needed to avoid a Minsky Moment, and for rationing food and energy, and for preventing bank runs. The path they chose was to require all citizens to be injected with a substance and to carry proof via a vaccine passport. I expect they hoped the injected substance would be harmless with some tangible benefit but it appears their hopes have been dashed by Murphy’s Law and inadequate time for testing.
  • Most powerful countries agreed to this plan. The US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia are all on board. As is China who engineered the virus with funding from the US, and which influenced the WHO to ensure global spread of the virus in the early days.
  • Russia refused to join the plan, perhaps after calculating that with its healthy ratio of natural resources to population, modest debt, food self-sufficiency, and citizens capable of enduring some hardship, they will be better off charting an independent path.
  • The collaborating leaders viscerally hate Putin for not being a team player and are attempting to cause a regime change in Russia by provoking Russia into an expensive war and by applying economic sanctions. As with covid, it seems this plan is failing so we should expect a Plan B soon.
  • A new repo crisis began in 2022 and so Monkeypox was introduced just in case another pandemic is required to get the financial system under control.

Finally, we can now answer another burning question:

  • Why has no one figured out what’s going on, including normally intelligent alt-media?
  • Because to understand requires acceptance of the end of growth and overshoot, and that’s not possible for most people due to our species’ tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT theory.
  • For those that don’t believe the official covid narrative, it’s ok to blame corrupt pharma, or a scheming WEF, but it’s not ok to blame overshoot.

Let’s hope Plan B does not involve nuclear weapons but does have something to do with humane population reduction.

573 thoughts on “What are our leaders doing?”

  1. I’m reading The Carnivore Diet by Dr Shawn Baker. Interesting. Apparently you don’t get scurvy after all if you don’t eat your vegetables. There are quite a few cultures that eat meat exclusively, not just the Inuit. Dr Baker makes a case that we are more carnivore than omnivore and only became omnivorous by necessity due to depleting all the big game.

    It’s got me thinking about what a sustainable society would actually look like. If we all ate only meat the population would have to be a small fraction of what it is today.

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    1. I think even vegetarian farmer’s will require livestock for fertilizer when the natural gas for Haber-Bosch is gone.

      The recent interview of Jason Bradford by Nate Hagens on sustainable agriculture was excellent. Jason doesn’t discuss the livestock/fertilizer issue but did argue that livestock historically was the buffer used to survive a bad crop due to weather, blight, etc.

      https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/24-jason-bradford

      On this episode, Jason Bradford, who is an author, activist, farmer, and teacher, talks about the energy intensity of our modern industrial agriculture system.

      How do we feed billions of people with depleting energy systems? How do we also protect existing biodiversity and ecosystem health? We also discuss what makes for healthy soil, why we’re losing it, and how small farms can help get it back – while creating higher yields of healthier foods for fewer inputs.

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  2. Tim Watkins is good today. He takes a deep dive into our options for responding to energy depletion and concludes we won’t choose the path that minimizes suffering.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/06/24/choose-one-bad-option-or-get-them-all/

    If we had true leaders – rather than the basket of sociopaths, spivs, clowns and gentlemen whose proper place is in a care home for dementia – we would be actively planning and discussing what kind of economy is possible within the limits of the energy and resources available to us, and how we might get there without starving or otherwise euthanising perhaps two-thirds of the current population. Instead, the only “plan” on the table is Herr Schwab’s Great Green New Reset which, absent some yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source, breaks so many of the laws of physics that only a lunatic or an economist would believe it possible.

    Unfortunately, a large number of the sociopaths who do think it is possible to defy gravity are in charge of central bank monetary policy and government energy policy. And so, rather than a clear understanding of our predicament together with policy decisions designed to mitigate the gathering storm, we can look forward to outdated economic theories and magic thinking combining to produce the worst of all worlds – one where mass starvation and hypothermia are all too likely. And worse of all, they will fail in their own terms. Because both the debt mountain and the supposed wealth based upon it are entirely dependent upon continued real economic growth which is now impossible.

    Of course, real wealth can outlive an economic crash. A factory, a power station or a railway still exists after the company which owns it goes bust. The question is whether neoliberal governments can be persuaded to intervene to recapitalise them before someone else turns them into scrap. But this requires a degree of intervention that conservatives tend to reject and a type of intervention that socialists tend to oppose. Because the issue at hand is about determining which infrastructure is critical and which we can allow to fail. And this, in turn, requires a degree of hard-headedness that few politicians are capable of deploying. Instead, in the short-term we can look forward to the rapid push to introduce central bank digital currencies so that they can turn interest rates negative once it becomes obvious that we face the biggest slump in living memory.

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  3. Heinberg today also laments our lack of wisdom.

    https://richardheinberg.com/museletter-352-the-1970s-again

    Are the 2020s just like the 1970s? If only! If our problems now were on the same scale as they were then, we would have a much better chance of solving them.

    If we want future generations to thrive, and if we want to minimize the suffering of those alive today, then we will have to confront some unpleasant realities that we have ignored too long. Yet, if we were unable to confront them when we had far more surplus (in terms of energy, materials, and ecological breathing space), and more willingness to compromise, why would be able to confront them more successfully in a politically fraught era of cascading crises?

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  4. Excellent rant from Kunstler today. His rage is appropriate and he included only one sentence of political crap which I deleted.

    Kunstler too is searching for a plausible explanation of our unprecedented insanity. He doesn’t include on the menu my hypothesis that covid was intended to try to prevent an economic collapse, and if unsuccessful, to put in place tools that will useful for maintaining social order after the collapse.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-the-wicked-try-to-flee/

    You may be wondering these days if our country can get any crazier. The FDA and the CDC seem bent on killing and maiming as many Americans as possible. Proof (not just evidence, you understand) abounds that Pfizer and Moderna mRNA “vaccines” don’t work and are grossly unsafe. If the people who run these agencies don’t know that, then there has never been a lazier, less competent, worse-informed executive crew running anything in the history of Western Civ.

    So, they press on now with shots for little children that are certain to harm the kids’ immune systems and produce an array of consequent serious disorders ranging from hepatitis to myocarditis to sterility to brain damage. You’d think that if mere rumors of these things reached their ears and eyeballs, these executives would at least pause their injection program to investigate. There is really no analog in history for authorities who act this blindly homicidal.

    The Nazis murdered targeted groups for deliberate eugenic purposes, vicious as they were, and made it clear why they were doing it — at least among themselves — while they did it. Stalin killed his perceived political enemies and then killed masses randomly to hold the soviet populace in thrall to his rule. There’s a name for that: despotic cruelty. Mao Zedong revved up his murder campaigns and cultural revolutions to desperately hold on to his slip-sliding autocratic power. Pol Pot killed people who wore eyeglasses and read books because they were capable of figuring shit out — like, what Pol Pot was up to.

    Dr. Anthony Fauci (White House Medical Advisor), Dr. Rochelle Walensky (CDC), and Dr. Robert M. Califf (FDA) are killing and harming Americans because… apparently, they don’t know why. As the old saw goes: they know not what they do. Or is that so? Is it even possible anymore? One must suppose it is possible if they are insane, which, you also understand, does not preclude them from being evil, too.

    Ms. Walensky says repeatedly that they are looking at or waiting on “the data.” No, she’s not. She’s just saying that, as if reciting a magic incantation that can deflect culpability. The data are in plain sight, not even hiding. The data are all over the world: this country, the UK, Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Israel, Cuba, South Africa, Australia, name a country. The data are turning up now in respected medical journals, many news websites, substacks, and blogs, as well, even, here and there, in what we call mainstream media. A lot of the data until very recently were getting published in the agencies own collection organs, but they deliberately stopped it.

    The data tell us that people who got “vaccinated” and “boosted” are turning up with broken immune systems that leave them extra-specially open to repeated Covid-19 re-infection, and that each reiteration of the illness breaks down their immune systems even more — which suggests that over time (think: the months ahead) more and more of them are going to die from all kinds of opportunistic viral and bacterial diseases, not to mention cancers, structural damage due to blood clots, heart tissue injury directly from spike proteins, and brain-and-neuro illness, ditto.

    Do you believe that the authorities somehow missed all this? Are they trying to pretend that they didn’t (take your pick): 1) fecklessly promote the biggest compound medical blunder in history? 2) conspire with pharma companies in a dastardly racketeering scheme? 3) carry out the orders of some shady, malevolent elite to cull the human population under a depraved, messianic, crypto-eco ideology? or 4) just…reasons….

    Before too much longer they’ll have to tell us. At this point, resigning in order to just slink away from the scene of the crime is probably not possible. Francis Collins tried to step down from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) late last year, but we’ll know how to find him, and we certainly know what he did in enabling the creation of the Covid-19 pandemic and then its supposed savior “vaccines.” This is true, by the way, across the entire medical profession, including doctors, hospital directors, and, of course, the pharma executives. They’ll have to answer for why they continued vaxxing the public when caution was indicated (primum non nocere — first do no harm), and how come they stupidly and / or maliciously suppressed cheap and effective early treatment drugs.

    The absurd grifting machine of American medicine is collapsing anyway, along with just about every other system we depend on. So maybe the doctors and the public health officials think that if they can delay acknowledging the obvious a few months longer, there will be no institutions left standing in the USA to adjudicate their crimes. Possible but not likely.

    There’s already plenty of data showing an abnormal rise of all-causes deaths in many countries. The life-insurance companies have been reporting it for months. But the acquired immunodeficiency of the “vaccinated” will become too tangible and visible as the network effect takes hold and evermore Americans realize that people are dying all around them, loved ones, friends, friends of friends, celebrities in the news. Inevitably that would produce some kind of social panic — and at exactly the same time that gasoline and diesel fuel grow unaffordable or scarce, every conceivable product vanishes from the store shelves, the financial markets crater, and [political crap deleted].

    Even under those dire circumstances realize this: there will still be a lot of people left in this country who are not vaccinated, not sick, and not insane — millions — and they are the ones who are going to keep the project of civilization alive here, including bringing judgment upon those who set into motion all the aforementioned calamities and wickedness.

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  5. The end must be nigh. Quiet doomers are coming out of dormancy and stepping up their game.

    Today it’s Xraymike79’s turn with an analysis of Nate Hagen’s interview with Peter Ward.

    https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2022/06/23/ticking-off-the-checklist-for-mass-extinction/

    If one were to equate Earth’s geologic history to a calendar year, modern humans have been around for a mere 37 minutes while managing to consume 1/3rd of Earth’s natural resources in just the last 0.2 seconds. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 83% since prehistory and it is projected that by 2050 humans will have eliminated 38–46% of all biodiversity from the planet. 70% of the planet’s land area has been altered by humans, with 40% considered degraded. By 2050, an area of land the size of South America will be further degraded. Nearly all of the marine biosphere has been degraded.

    Today we are pumping heat trapping gases into the atmosphere nine to tens times higher than during the PETM extinction. We are just four generations away from matching the chemical composition of the atmosphere that caused that die-off event. However, we are already seeing major changes in the Earth’s climate system that align with the third step toward a mass extinction. Proxy data (like coral data, ocean sediments, and land-based data) along with modern-day instrumentation show an intense weakening of the AMOC, Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, in the past 200 years. And the Gulf Steam, a component of the AMOC, is also showing signs of collapse. We are in the process of turning off the global ocean conveyor belt that keeps the ocean oxygenated and helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Ocean acidity has increased about 30% from preindustrial times to the early 21st century, a pace faster than any known in Earth’s geologic past. The volume of anoxic ocean waters has quadrupled since the 1960s, and evidence suggests that temperature increases explain about 50% of oxygen loss in the upper 1000 meters of the ocean. Ocean stratification due to climate change has increased 18% in the top 150 meters of the oceans since 1960. Stratified ocean layers have a number of negative effects such as preventing the mixing and transport of heat, carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nutrients to the lower depths of the oceans.

    …the most recent report on sea level rise states that it is accelerating with an increase of one foot expected along U.S. coasts by 2050. And that is only if emissions are curbed now. Otherwise, expect up to 5 feet. The researchers say that one foot of SLR over the next three decades is equal to the total that occurred over the past century. Just one foot of vertical rise in sea level will swallow up 100 feet of shoreline if the slope is just 1% or more, a typical slope for most coastlines. To make matters worse, most coastal cities are sinking at a rate faster than the seas are rising. Thus within the next few decades, we could see several hundred feet of shoreline swallowed up along coasts of America and around the world, creating the largest human migration in history. Ward believes we’ll have six feet of sea level rise by 2080 which will destroy a big percentage of the world’s rice production, primarily through salinization. Rice is the number one food source for a majority of the world population today. Sea level rise alone could devastate global trade, not to mention the inevitable damage to ports from stronger storms.

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    1. I re-listened to Nate Hagen’s interview with Peter Ward. It’s both excellent and dire. It’d easy to forget how important the oceans are in our overshoot story.

      Peter Ward is highly intelligent and aware, and yet he makes this jarring statement about covid at the 41 minute mark:

      How could we as a species have taken something so simple as masks and turned it into a political point where the level of ignorance will kill you, will kill you!

      It’s remarkable because there is zero science to support the mask polices that were put in place. There is some benefit from N95 masks worn by people trained in their use, but no benefit from the masks we were required by law to wear.

      Later in the interview Ward mentioned that he is completely disconnected from social media and it seems to me that this is a good example of how effectively our leaders controlled the conventional information channels. Without access to uncensored information, people have no clue that everything they were told about covid is wrong.

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    1. Hi Rob, since you don’t have Facebook, I though I would share this here. Will Falk has written an excellent piece on exactly this topic. Here’s his website by the way: http://willfalk.org/about/

      An Ecological Basis for Ensuring the Right to Abortion

      (I recognize that I am a man. I will never confront a decision about abortion. I am not trying to tell women what to do with the following. I am, however, humbly trying to offer an argument for enforcing women’s rights to full reproductive freedom that is rooted in neither political or religious ideology, but in ecological reality.)

      “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Aldo Leopod, A Sand County Almanac

      The global economy – the system that brings most humans the basic necessities of life (food, water, clothing shelter) – is based on, and would collapse very quickly without, the ever-growing consumption of non-renewable resources and the over-exploitation of renewable resources. Fossil fuel consumption is one example (though it is not by any means the only example). Most of the time when we think of fossil fuel consumption we think of tail-pipe emissions from personal automobiles because that is the most overt example of most individuals’ direct use of fossil fuels. But, fueling personal automobiles, of course, is only one way fossil fuels prop up the global economy.

      Fossil fuels are essential to the global food supply, for example. The world’s topsoil is also essential to the global food supply and is another one of those non-renewable resources that the planet is rapidly running out of. Humans have postponed the worst effects of local and regional topsoil deficits through the use of fossil-fuel based fertilizers like nitrogen fixers. Fossil fuels are also essential for processes like transporting food from where it’s grown to places humans need that food, for the manufacture and operation of the machines needed to harvest crops supporting humans, etc.

      We are depleting many nonrenewable resources like topsoil and fossil fuels at an intensifying pace. This consumption of resources is driven, if not primarily, at least significantly by a human population that is growing exponentially. Basic algebra teaches us that the infinite use of a finite resource, the ever-growing use of a non-renewable resource, leads to the total loss of that resource. In other words, topsoil, fossil fuels, and other non-renewables we are currently losing will not be replaced. (Topsoil takes thousands of years to regenerate. Perhaps it will regenerate in several millennia but that doesn’t help creatures alive and suffering on earth today or for the next several millennia. It certainly doesn’t help any unborn children for the next few thousand years.)

      Human population has doubled since 1968 and has grown by 40% since 1987. It appears that human population growth might have slowed from 2% per year for the last 50 years to around 1% per year in recent years. However, all that means is the rate of growth is slowing. It does not mean human population is decreasing.

      There’s another aspect to the problem. The rate of resource consumption similarly appears to be increasing. Many mainstream studies estimate that while human population doubled in the last half-century, resource consumption quadrupled. So, each human today, on average, is using 4 times the amount of resources that each human was using in 1970. Right now there are more and more humans using more and more of the natural world that can never be replaced.

      This reality means that humans who follow us (the population of which will only be made larger by making it more difficult for women to access abortions) will not only be part of a much larger population, those humans will use more resources than they are today – all while there will be less and less of those resources available.

      A primary argument offered by anti-abortionists revolves around the right of a fetus to life. I should note that I am uncomfortable with the distinctions and hierarchies of life that many humans use to justify their position on abortion one way or the other. To me, this argument gets too close to arguments about why animals and other creatures should or should not have rights based on how closely they resemble adult humans. It gets too close to the arguments made by human supremacists seeking to justify the destruction of the natural world because, for them, only humans are truly alive.

      So, I’ll take it as a given that a fetus is alive, a person even. Anti-abortionists then argue that a mother’s right to an abortion should not trump a fetus’ right to live. This of course ignores the danger pregnancy threatens a mother’s life with, too.

      However, I’ll set that argument aside too because ecological reality undermines the anti-abortionist argument about a fetus’ right to life on its own terms. How?

      Quite simply, the vast majority of humans alive today (and the vast majority of unborn fetuses that are not aborted tomorrow) survive by stealing from the future. The laws of ecology which are as immutable as the laws of physics illustrate how this is true.

      Generally, whenever a population of any species overshoots the carrying capacity of that species’ habitat, a crash always follows. It is not a question of if a crash will follow, it is only a question of when. And, to make matters worse, when the carrying capacity of a certain habitat is overshot, carrying capacity is permanently eroded. The longer a population exists in overshoot, the more carrying capacity is destroyed. The inevitable crash happens. And, the population, whenever it stabilizes, will be far less than the carrying capacity that existed prior to overshoot.

      Ecologists and other scientists have known for decades that human population has overshot Earth’s carrying capacity for humans. The Earth’s carrying capacity for humans is the maximum population of humans which the Earth can support indefinitely. Overshoot is the condition of having exceeded for the time being the permanent carrying capacity of Earth. Human overshoot has created a carrying capacity deficit, a condition where the Earth’s permanent ability to support human life is less than the quantity of humans already in existence. The Earth’s carrying capacity for humans has been temporarily extended by drawdown. Drawdown has been achieved by extracting resources necessary for human life that cannot be replaced. This drawdown will lead to a crash and a permanent carrying capacity deficit.

      The harsh truth, for humans alive today, is that a population crash is coming. Meanwhile, more and more humans are being born who will depend on, and contribute to, the permanent destruction of resources that future humans require. These humans are more likely than we are to experience the horrors of that population crash. How horrific will that crash be? Mainstream estimates of the Earth’s carrying capacity for humans often range in the hundreds of millions. There are nearly 8 billion humans alive today. The die-off will likely be massive.

      The vast majority of humans alive and/or born today are quite literally stealing from the future. The vast majority of human fetuses that survive today are quite literally ensuring that many human fetuses in the future will not even have the opportunity to survive.

      Ecological reality, therefore, undermines the argument that abortion infringes on the rights of unborn children because most children born today (especially in developed countries like the US) will consume and permanently destroy resources that future unborn children desperately need. Indeed, in industrialized countries most children born today reduce the number of children that can be supported in the future. Therefore, enforcing an unborn fetus’ right to life today comes at the costs of unborn fetuses right to life tomorrow.

      Epilogue: My argument here focuses on effects to humans because I know most humans only care about humans. But, a biophilic reader, while reading my arguments, could (and should) point out that humans are destroying the Earth’s carrying capacity for everyone else we share this beautiful planet with. Right now, industrial humans aren’t just destroying countless other-than-human lives and species, industrial humans are rapidly destroying the very possibility that those creatures can exist in the future.

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      1. Thanks! Good to see someone cut through the political and religious bullshit and get to the ethical core.

        Given our state of extreme overshoot, every birth that we humanely prevent means one less person suffers.

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  10. Sabine Hossenfelder today on bee health. Her key conclusions are:
    1) ecological systems are much more complex than quantum gravity;
    2) honey bees are not at risk because they are a farmed commodity with a price, what’s at risk are natural resources that we exploit without cost or attention to the consequences, like wild bees.

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  11. Geert Vanden Bossche updated his advice today.

    Notice that this expert branded as an antivaxxer is recommending people be vaccinated with vaccines that are safe and effective.

    Also note that Bossche is advising those who have already been vaccinated with an unsafe and ineffective vaccine to have antivirals on hand because their immune systems have been damaged.

    https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/open-letter-advice-gvb

    I am finalizing my analysis on the immune-epidemiologic consequences of the mass vaccination program. It will shed light on how the emergence of globally ongoing / starting epidemics of several different infectious diseases (meningococcal, TB, HIV, Herpetic diseases, etc.) as well as that of 2 major pandemics (even if not yet officially declared as pandemics), i.e., Monkeypox and Avian Flu are related to the mass vax program.

    Basically, the enhanced susceptibility of vaccinees to SC-2 (which results from their infection-enhancing vaccinal antibodies) sufficiently exhausts the innate and adaptive immune system to lower the population’s immune defense down to a level where these microorganisms can spread in the population. I will explain this in more detail but for now, I strongly advice all people who didn’t get the shot to:

    – take extreme care of their health and lifestyle,

    – not vaccinate against seasonal Influenza (!!) as this will only make you more susceptible to avian Flu (because of ADEI),

    – for all those who didn’t get it in the past: get sooner or later the live attenuated, replication-competent smallpox vaccine (not yet available in sufficient supply but the expansion of smallpox is slower than that of avian Flu, so hope that this will allow for enough time to scale up production)

    – make sure your young children do NOT get vaccinated with any of the C-19 vaccines (under no circumstances!) but get them properly vaccinated with the live attenuated childhood vaccines: Measles, mumps, rubella, varicella, as I predict that outbreaks will occur in countries / regions where herd immunity has dropped below the threshold

    – not worry too much about C-19; most of us now have a level of trained innate immunity or even natural immunity that will protect us from moderate (and certainly from severe) disease. The situation will only further improve as the virus continues to select more resistant immune escape variants. I predict that even the unvaccinated vulnerable people will become less and less susceptible, but for now, some may still be vulnerable if they haven’t gotten any SC-2-infection experience yet.

    – Avoid travel to other countries and follow the situation in your own region / country and also worldwide, especially re: avian influenza

    – Consider removing your parents from the nursing home as we are up for outbreaks of RSV and seasonal Flu and having vulnerable people concentrated in the same place is just going to make it worse. Nevertheless, even the elderly and vulnerable people should stay away from seasonal Flu shots as they could be a death sentence if one gets hit by avian flu (ADEI!).

    – As already mentioned, I strongly recommend all fully vaccinated people to ensure access to antivirals.

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  13. In case anyone was wondering what happened to RE of the Doomstead Diner, this is the most recent update I could find. He’s had some serious health problems and is struggling.

    The Doomstead Diner blog has shut down due to a lack of donations. I never did participate there because I tried to educate RE on MORT and he blew me off.

    https://globalcollapse.createaforum.com/general-discussion/following-in-the-footsteps-of-the-doomstead-diner/

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    1. Thanks Rob,
      A couple of years ago I used to comment on Doomstead Diner occasionally. The regulars there were a pretty polarized opinionated crowd. I know RE could be difficult to deal with but I had nothing respect for what he had done. I looked at the link you put up and he still appears active there but there isn’t much commenting. T\ns if given a logical/rational set of facts and arguments.
      AJ

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      1. That last line of my comment was supposed to say “I like this site because most people present logical/rational sets of facts and arguments.”

        That said, I hate my 5 year old hand down from one of my kid’s laptop computer . . . it takes every errant keystroke (or mere touching of the built in touchpad) and translates it into crap that screws up what I have typed (as above). BUT at this stage in my life and considering that if collapse gains speed having a great computer is kinda meaningless.
        AJ

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  14. I watch Russell Brand on YouTube occasionally. He has a different perspective on a lot of issues including covid. He has some interesting folk on his podcast but I no longer listen to those since he went to a subscription based platform.

    This video came up in my YouTube feed so I watched for interest. Apparently we should blame globalisation. the relationship between state and corporations, and the main stream media. It’s definitely not a scarcity issue.

    He has 5.7 million subscribers with the majority of comments along the lines of “thanks for speaking the truth”. I thought about commenting to put forward another narrative like maybe overshoot and peak oil influences but decided not to. With 3500 commenters bowing at the alter of Russell (he is religious) after the video had only been up 2 hours I figured it was a waste of time.

    Globalisation. the relationship between state and corporations, and the main stream media are his go to route causes on almost every video he posts and while I agree with a lot of the issues he brings up I think he’s also, maybe inadvertently, playing to the human trait of “we just want someone to blame” to gather subscribers. Anyway I came away thinking there are a lot of people in the world who will suffer in the collapse while continuing to shake their fists at the elite as they go down.

    I’m off out to the preparation tasks on the land while the winter sun is shining.

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    1. Globalisation, state, corporations, and the main stream media are superficially plausible to blame and are not unpleasant topics because (we think) we can do something about them.

      Geologic depletion of a non-renewable and non-substitutable resource that everything we value depends on is deeply unpleasant because there’s nothing we can do about it except change our lifestyles and reduce our population.

      Nate Hagens thinks it’s energy blindness and he blames a lack of education.

      I think it’s clearly a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities because it’s everywhere you look, regardless of intelligence or education.

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  15. I’m watching like a hawk for evidence that supports my theory that covid was cover for central banks to try to prevent an economic collapse, and in case they failed, to put in place tools for maintaining social order post collapse.

    I listened to an interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a lead author on the Great Barrington Declaration, who said at the start of covid they were aggressively censored for opposing lockdowns. Vaccine safety/effectiveness and early treatment were not in play so you can’t blame pharma influence. This supports my hypothesis that in the early days the priorities were 1) a reason to print a gazillion dollars and 2) lockdowns to reduce energy consumption.

    I listened to an interview with Dr. Peter McCullough who said that today all forms of early treatment, including those recently released and protected by pharma patents, are being blocked in favor of vaccines, despite overwhelming evidence that the vaccines have a very poor benefit/cost ratio today. This supports my hypothesis that vaccine policies are not driven by pharma grift or public health objectives, rather are primarily a vehicle for introducing social control leading to digital currencies.

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  16. Brilliant expert or crazy crank? We have an opportunity here to test Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche.

    In this June 19, 2022 interview Bossche makes many specific predictions, one of which is that hospitals will collapse from overload within a few weeks or months. “Few” is fuzzy but since he said “weeks or months” I suggest we give him until September 1, 2022.

    I’m going to listen to it again because he makes many other predictions including 1) more cancer in the vaccinated; 2) this could be the end of western civilization (Africa will do best because they are least vaccinated).

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    2. So, if his predictions don’t come true, I predict that almost all of his current adherents will continue to advocate his hypotheses. I hope he’s wrong and I hope I’m wrong.

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      1. I predict if Bossche’s right all of the people who think he’s wrong will blame the unvaccinated rather than the vaccines, and our leaders will double down on pushing more vaccinations.

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          1. We keep getting headlines here like this one..
            https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-flu-health-worker-shortages-minister-andrew-little-says-system-as-a-whole-is-managing/PFQ4FIRNSYBVRKK3P4UTP366IA/

            I know the media like to over hype things but a lot of these calls seem to be from people in the medical profession while the government continues to downplay the situation. It’s probably complex with lack of investment in the health system by successive governments also being a significant issue.

            I do know the mandating of vaccinations for health workers has meant job losses. We had a friend stay recently who was a nurse who got covid early in 2020 in Australia. Once she’d recovered and returned to work she was given all the suspected covid cases until they tested negative. She said no people she looked after actually tested positive. I’m not sure of the number but she was working through until the vaccine was rolled out and when she opted out of vaccination, partly because of the adverse reaction cases she was seeing, she lost her job. She’s desperately disappointed to not be able to do the job that gives her a real sense of purpose.

            We also had a video circulating online here recently from a nurse who had a severe myocarditis reaction to the second vaccine shot. They’re now mandating boosters for health workers and when she refused based on her previous reaction she lost her job. She was distraught.

            Like vaccinating kids these decisions / rules also make no sense and add to pressures on the health system.

            Mike might have more insights here than me. I haven’t looked into our data in any depth.

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            1. Well, there don’t appear to be significant safety concerns in the latest vaccine safety report with “only” 3 deaths likely to have been caused by the vaccine (over 11 million doses administered) and serious reported events not significantly higher than expected numbers normally. The next report is imminent, so we’ll see if anything has changed.

              I’ve never been a fan of vaccine mandates, especially given the lack of efficacy with them over omicron. But I know I wouldn’t like to be the one having to make such decisions.

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              1. For the thirty reasons I listed in the next post, of which adverse event data was one, I no longer believe a word any of our authorities now say. Before I would trust a report like the one you provided, I would need to spend days digging and have access to the source raw data. None of our leaders have any credibility.

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                1. I haven’t read your next post yet but I would tend to agree with this comment. The problem is, then, that we have no such access to the raw data, so there isn’t much we can say, definitively, that is backed by data. I’m disgusted with our Ministry of Health because they seem to have chosen to publish data in such a way as to make calculations on vaccine efficacy impossible. However, it is very odd, indeed, that what they do publish actually serves to suggest there is no point in further vaccination. Is the real picture even worse?

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    1. On this topic, I still have my copy of “When the People Bubble POPs” by Dr. Jack Kevorkian (often portrayed in the media as Dr. Death).

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    2. I did miss it, thank you.

      Good on Alice Friedemann for speaking up.

      I do think the 20 reasons Alice lists for why we don’t discuss over population are all enabled by our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities as explained by Varki’s MORT theory.

      For many years I volunteered at planned parenthood, zero population growth, and the Sierra Club action groups on population, because this is the ONLY way to reduce the 9 existential threats we face: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, erosion of topsoil, depletion of fresh water, ozone depletion, land-use change, altered bio-geochemical cycles from overuse of fertilizers, ocean acidification, chemical pollution, atmospheric aerosol loading, and the phosphorus cycle (Steffen et al 2015, Rockström J et al 2009). Not to mention fewer traffic jams, less noise pollution — can you think of a single problem that wouldn’t be helped by fewer people?

      Fossil fuels are how we were able to exceed these boundaries and overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, with world population growing from 400 million before coal to 8+ billion today. But it looks like world oil production of both conventional and unconventional peaked in 2018, coal in 2013, and possibly natural gas in 2019, almost as serious as peak oil, since fertilizers are not only made out of natural gas, but use natural gas to create the tremendous heat and pressure to get inert nitrogen in the air to combine with the hydrogen in natural gas — fertilizer that keeps at least 4 billion of us alive today (Fisher 2001; Smil 2004; Stewart et al. 2005; Erisman et al. 2008).

      Today the Supreme court undid Roe V Wade, at a time when the carrying capacity of the planet is about to go back to 500 million people and birth control and abortion are the only way to get there besides the four horsemen of the apocalypse…

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  19. Similar to your Overpopulation Denial post from 2017 Rob. That had a response to a very similar post from Alice back in 2017.

    https://un-denial.com/2016/03/25/overpopulation-denial/

    You added your theory that… “continued growth of the population via immigration became necessary to maintain some overall economic growth despite falling real incomes for individuals.”

    I see that reliance on immigration here in NZ where until covid appeared successive governments had enabled historically high net migration rates for the previous decade. They then promoted how strong our economy was. Our previous prime minister worked for Merrill Lynch. Our current prime minister is a career policy advisor and politician who was once the president of the International Union of Socialist Youth and part of Mr Schwab’s Young Global Leaders alumni.

    I don’t really know where I’m going with this other than all roads lead to overshoot and denial of reality 🙂.

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    1. I forgot I wrote that essay Campbell, thanks for dredging it up. Five years later I don’t think I’d change much if I wrote it again today.

      I maintain that if you are overshoot aware and have not yet given up and still want to make the future less bad, like for example Nate Hagens and Alice Friedemann, then it doesn’t matter how many dozens of clever theories you discover to explain the causes of overshoot, unless you FIRST acknowledge and confront MORT you will fail.

      This essay I wrote on the un-Denial Decision Tree explains more thoroughly:
      https://un-denial.com/2020/10/23/the-un-denial-decision-tree/

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  20. Chris Martenson may have read my post above that started this comment thread, or more likely he independently came to the same conclusions as I did because there is no other conclusion one can draw from the evidence unless you assume all of our leaders are evil and/or stupid.

    Martenson does a nice job of analyzing the Great Reset although he puts a spin on it that I’m sure sells subscriptions but I think is disingenuous when you understand how deeply rooted most citizens are in denial of overshoot.

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  21. Wonderful intelligent thoughtful interview with Dr. Phillip Altman on the insane Australian covid policies.

    One point that stood out for me was that Australian authorities knew the safety and effectiveness of Ivermectin despite calling it dangerous and banning it’s use, which is more evidence in support of my hypothesis.

    I began to summarize other key points but it’s too much work because he makes so many good points that support my hypothesis. Just watch it.

    And watch his demeanor. He’s an expert with strong ethics that’s been studying covid for 3+ hours every day for 2 years and his brain can’t fathom the insanity of what our leaders have done and continue to do. It’s like he’s in shock.

    Dr. Phillip Altman has a Bachelor of Pharmacy (Hons), a Bachelor and Masters of Science and a Doctor of Philosophy. He has worked as a clinical trial and regulatory affairs pharmaceutical industry consultant with more than 40 years’ experience in designing, managing and reporting clinical trials. Dr. Altman has dealt extensively with the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration throughout his career.

    Dr Altman has worked for, and consulted to, most of the international pharmaceuticals represented in Australia. He was fundamental in the establishment of the Australian Regulatory and Clinical Scientists Association (ARCS), which is a peak educational forum for more than 2000 clinical and regulatory scientists working within the Australian pharmaceutical industry. He has Life Membership of this Association.

    https://amps.redunion.com.au/blog/episode9_phillip_altman

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    1. Altman makes a key statement at the end: “The TGA (Australian health authorities) are very capable and know the information but are under enormous pressure both nationally and internationally to act in certain ways. They are very competent. I’ve dealt with them for decades.”

      This is not pharma corruption.
      This is not stupidity.
      This is not incompetence.
      This is (was?) not evil.
      This is a global plan to prevent and/or to prepare for an economic collapse (aka The Great Reset).

      You could argue that some evil (and/or fear of being strung up) is present today now that we have 12 months of data that shows the gene inoculations are not safe as was originally hoped.

      Regardless, given what we know today, pushing for children to be vaccinated IS fucking evil. If my hypothesis that vaccination was a path to a digital currency is correct, why push for children? Children don’t need access to currency. It won’t necessarily eliminate a control group. Children could be vaccinated when they grow up. Children getting sick and dying from adverse reactions will significantly increase the risk of authorities being strung up.

      The children policy doesn’t fit in my story. I don’t understand.

      Ideas?

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      2. The children’s policy doesn’t fit in my story. I don’t understand. Ideas?

        My guesses:

        We’re two and half years in and nobody has been strung up yet, they’re not concerned about it perhaps? It takes healthy, clear-headed peeps to organize resistance, how many of those are there these days?

        I’ve read that 1/3 of parents “definitely won’t” vax their kids (here in the US at least), if nothing else it helps identify Team Resistance?

        They’re denying that getting strung up is even a possibility?

        By the way, in regard to vax manufacturers, what happened to J&J in all of this? Looks like they’ve been put on the back burner, see the bottom of this post:

        https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/how-fda-s-approaching-covid-19-vaccines-kids-under-5

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  22. You know we are out of oil when Saudi Arabia is bleating on about green energy and embarking on end-of-empire projects. Also I don’t know how they’re going to maintain the grass and trees in this plan considering they drained their aquifer in the 80s

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      1. Yes 99% of their population are city dwellers apparently. The only country in the world without a river. Their population is a disaster waiting to happen 😦

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        1. Speaking of SA, this from the “mad money” department:

          The Saudis just started a golf league, the LIV Tour and they’re stealing PGA players away with huge sign-on bonuses. “Sportswashing”- using sport (and cash) to improve their reputation. Australian Greg “The Shark” Norman is the CEO. The American golf star, Phil Mickelson, received $200 million just to join. And it just came out in May that Phil, by his own admission, once lost $40 million in four years gambling. And of course now he’ll now turn around and start five $10M charities to sportswash his rep! Meh…
          shorturl.at/atH04
          shorturl.at/bcvyV

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