The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory

In my last post I speculated that covid was a plan orchestrated by the heads of the important central banks to provide cover for printing a gazillion dollars to head off an imminent economic collapse, and to implement tools like digital currencies and lockdown mechanisms that will be useful for maintaining social order when money printing eventually fails and the economy collapses.

In that post I asked the key question:

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

I stated that those of us paying attention and not listening to the official narrative know that nothing about covid makes sense.

Here is a brief summary of the covid facts and actions that do not make sense and that together suggest there is an objective other than public health in play:

  • no investigation or consequences for China and it’s Wuhan lab that engineered the virus
  • no investigation or consequences for the funders of the Wuhan lab work
  • Fauci kept in the most powerful healthcare position in the world, despite his involvement in funding the virus research and the subsequent coverup
  • no gain of function research policy changes to prevent a recurrence
  • no consequences for grossly incompetent WHO policies that encouraged global spread of the virus in the early days
  • suspiciously short and record time to develop a novel vaccine technology
  • all 4 vaccine manufacturers use the same (probably bad idea) mRNA code
  • suspicious vaccine patent history
  • probable fraudulent vaccine approval process and attempt to hide it for 75 years
  • insufficient testing to determine mRNA longevity and locations of activity in the body
  • willingness to rapidly deploy a novel insufficiently tested vaccine technology to billions at low risk from the disease including pregnant women
  • confident claims that vaccines are safe and effective despite being unwillingly to unconditionally approve the vaccines
  • indemnification of vaccine manufacturers
  • aggressive censorship of covid policy debate
  • aggressive character assassination and career destruction of dissenting experts
  • no updates to mRNA vaccines despite being ineffective against current variants
  • boosters recommended despite risks of infection, hospitalization, and adverse reactions increasing with each subsequent shot
  • elimination of non-mRNA vaccines from the market
  • ignoring 50 years of knowledge and discounting the risk of promoting vaccine resistant and/or more virulent strains by vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine
  • no cost benefit analysis on lockdown policies
  • testing methods that grossly overstated the prevalence of disease
  • reporting methods that grossly overstated the severity and risk of disease
  • data manipulation that grossly overstated the effectiveness of vaccines
  • passports required for vaccines that are ineffective at preventing transmission
  • no passports given to people with naturally acquired immunity
  • zero promotion of effective disease prevention methods like vitamin D and weight loss
  • aggressive promotion of ineffective disease prevention methods like mask policies that did not prevent and probably encouraged disease spread
  • blocking of all effective early treatments including those profitable for pharma
  • strong arming countries like India & Japan that developed successful prophylaxis and early treatment protocols from disclosing what they did
  • preventing doctors from treating patients by blocking fulfillment of prescriptions
  • ignoring record numbers of adverse reactions confirmed by different systems in different countries
  • avoiding autopsies to determine causes of suspicious deaths
  • gaslighting and not supporting those suffering from adverse reactions
  • no adjustment to policies or admission or error regardless of evidence

I argued that if we assume that most of our leaders are not evil and/or stupid then the only plausible explanation for their behavior is that they are working as a team to prevent harms worse than those being caused by their covid policies.

Those of us that study human overshoot know that 8 billion people depend for survival on rapidly depleting non-renewable, non-substitutable resources, and that the only reason our global growth dependent system functions today is that we deny limits to growth by accelerating the use of unrepayable debt, and we know that emerging inflation will soon force a day of reckoning via an economic reset.

This day of reckoning will harm many people. Most citizens will be surprised and unprepared. If citizens respond with violent social unrest then the harms will be magnified. Hence the urgent need for tools to manage a collapse such as:

  • lockdown tools to prevent rioting
  • lockdown tools to reduce consumption of energy and other scarce resources
  • digital currencies to enable a negative interest rate so debt can continue to grow
  • digital currencies to enable fair and effective rationing of scarce resources like food and energy
  • digital currencies to prevent panics from destroying the financial system

I argued that the real purpose of our otherwise irrational and obsessive focus on vaccines as a response to covid was to prepare the behaviors and infrastructure necessary for lockdown policies and digital currencies.

While I still think this hypothesis is plausible and probable there is a fact that bothers me because it is inconsistent with the assumption that our leaders are not evil or stupid.

That is the recent push to vaccinate children. This policy makes no sense in the context of the above hypothesis because:

  • vaccinating children for covid is 100% risk and 0% benefit
  • any sane, non-evil person knows that protecting children from harm should be a top priority
  • young children do not need to participate in the economy with digital currencies
  • children can be vaccinated at a later and safer age when they need to participate in the economy

I do not understand what’s going here. I suppose you could argue that our leaders really are evil and/or stupid, although that seems improbable given the large number of cooperating leaders.

Another possible explanation is that my hypothesis that covid is cover for collapse preparation is incorrect.

What other purpose might there be for our insane covid policies?

Just for fun, let’s go all dark and crazy and speculate the mRNA has some function that has not yet been deployed, and our leaders want it to be injected in everyone before pushing the on button.

Perhaps our leaders have employed, or stolen the ideas from, Jack Alpert to mastermind a humane population reduction plan.

I say humane, by which I mean no suffering or violence, because we’re still assuming here that our leaders are not evil.

Alpert has developed the only feasible plan in existence for retaining a modern technologically advanced civilization after we have depleted most of the economically recoverable fossil energy. His idea is to rapidly reduce our population to about fifty million people concentrated in 3 regions of world with adequate hydro electricity and other necessary natural resources. By keeping the population low and constant, but still large enough to sustain advanced technology and manufacturing, and by aggressively recycling materials and forgoing impossibly wasteful luxuries like air travel and personal vehicles, it might be possible to sustain our science and technologies long enough to make fusion work, before the hydro dams inevitably silt in.

Because of the rapid rate that fossil energy is depleting, and the total dependence of our food supply on that energy, there is insufficient time for a one-child policy and/or family planning education to get the population down to a sustainable level without massive suffering.

A very aggressive plan for reducing the population is required to avoid unimaginable suffering and probable civilization ending nuclear resource wars.

Jack’s idea is to vaccinate everyone on the planet with a genetically engineered substance that causes sterility and that can be reversed with an antidote.

Any couple desiring a child must apply for a birth permit. Once a year a carefully calculated number of permits will be randomly awarded to applicants and those lucky people will be relocated to one of the 3 regions established for humanity’s permanent civilizations and issued the sterility antidote.

If our leaders are indeed implementing Alpert’s plan with a time delayed sterility inducing vaccine, this would explain why children are being targeted for vaccination. It would be imperative that as many child bearing, and soon to be child bearing, people be vaccinated as quickly as possible because once word of the plan gets out, either via a leak or via impossible to ignore evidence, then no further vaccinations will be possible.

If true, this thankfully means our leaders are brilliant heroes rather than evil idiots.

And it gives “The Great Reset” a whole new meaning!

Go Jack go!!!

P.S. I would like to make the above list of covid things that don’t make sense as complete as possible. If I missed anything, please let me know and I will add it.

17-Jul-2022 Addendum

I’m worried that a future visitor who does not know me will will read this post and conclude that I’m a wack job and therefore should discount everything else I’ve written. This is a statement to clarify what I actually believe is going on with covid.

If we assume that our leaders are not evil and/or stupid then there is overwhelming evidence to suggest there’s an agenda other than public health in play for covid policies.

I believe that some of our most senior leaders with the power to influence lower level leaders are using covid as an excuse to implement tools that will be helpful for maintaining social order during an economic collapse.

I do not know if these senior leaders deliberately released an engineered virus, or if they are just taking advantage of a mistake made at the Wuhan lab.

All of the evidence I see supports this “covid is cover for collapse prep” theory, EXCEPT the push to vaccinate children which I cannot explain if we continue to assume our leaders are not evil and/or stupid.

I proposed above, tongue in cheek, that perhaps the child vaccination push could be explained by a humane population reduction agenda, which I think would be a brilliant thing for our leaders to do, because population reduction is the only path to reducing the suffering that is coming due to human overshoot.

The problem with this population reduction hypothesis is that I don’t think are leaders are aware or smart or brave enough to try it.

So to be clear, I do NOT think there is a population reduction agenda in play.

Which means our leaders must be evil and/or stupid.

I’m pretty sure Fauci and his gang are corrupt, but I do not think all the collaborating leaders in the world are evil.

Which leaves stupidity as the only viable explanation for what’s going on with children.

Stupid behavior can have causes other than a low IQ.

Stupid behavior can result from our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, like for example, doubling down because “I can’t possibly have supported the biggest blunder in human history”, or from a mass formation al la Mattias Desmet that causes temporary insanity.

July 13, 2022 Addition

Thank you to a reader for bringing to my attention a list of bad covid decisions compiled by Dr. Vinay Prasad.

I respect Dr. Prasad’s fairness and integrity by only listing those items for which a functioning brain looking at evidence available at the time would know was wrong.

https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/a-checklist-for-covid-policy

“Lots of people commented about COVID-19. Some were more right than others. It isn’t fair to judge people by facts not known at the time. Instead here is a list of issues where a person who read actively, and whose brain was working (aka not riddled with anxiety) could be right in the moment.

  1. The evidence for community cloth masking was awful, nonexistent, negative and poor and we should have run cluster RCTs. This view was obvious based on reading pre-pandemic literature and is why the CDC, WHO and Tony Fauci himself initially advised against masking. Instead, in the weeks that followed many lied about the evidence of cloth masking to push this intervention. It was propaganda, not science. It was shameful how real scientists lied and exaggerated and virtue signalled, all of which prevented randomized trials.
  2. Without embellishment, I will think it’s ok to have supported cloth masking initially, but smart people understood the residual uncertainty and wanted cluster RCTs. Unfortunately, they were defeated by zealots, and we have zero cluster RCTs in high income countries. Aka we learned nothing. This is embarrassing.
  3. Masking kids 2-4 and mandates (oh, of course, except when they nap for 2 hours in the same room!) was a stupid policy and it’s hard to understand how anyone whose brain was working would support it. They napped together in the same room unmasked! Use your brain! How could that possibly work? Moreover, the World Health Organization advised against doing it.
  4. School closure in the spring of 2020 was arguable, but closure any time after Aug 2020 was clearly wrong. Enough data had accumulated by then to know it was a fools errand. Most Western European nations had returned in person by then. Liberal American cities remained the last hold outs. They paid lip service to vulnerable children, but their policies crushed their future.
  5. Vaccinating 20 year old health care workers and teachers and ‘first responders’ before the elderly was clearly stupid. It only happened because anxious first responders are more powerful lobbying force than old people. Society, particularly America, does not value the elderly. Anyone who could do basic arithmetic would know this would cost lives. Even assuming first responders were much more likely to get the virus, the IFR by age was so steep, it could not be overcome by exposure. Wise nations didn’t do it. You only needed a calculator and 2 seconds to realize how stupid it was.
  6. When J&J was found to cause VITT, it was obvious the product should be pulled from the market. Bad policy makers analogized it to DVT after oral contraceptives. They apparently did not understand the difference between the cerebral sinus, and the leg. Or a simple clot and runaway platelet activation. Alternatives were available. The FDA and CDC kept the product for one more year and many people were harmed.
  7. Mandating the mRNA shot was always a stupid idea. First, remember mandating a medical intervention is not done to protect the person getting the intervention. We don’t mandate you take your blood pressure pills. And you’re allowed to decline life-saving therapies. Mandates only exist when there is sufficient benefit to third parties that the intrusion on autonomy is justified. It has to clear a high bar. In the beginning, it looked like the vaccine provided massive individual level protection. Thus, it didn’t matter if someone else didn’t get the shot, you were protected. Modeling studies suggested that thousands of people would have to be excluded to avert one acquisition of COVID. It was clear that many people would be angered, a few would not comply, and there was no justifiable case that coercive vaccination benefited third parties. If a third party was worried, they could get vaccinated themselves. Later, by the fall of 2021, when it was abundantly clear that vaccines were unable to halt novel variants and breakthrough was inevitable, then vaccine mandates were unethical because vaccines could not protect a third party from transmission anyway. Ironically, vaccine mandates were always unethical because they never conferred sufficient benefit to 3rd parties. Instead, some people argued that protecting someone from their own choice was a valuable use of coercion. These people are ignorant of medical history, and do not see the fact that there is no end to this principle. You can mandate people to get any medical intervention by this logic. Moreover, they are aloof from Americans. Americans would never tolerate such an intrusion.
  8. Wearing a mask after vaccination. Or distancing. Or avoiding weddings or avoiding other things. After vaccination, there was nothing more you could do to lower your individual risk. Weight loss, optimizing medical issues, and vaccination by the only three risk reducing interventions. Before it was evident that breakthrough was inevitable, there’s no point to take precautions after vaccination because you were very well protected. The moment it was evident that breakthrough was inevitable, there was no point to take precautions after vaccination because if you live long enough, you’ll eventually get the virus. So what’s the goal of delaying?
  9. Testing testing, testing. The United States not for 1 minute was able to control the virus through test, trace, isolate. The seed load or initial preconditions in 2020 made it impossible to do that. The idea we could test our way halting the virus and his tracks was delusional. Someday Congress should pass a bill asking testing companies to release the names of doctors and epidemiologists who they paid. Once you see the money trail, you will understand why people pushed testing.
  10. After adult vaccination, the idea that wide scale testing was necessary or desirable was a delusion. Testing kids and quarantining them was massively disruptive. The loss of educational alone offset any potential gains. And the final outcome will be inevitable. 93 to 98% breakthrough.
  11. The idea kids need a vaccine to return to normal– was insane. This was absolutely a crazy point of view. Proof that it was not true is that many nations had very high sero prevalence prior to the debut of vaccines. The United Kingdom was nearly 100%. The US was at least over 70% but probably much higher, due to terrible data collection. If kids got COVID anyway prior to vaccine all the restrictions hurt them with no possibility of benefit.
  12. Children never faced an emergency. The regulatory use of emergency use authorization for kids was unjustified. Their drug products should have come through traditional marketing pathways. The IFR in children was too low to constitute an emergency. Moreover, by the time kids vaccines arrived it was clear that breakthrough was inevitable. Ergo vaccinating kids would not protect anyone else. The abuse of expedited pathways benefits companies, but does not benefit people. This abuse has continued in cancer drugs for years. COVID makes people scared, which pharmaceutical companies use to enrich themselves with scant data.
  13. Giving paxlovid to young vaccinated people. Anyone who knows the history of medicine knows that extrapolating data from very sick individuals to milder versions of disease is never a good idea. It’s always better to run a randomized trial before you spend $5 billion dollars treating your anxiety.
  14. Anyone who ever said the word zero COVID is an idiot. Because the opportunity for zero COVID ended in early December 2019, and firmly closed by March of 2020. Anyone who still thought it possible, particularly in 2021, should be muted and ignored.
  15. By June 2022, anybody who thinks the United States should do anything to control infections is wrong. Such a person must be living under a rock to not notice the fact that 200 million plus Americans have returned to complete normal. Moreover, it is not biologically possible. These should be too good reasons for these people to stop.
  16. Travel bans. Border closure. Testing to cross borders. It was evident that these measures could do nothing to stop spread. It’s unbelievable we repeated that until 2022.
  17. Long COVID: If you were very ill with COVID-19, if you were hospitalized, if you were intubated, if you were on death’s door, it is entirely possible that you will have a prolonged recovery. You may never be the same. This has always been the case with respiratory viruses. Or any illness for that matter. But if you had a mild infection, if you didn’t even know you were sick, then it would be astonishing that you would have serious long-term sequela. The burden of proof that this is due to COVID should be very high. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t take you seriously. Doctor should always take patients seriously. And if a person feels bad, we should run studies to determine what makes them better. But that’s very different than advising people that asymptomatic Long Covid is a big problem, and that we should try to control infections in perpetuity. Those are bold policy maneuvers. It requires extraordinary evidence. That evidence has never been met. The best study from the Annals of internal medicine compares patients with milder Covid to those without milder Covid and finds no differences in any of dozens of dozens of biological tests. That finding is astonishing. And should be replicated in larger sample size. But if it holds true, a serious rethinking of long COVID is needed.
  18. Saying in 2022 we need to control infections to prevent mutations. Serious science writers are saying this. In top magazines. It’s totally delusional. There is no political buy-in. Even if there were, you’d have to weld door shut like Shanghai to achieve it. That’s not possible in free society. It’s living in a fairy tale confusing it for reality.
  19. Saying healthcare workers will mask forever. Before you institute a sweeping change in healthcare, don’t you want to run a randomized trial to know it works? Evidence-based medicine is dead when people propose such changes without evidence. I’m pretty confident now that many people didn’t understand it.
  20. And the biggest way to know somebody doesn’t know what they’re talking about: when somebody suggests school reopening benefits rich and privileged kids. It benefits poor, underserved, minority kids. How clueless are you?
  21. I forgot to mention boosting 12-year-olds, yearly booster, and a load of other things. That’s for another column.

These were issues that were not just obvious in retrospect but at the time. A simple test for who knows what they’re talking about.”

327 thoughts on “The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory”

  1. I like Steve St. Angelo. Don’t get to see much of him these days because he’s behind a paywall. Today he released a free video looking at the relationship between energy and the economy through the eyes of an overshoot aware investment advisor.

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  2. I honestly do not know if you are joking, Rob, but I agree: Go, Jack, go!! I interviewed Jack for Collapse Chronicles and I am sorry to report that nothing of the sort ever left his mouth during our hour together. Maybe I just did not ask the right questions.

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    1. Hi Sam,

      If I am joking then it seems we have to conclude that all of our leaders from many different countries are all evil and/or brain dead stupid which is pretty bleak, even for an old skeptic like me.

      Just to be clear, I have no idea what Jack thinks about our covid policies. I only know what he thinks about overshoot. I missed your interview with Alpert and will listen to it soon.

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    2. Sam, Jack Alpert discusses his sterility vaccine plan at the 45:45 mark of your interview with him.

      What are you referring to when you say you’ve never heard him say anything like that?

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  3. New Zealand Police used sound weapons on the anti-vaccine-mandate protestors at NZ Parliament. Are they practising and prepared for the coming inflation/energy riots? I really don’t like it when conspiracy theories become fact 😦

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/revealed-police-used-sound-cannons-against-parliament-protesters/PIBFZEHRIOEADS7SK4Y4SWM464/

    And for all you international folks saying you wish Jacinda was your leader, well you can have her.

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  4. Neither of these two theories explains the push for boosters though.
    I personally don’t think there is anything nefarious about the vaccines. They seem to be protective to higher risk people. There’s the usual big pharma being corrupt stuff which I think is pretty factual (hiding the side-effects etc.). There’s a sheep mentality in health care and academia, every organization and country just copies the one above it. Epidemiologists got carried away for their 20 seconds of fame.
    However, there seems to be good evidence showing the covid controls in China are being used to control dissent and protesting.

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    1. Maybe, at least in the early days, but evidence seems very thin that vaccine benefits exceed risks for anyone today. But let’s say you’re correct. That means we should have only vaccinated everyone over 70. But we didn’t. We’re pushing them into everyone, including children which is just plain evil and/or stupid, unless we can discover an alternate noble hidden plan.

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          1. If the plan was to use vaccines to create a digital passport, why is there a push for booster vaccines? You already collected the people with the initial vaccine…

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            1. If we’re still assuming our leaders are not stupid or evil, and if we ignore the fact that the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission, and if we ignore the fact that the only people that needed protection were the elderly and unhealthy, and if we ignore that fact that early treatment and supplements could have prevented most deaths, and if we ignore the serious health risks from the vaccines, and if we ignore the significant (but yet to be proven) risk of creating a more virulent strain by using a leaky vaccine in the middle of a pandemic, and if we ignore the fact that the vaccines were designed for a strain that no longer exists, and if we don’t ignore the fact that the vaccines lose there effectiveness at preventing serious sickness after about 90 days even with the original strain, then requiring a booster every few months to keep your vaccine passport valid makes sense, and keeping the vaccine passport infrastructure up and running should help with launching a digital currency.

              I’m still deeply bothered by the fact that our leaders are willing to push vaccines into children for which there is zero benefit and significant long term risks which means our leaders really are evil or stupid, which brings us full circle to WTF?

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              1. A cafe that I love recently shut down. It was owned by a young woman. I wonder how many young businesses were lost during the shutdowns, all so someone’s ancient granny can eke out another turn around the sun.
                The boosters are so BS.
                I never used the get the flu vaccine for much of the reasons you’ve just laid out.
                I think the kicker for me was when they said the covid vaccine was safe for pregnant women, with absolutely no evidence to back up that claim. It was just said from a position of authority and people believed it 😦

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              2. Rob–Our leaders don’t have to be stupid or evil. All they have to be is greedy. Pushing highly questionable vaccines on kids expands the market–which is all the motivation Big Pharma needs.

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                1. You’re probably right for leaders in Fauci’s circle but I don’t think pharma corruption explains the behavior of the thousands of provincial and state health leaders in countries big and small that all seem to have lost their minds.

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                  1. Rob Mielcarski–it would be hard to find a global system more hierarchical than the medical system. I think you and many others are underestimating the level of control that Big Pharma–along with their political allies at the WHO, the CDC and the FDA–exercise over this system, especially when it comes to dealing with a novel, highly contagious and potentially lethal virus. People freak out, and small-time hospitals, researchers, health-care professionals–even doctors–are granted scant leeway when it comes to treatment options (witness the Ivermectin debacle). And the media who (have you noticed?) are now bought and sold across the board, fall quickly in line. So when it comes to ascribing motivation for response to emergencies, it’s always a good idea to start with the fail-safe idea that underlies almost all human actions: Follow the Money.

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                    1. You make a good argument. Perhaps pharma money influence, rather than outright corruption, best describes what’s going on with all the little healthcare chiefs.

                      I think for pharma money to be able to override good judgement on simple issues like vitamin D, early treatment, child vaccination, etc. also suggests our healthcare leaders must be mostly idiots.

                      The popularity of statins and how most healthcare professionals accept them without any independent thought is another good example of pharma money influencing weak intellects.

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                    2. Rob Mielcarski–in your LONG list of things that don’t add up about this virus, you include “ignoring 50 years of knowledge and discounting the risk of promoting vaccine resistant and/or more virulent strains by vaccinating in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine.”

                      Why didn’t more evolutionary virologists warn us about this obvious risk? Some tried, but were shouted down. https://www.quantamagazine.org/vaccines-are-pushing-pathogens-to-evolve-20180510/

                      So now the chickens are coming home to roost. Some of us–a few anyway, who were also loudly shouted down– were RIGHT when we objected to the wide-spread use of “leaky” vaccines. Unlike the “sterilizing” vaccines for smallpox and polio which prevent both infection and transmission, leaky vaccines like the ones rolled out so quickly for covid PROMOTE the rise and spread of mutations. And researchers have known this for some time, as you point out.

                      Unsurprisingly, this is just like overuse of antibiotics promoting the rise and spread of bacterial mutations that are antibiotic-resistant. Thus, making a bad situation worse. https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-health-india-united-states-e461b0c0db39707aab884378c24292ae

                      Remember back to the start of the pandemic in 2020 when the authorities were quick to reassure us that SARS-CoV-2 was a slow-mutating virus? Well, somehow, a couple of years down the road that turned out to be wrong. Or else a slow-mutating virus has gotten turned into a fast-mutating one. Or else, viruses are NOT static entities and in general respond to and evolve in tandem with their hosts.

                      What’s happening now is a proliferation of vaccine-evasive variants, each more transmissible than the last. Meanwhile, our masters at Big Pharma and their political and media allies keep urging us to just trust our betters and take more vaccines/boosters–which inevitably results in more vaccine-evasive variants, but more ginormous profits for them. And if a few million humans are hastened towards their deaths in the process….well, so much the better.

                      Huh. Come to think of it, this futile battle with Natural Selection mirrors the larger wetiko effort to dominate Nature in general. You’d think that any non-hijacked, truly sapient species would look up and notice at some point that it’s in a hole, and just stop digging.

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  5. “Jack’s idea is to vaccinate everyone on the planet with a genetically engineered substance that causes sterility and that can be reversed with an antidote.”

    Except that you’d only have to vaccinate future and current breeders. For those past breeding age it would be a waste of time and resources, BUT, if you also introduced a novel engineered virus that would take care of the elderly and those with co-morbidities (the rest of us), AND a dangerous vaccine for them, you’d be home and dry. You don’t need a suite of evil, stupid leaders onside, just those who see an opportunity to increase their power (most of them). It only needs a few evil people to engineer all of it and there’s no shortage of them. Getting BigPharma onside will be a doddle, given the dollar signs in their eyes. Covid and the vaccines was a first shot…they’ve learned a lot from it. I’m waiting for Round 2.

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    1. Interesting theory. If I understand you correctly, you think covid was a practice round for the main event which is another more deadly engineered virus that takes out the old and weak.

      I’m also expecting a more deadly round 2 due to the mistakes we made in round 1, as Bossche predicts, but not because of a new engineered virus.

      1) How do you explain that virtually every decision in round 1 was the opposite of correct? If there was no plan for round 1 then we have to assume every political leader and every health care leader in almost every country is evil or stupid. Seems improbable.

      2) Taking out the old and weak in a round 2 is a grossly insufficient plan. We need to rapidly get down to 50 million total to have a chance of a long term technically advanced civilization. That means the population has to be dramatically reduced in all age groups.

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      1. The older and weaker population has already begun its truncation, by all forms of attrition natural or otherwise encouraged. I am most definitely of the opinion that the vaccine policy has increased the death rate of this cohort and the effects will be cumulative. Even the middle aged sector is heading towards decline. In 20 years, I think most of us here will not be logging in anymore, and that is being optimistic. Increasing the death rate in the older population will happen regardless of any extra intervention now, so there’s no need to belabour that cohort, but it makes sense to keep printing money to support them through their latest years to retain some semblance of the State taking care of its people, this will help keep society more stable during these tricky transition years.

        Reducing the birth rate is the critical arm in this equation to get the population down as quickly as practicable, and as we have already covered in earlier posts, the only way to do this en masse in countries not already under near totalitarian rule such as China, is to effect decreased fertility involuntarily but surreptitiously, but it must still retain the possibility that it occurred by natural means. I think we have identified one such intervention to this possible strategy, which is why there is such a push to vaccinate even babies now in some Western countries, notably the ones of the Commonwealth and of course the US. In 10-20 years time, if infertile men and women account for a great portion of the breeding aged population, then the goal of long term and last reduction will be accomplished. Interestingly, the Scandinavian countries have curtailed their child vaccination campaigns, take this where you will.

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        1. Hi Rob,
          I just wanted to add/clarify a few points to what I wrote earlier. Your hypothesis that the Covid Chronicles are a prerequisite to our engineered economic collapse is still the most salient and the agenda to push unnecessary and potentially harmful inoculations upon children doesn’t preclude it at all, but it can be seen as an adjunct policy to address the other major overshoot branch that needs literal pruning, that of our population.

          Both contracting our economy and reducing our population are equally vital in attempting to mitigate our energy overshoot woes, two sides of the same coin. What you have outlined has now fleshed out the plan more completely, whether or not it will be followed to Alpert’s full conclusion, it is still the foundation stone for the Great Reset. So I just wanted to stress that you needn’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. The most immediate problem is still runaway economic collapse which would lead to societal stability free-fall. Covid has certainly erected the scaffolding from which to build our technocratic, digitalized, and authoritarian new world order. The inoculations for the entire age range, are deemed to be a critical component of this agenda, whether it be as a vehicle for the expedient Mass Formation by creating internal irreconcilable factions, a biological means for increasing morbidity and mortality across the board and also affecting future fertility, or even as a test case of how the masses respond to authoritarian policy in order to refine the control techniques needed for future even more draconian measures. I think everything still fits well into the biggest picture, we only need to step back a bit more to appreciate the scale and scope of the task underway.

          Thank you for being brave and honest to put it out here as you see it with all due diligence thoroughly accounted for. That takes a lot of courage and conviction which I know we all appreciate and I for one can draw much encouragement from.

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          1. Thanks Gaia.

            If I understand you correctly, you think the economic collapse prep theory and the population reduction theory may both be part of the plan our leaders are collaborating on.

            In a comment below I explained why, although I wish it were true, I think it unlikely that our leaders are collaborating on a population reduction plan.

            The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory

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  7. Hi Rob and friends on this brand new page, getting further and further stuck into the Story of Humanity that we are all writing together. May we see it out until the end of this exciting chapter, at least!

    Following this discussion these past few months has been a lifeline for my well-being and especially knowing that others share my thoughts, or at least can understand and respond to them, has certainly made this a less lonely and desperate time.
    Thank you, everyone, for finding your way to this oasis in the desert and sharing around the warming campfire as we ponder these days of wonder.

    Rob, you know that I have been thinking exactly on these lines since the first I reached out like a timid wallflower to you and you encouraged me to share my thoughts through posts (hah! you didn’t realize then what you unleashed, did you!). You have the skill to distil all the salient points in the most logical manner which is so edifying and satisfying. I concur with all the stepping stones leading to the resolution theory–through all the twists and turns of this saga, it still makes the most logical sense that there is one overarching aim to one overarching issue at hand. However, despite knowing in my heart of hearts and mind of minds that this must be so, I feel no great joy, but neither sadness, in the conclusion, only an overwhelming sigh of resolution and gathering of resolve for the coming days. It must be what it will be, and just as surely as we have written each page, we must endure and accept the finale.

    I completely trust that you have the utmost intention to reduce suffering for all who can suffer, and that you have the highest reverence and awe for life and the architecture of our cosmos, but I think you will find few fellow earthling hominids who will be able to see the view of surreptitiously engineered infertility to be a cause for approbation. I have wrestled with this idea for many months now and for me the only solace comes from hoping to believe that this is the more compassionate way forward, as well as the only clear path remaining to us in the time we have yet to able to choose one. We being those who can effect change and carry them out as agency and advocates for the masses whom they have been entrusted to have dominion. Suffering is in their final analysis, but survival is paramount. I will never forget the words of a top Chinese party official many years ago that awakened me to leaders’ great responsibility and sacrifice. It went something like this: “We have over one billion people to try to feed, house, clothe, to keep society stable–you in America only have 1/4 of that. We have to use the tools we have (communism) to keep society going in the way we can to mitigate suffering for the majority. In our country, the individual doesn’t exist and cannot, except as a part of the whole which is the only thing that must be preserved at all costs. We don’t have the luxury of democracy and freedom as you think you have, so we don’t pretend as you do to even try. ” For an earth as diverse in resources and population as we have now, 8 billion human bodies all one meal shy from hunger, several more from chaos, with multitudes already starving, a totalitarian regime seems the only solution to accomplish what needs to be done to change the course of our biosphere. That is why I have never thought our leaders or even the entity pulling their strings are evil, they are only obeying, as we all are, the ultimate law of this universe which is to exist and continue to do so, matter into energy, stardust to stardust, worlds without end.

    Go well everyone, and looking forward to as always robust discussion on this new post!

    PS Almost on cue, a couple days ago I read about Virtual Children being part of our answer to overpopulation, with technology by 2050 allowing for “parents” to haptically being able to interact with their child in the metaverse. For those who wish to skip the terrible twos or the teenage years, no problems, just program everything and enjoy the perfect child minus any upkeep costs! I suppose this will be the solution for those unable to have their own physical child (for any and every reason) to have the opportunity at parenthood.

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    1. It’s great that you find time to participate here Gaia.

      I have long had a lot of respect for Chinese leadership. They seem to be much more intelligent and aware of reality than western leaders. I remember years ago reading that the Chinese government has a higher percentage of engineers and scientists than we do in the west. Our economists and lawyers are quite literally useless idiots.

      At first blush, the idea of a plan to rapidly reduce the population is horrific. But if somehow, by some miracle, people could break through their denial of our overshoot reality, and really see what’s coming if we do nothing, then population reduction becomes moral, ethical, compassionate, rational, logical, and the only good path forward.

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  8. El gato malo today seems to be echoing Bossche’s warning.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/just-how-much-are-covid-cases-up

    the data is flat out telling us that the huge genetic jump to omicron was a sharp selection for an OAS variant advantaged by the vaccine driven herd antigenic fixation stemming from leaky vaccines. omi is not a descendant of delta, it’s a throwback to a far earlier common ancestor. it got plucked off the “failed variant” pile by a powerful new evolutionary selector.

    that’s what leaky vaccines do: they select for OAS and ADE.

    it’s WHY we don’t use them.

    and these vaccines look to induce strong antigenic fixation rendering your immune system a one trick pony unable to adapt to new variants of this pathogen.

    to my knowledge, herd antigenic fixation has never happened before in humans. if this is what’s happening now, things are going to get pretty dramatic.

    bottom line:

    it is the vaccines driving covid evolution and superspread and they are failing faster by the day.

    the reported cases data is masking this, but the magnitude of what’s starting to happen will be too big to hide from the general public much longer.

    when you’re quad vaxxed and on your fifth round of covid and it feels worse than your fourth, even the stalwart “trust the experts” crowd starts to notice…

    this may be a bumpier summer than many were planning.

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  9. How does your theorie that Covid is used as a cover for population reduction fit with the ongoing policy to increase the population in countries with high energy consumption (e.g. USA and Western Europe) by immigration?

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    1. Hello Secret one,

      Thank you for bringing up this interesting concept. I think there are two separate issues here, and the one you are bringing up relates to first world countries trying to save their sinking economic ship by bringing in new Ponzi scheme candidates in the form of migrants. Given everything that is happening now, this will be a flash in the pan measure to try to assuage internal fears of recession, it’s just like printing money but instead they’re trying to use an influx of people to prop up the decaying facade. Despite this, how many can they import and from where? Mainstream Australia thinks it can support up to 50 million people (currently we are about 25 million) but of course we all know this is an impossibility. To have even several more million of high energy consumption people shift from one first world country to another (or equivalent, as the only migrants we are wanting to attract are the wealthy ones from developing countries who are already hefty consumers and will thus add to our economy) obviously will not solve our population and over consumption problem in any way and may well add to it. We have merely shifted the population distribution an infinitesimal degree but we are still on the same planet. I have never understood how re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic changes anything. Whether a very small minority of people shift from one country to another doesn’t change the fact that we are still 8 billion on the same planet, or am I missing something? I think the long term goal is still squarely on the side of overall population reduction, be it obscured to the masses for the time being, especially in first world, high energy consumption countries where the Covid rollout has been the most egregious. Perhaps this very fact adds weight to the theory that Covid and its repercussions is a Swiss Army knife of a tool, very handy and versatile.

      I am wondering how many extra migrants are your country proposing to accept and does your country’s current citizens think this will be a solution to whatever issues at hand?

      I, of course, am very grateful that Australia has accepted my husband and me as migrants, and before that, my parents were migrants to the States. We are all nomads on our home planet, a temporary sojourn between infinities.

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    2. In the essay I said my original theory that covid is cover for preparing for economic collapse is plausible and probable. I can describe how each player and most of the evidence fits that story without sounding crazy.

      Except the recent push to vaccinate children. That doesn’t fit. So I said, let’s have some fun and go dark and crazy to try to explain why they’re vaccinating children.

      I don’t think they are trying to reduce the population. It’s one thing for our leaders to collaborate to prevent and/or prepare for currency and financial system collapse, but it’s a bridge too far for them to collaborate to reduce the population. Collapse prep is trying to keep BAU going, which is what our leaders already do 24/7. Population reduction is trying to dismantle BAU, which their denial genes prevent them from even imagining.

      This means unfortunately, unless someone else can come up with a rational theory for why they’re vaccinating children, we have to conclude that all of our leaders really are evil and/or stupid. Which is pretty depressing, at least for me.

      I do wish they were trying to reduce the population. A sterility vaccine with an antidote would be an excellent vehicle. Billions of people are going to suffer and die because we deny the reality of our overshoot predicament. We’ll lose most of our science, technology, music, art, literature, education, health care, dentistry, eyeglasses, etc. and the 600 million that remain will live like medieval peasants, unless we wipe everyone out with a nuclear war fighting over the remaining resources.

      A sterility vaccine sounds pretty good compared to reality without it.

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      1. Hi there Rob,

        There is more than one way to skin a cat, preferably without suffering but what a strange saying nonetheless! I really appreciate that we can come together here from all different backgrounds and mind make-ups to communicate ideas and understand one another. I think you and I (and others here) have very differing “antennae” with which we access and process input but still we can reach quite congruent understandings, but using different lens to come at it from varying perspectives. You are guided by logic and reason and things you can measure and test, and whilst I, too, rely upon these tools, my overlay is a filter of intuition and emotive feeling about the situation. Having the full spectrum of perceptions as we do here in this space is a great strength in our collective pursuit for truth and understanding. The fact that we can usually get our points across as cogently and accurately as we do, and in such a congenial manner despite missing the key element of direct connection and real-time conversation, is a source of great wonder and delight for me–utterly fascinating and satisfying!

        I believe I attempted to make some sense of why the push for vaccines on children in a previous post, and it went something along the lines of trying to keep up appearances so that the main narrative stands as long as possible to keep discontent at bay as much a possible so the Great Reset can be put into place as smoothly as possible. Since all other age groups in the population were mandated to have this “safe and effective” wonder therapy, and now when the wheels are obviously falling off the bus but still no-one can comment or change policy otherwise that would turn the tide of public opinion in the direction of malcontent to put it mildly. If they were to single out the ineffectiveness or unnecessariness of the intervention for children, not to mention the risk of harm, that would most likely open up floodgates of provocation in the general public who would be then demanding what the safety assurances were for them. And then the litigation would begin as VAERS and life insurance claims become the goldmine trail of breadcrumbs for damaged and dead parties. This would up-turn the country in the other direction, removing what gains of Mass Formation and control of the people were made in the past 2.5 years. The best policy, even though an utterly unsatisfactory one and possibly reckless, is just to continue BAU, and that has been applied to this case of the vaccines for children. Perhaps the leaders had no inkling how pear-shaped this whole Covid vaccine debacle would end up, but once the decision was made to pursue this policy over the entire western world, there was no other way than forward.

        However, the side effects of this spectacularly bad failed intervention (as far as medical therapy goes) still may have some silver lining (as far as the preparation for the Great Reset goes). A sicker population (as well as a deceased one) is easier to control on the main, as one becomes ever more dependent upon the State that provides health care and welfare benefits for treatment and survival. I have touched upon this before as well. The countries can continue to print money to keep up the health and social services as long as possible to keep the social structure going, but the main thing is the beneficiaries are effectively enfeebled not only physically but also in their capacity for active dissent. Just garnering enough energy as someone with long Covid (aka immune collapse) or being completely overwhelmed and burnt out in the care of sick family members will suck all the life force from thinking anything else other than what needs to be done to get through the day. These members of your society will be easy candidates to assimilate into whatever new paradigm is necessary. Therefore, if these vaccines have the possibility of creating dependent citizens through every age group, then that already is an effect that could be used in favour of the agenda, decreased fertility or outright population reduction notwithstanding. This could be another reason the policy to continue recommending boosters, and vaccination of children is still the ascendant for now. Of course, sicker children with weaker immune systems over the course of the next 10-20 years of their child-bearing age, most likely would contribute to decreased fertility, even if the actual repeated inoculations do not have a direct longstanding effect. Once again, whether or not this was an occult by design goal or an unintended but “re-purposed” consequence, it still ticks the boxes for Reset and overshoot mitigation. I think the leaders or rather their superiors have overshoot squarely on their radar, and the economic reset is a stepwise intervention to address it–in this I know you have another opinion and forgive me for being slow on the uptake but can you humor me again to explain why?

        I’ll leave this rather loquacious post with a book and/or movie suggestion of my own. Some of the most eye-opening and provoking books are in the children’s or young people’s genre, but seeing as they are written by adults who are interpreting some very deep issues in a manner for formative minds to grasp, I find the truth and possibilities in this literature to have especial power to reach all open minds, and sometimes these stories cut through like a hot knife through butter. This seems the perfect time in our discussion to introduce Lois Lowry’s The Giver which was a Newberry Award winner (highest acclaim for a children’s book), and has been made into a movie in 2014. It paints a utopian/dystopian world post some kind of apocalypse where the remaining humanity lives in a completely behaviour modified society much like Skinner’s Walden Two. Everyone has specific roles, only certain members can breed to keep population in balance, and they are kept isolated from the outside physical environment, very much like Alpert’s vision. The technological advances guarantee every member of this bubble world a convenient and pleasant existence. Every member has to take daily injections to retain their well-being. There are rules for proper speech to convey equality and respect but most of all, to objectively describe feelings rather than abandon oneself to emotionality. The structure has been place for so long that no-one questions anything at all, but everyone knows their lives are so much better than that of the long distant past from which all memories and experiences have been erased from the collective psyche, bar one most esteemed member in the society called the Giver who retains these in the event something happens to the community which needs his/her guidance. Then one day everything starts to unravel. If you have a lazy free afternoon, I highly recommend getting the book and movie out from the local library and just let the implications wash over whilst being thoroughly entranced and very possibly disturbed.

        All the best everyone, and welcome to the start of a new month. July, named in honour of Julius Caesar, crosser of the Rubicon, creator of an empire but destroyed by his own hubris. I wonder what lessons are in store for us in this moon cycle?

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        1. Nice essay Gaia. I’m going to read it a few more times and then reply if I can think of something useful to say. In the meantime I have a question.

          When I wrote my “covid is cover for collapse prep” hypothesis I had a clear picture of who the players were. They are the heads of the powerful central banks working as a team, and then informing the respective heads of their countries on what needed to be done. Those country heads then gave marching orders to their bureaucracies. The chain of influence and authority is plausible. No mysteries.

          You think there is some other group pulling the strings. Who are they specifically? A story is not plausible for me with mysterious shadows.

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          1. Hi Rob,

            Thanks for the invitation to try to explain myself more clearly, could we hold this thought for a few days until I find a window to compose my ideas? I think I did try to expound on this in an earlier post back some time ago about the insidiousness of the influence over every major aspect of Western society, from education, medicine, media, politics, and of course control of money. Suffice it to say for now that I concur you’re getting very warm with the idea that the most obvious main players are the central bank heads, but who is their boss? And then asking that question again? Just because we do not know them by name or face does not preclude existence; we can see how hierarchy works in every sphere. These structures of power do not evolve overnight. I’ve taken a very cursory delve into the history of money and banking and that has been most revealing, methinks the crowning pate of this many-headed hydra has its origin story there, for whosoever controls the money, or even the illusion of money, has the keys of power over the world.

            Interestingly, the history of universities and education in general, medicine and medical education, especially in the US, is a walk down a shadowy lane with many of the same banking and business magnates prominent as foundational players. I began my undergraduate degree at one of the most notable institutes (The University of Chicago) founded by one such magnate, a household name of JD Rockefeller, wealthier than Croesus and perhaps more powerful and influential than any king over the scope of his business and philanthropic life. Whilst this esteemed private university was to be his American ideal of the elite European university system, his quote “I don’t want a nation of thinkers; I want a nation of workers” sums up what he thought public education goals should be (he had a guiding hand in compulsory schooling). He also had a great deal of influence in setting up modern medical education as well, and from there we have the underpinnings of the current pharmaco-medical system. What I am trying to say is it only takes a few key players at key times in history to fashion the course of institutions which have power over the masses. It is not a stretch to envision that a few key players keep it going, as ideological descendants of the original masters. Their names and places are not of importance, rather the true power lies in anonymity because from nebulous depths, all things can arise and seem naturally so.

            Oh my, I’ve done it again, that is gone on and on in what you all now know is just Gaia’s way. Thanks for bearing with me.

            All the best to everyone.

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        2. All the best everyone, and welcome to the start of a new month.

          Congrats on surviving the easy part of 2022 Gaia and all! I hope I’m joking…

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      2. Once someone gets hooked on an idea, it is very difficult to shift them off of that idea and even evidence to the contrary can often not shift them. I’ve seen that in the first couple of years of COVID-19 with the contrarians. In this case, our leaders think that the only way out of the pandemic is to vaccinate everyone and keep vaccinating them until the virus is beaten to death. Of course, this will never happen but they have now embarked on this road and, if there is one thing our politicians do well it is not admitting they were wrong. Not vaccinating young children would be admitting they were wrong. They are hoping against hope that eventually new formulations of the vaccines will be the final straw for the virus but, in the meantime, they have to keep up the pretence. As the vaccines don’t appear to be too harmful (I know some here doubt that) our leaders can’t see much of a downside to maintaining the message.

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  10. Hi Rob

    Some comments, playing devil’s advocate to your post.

    I have now had Delta (Oct 2020) and Omicron (May 2022 exact lineage unknown). I think I can say, in case anyone still has doubts, that this virus is real.

    It is also different than influenza or the seasonal flu. I experienced loss of smell with Delta, so this thing got into my brain? Both Delta and Omicron raised my blood pressure a bit which suggest something about its systemic impact? I don’t remember other respiratory viruses doing that. 6 or so years ago I had influenza, I felt sicker with influenza, but recovery was shorter.

    Accident or plan? You hint at but don’t directly address whether this virus was released purposely as part of a plan, or whether the virus “naturally” appeared and created a crisis that was used by the elite to impose an economic slowdown? (FYI, Recently I spoke to someone who works at the Gates Foundation, their scientist still think that this virus came from a bat in a wet market. Take that information for what it is worth.)

    If this virus was intentionally released, who are we saying was willing to make/take that decision? And on behalf of whose interests specifically?

    Fear. One possible explanation for some of the early actions on COVID is that officials feared this virus was much worse than it turned out to be. Case Fatality Rates initially looked to be 5% or so. Perhaps they had inside information about the experimentation in the Wuhan lab, and really believed it might have been released from that lab. They knew the U.S. had funded development work in China. They feared the worst. (Apparently the U.S.A has biolabs elsewhere in the world? Fauci et. al. don’t want those programs disclosed… Is this research for benevolent purposes, or part of military programs and plans?)

    Incompetence. Another explanation for many actions is just the incompetence of institutions and government, especially in the U.S.A. They are not good at solving complex problems, and very bad at solving them under pressure of time and economic distress. One specific example, the process used by the FDA and CDC are making decisions on vaccine approvals prone to error and bias. However, even given the general institutional incompetence, I don’t deny a lot of actions seem just flat out wrong given what we know. Now they cannot admit to making mistakes.

    Cognitive limits. We humans are not really so smart as we think we are. It can take years for science to come to settled conclusions. Sometimes decades. Here we are trying to do sciences in months, and discussing it real time on twitter etc. Hence, why so many decisions going begging for explanation. Mask work, or don’t? Scientist still disagree? (Why don’t we know for sure after all these years studying respiratory viruses?) Is Dr Geert Vanden Bossche right in his view that vaccines will push the virus to evolve into more lethal forms? Or do unvaccinated people present a greater reservoir for virus mutation. Published consensus science statements don’t support Bossche’s views. (Personally, Bossche makes sense to me. If the current vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission, then how can some scientists say we must vaccinate to reduce the mutation rate?).

    I have a few more thoughts and why and how this COVID thing played out, but out of time today. Maybe will try again tomorrow.

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    1. Hi Shawn, you make a lot of interesting points.

      It’s the global synchronicity of political and healthcare leaders that troubles me and makes me suspect a plan is in play other than public health.

      Accident or plan? I don’t know. Given that a probably man-made virus has caused the greatest calamity in modern history, I find it VERY troubling that not one leader anywhere is aggressively pushing to investigate what happened, nor pushing to punish those responsible, nor pushing for policies to prevent it from happening again. This is remarkable and VERY suspicious when you think about it.

      Fear. Yes fear no doubt played a big role. But ALL of our leaders aggressively stoked the fear rather than trying to quell it as wise leaders would do. Why no outliers that did the right thing? Why did no leader anywhere speak up and say PCR tests dialed up to detect noise were creating unnecessary panic?

      Incompetence. No doubt. Lots of it. But again the synchronicity troubles me. Why didn’t the health minister of my little province tell Fauci and the WHO and the CDC to go fuck themselves about Ivermectin and many other issues?

      Cognitive limits. Maybe. To me it feels more like peak oil which is obviously true with dire consequences and yet the vast majority can’t see it due to their genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities. I’m thinking denial is a stronger player in covid than cognitive limits.

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  11. I doubt that this will make it to your comment section as you seem to be resistant to alternative opinions but…

    You keep saying “virtually all of the world bought into the “pandemic”…but the truth is less than half the countries of the world complied and if you count those who did not accept the Gene Jabs it is the majority of the population.

    I know that this truth is inconvenient and destroys your thesis but will you please acknowledge? There are tens of thousands of Dr’s , researchers, scientist, journolest, public officials, and activist citizens that stood up and pointed out the truth. It is only a relatively small % of those in charge that have been pushing the lies + a bunch who are in a situation that is so bad that they have no choice but to go along, who are perpetrating this lie. If and when the truth comes out I am certain that the masses will step up too, just like with the fake battle against Russia and the rest of the planet racing to join them in their fight against the EVIL Empire of Lies. Please don’t give it more power than it really has.

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    1. Thanks Jef. I did say at the outset that it was coordinated by the powerful central banks meaning the rich countries. I do not have much knowledge of what went on in the poorer countries. I was under the impression that many wanted vaccines but could not afford them. What is the reality here?

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      1. Well thanks for asking. First there are two distinct differences wrt “vaccines”. A traditional vaccine takes all the elements of the virus and as many of the variants as possible and “attenuates” them, makes them less harmful if you will, then uses that as the vaccine. This has the net effect of bolstering the process of herd immunity. This has been historically, relatively effective. What is well known and key to this traditional vaccine process is the fact that the injection of the virus is ineffective most of the time until they discovered that when the subject being injected was poisoned with some toxic event, then the virus and the therefor the vaccine was effective, so they began to include what is called an adjuvant to the mix and this is where the whole “anti-vax” controversy comes in.

        Most often the adjuvants commonly used have very bad side effects/after effects and are not commonly discussed.

        I would define the greater tragedy of C-19 as the fact that it has been disallowed for Dr’s to treat it. Never before has this happened with any illness. All the other responses have been tragic for sure but none of it compares to the fact that in much of what is called the West and those countries locked into alignment with them were disallowed from treating sick people. They were threatened in every way to not treat. They would lose their jobs, open themselves to certain law suits that because TPTB said don’t treat, if they treated they would lose any lawsuit.

        I know you are loath to say it but there is no other way to say it other than that it is EVIL. All lies, especially those that harm are pure and unadulterated EVIL. I don’t care how altruistic some believe their perceived goals are there is no rationalizing this kind of behaviour. I fully believe that given the information most of humanity will respond properly to the crushing limits that humanity faces and do the absolute necessary actions of powering down that needs to happen in order for humanity to survive. In fact it would empower humanity and they would pull out the best behavior we are capable of.

        I know many or most of you will try and refute this and summarily condemn all humanity as incapable of this level of behavior …and to you I say FUCK OFF!!! You have no idea what you are talking about and I will fight you and your defeatist perspective to my dying breath I have seen people behave better and if you can’t see it then consume feces and cease to exist.

        Sorry about that at the end there I do get worked up about this.

        P.S. Rob, I live in north Oregon and would like to talk more about all this if you are interested. I have been doing this for over 20 years.

        I have a small farm called Grace Farm & Gardens. 2901 NW oak grove Dr. albany oregon, 97321.

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        1. I agree and am familiar with a lot of your views. My hot button was a coordinated campaign to discredit and withhold cheap and safe Ivermectin. Even if it does not work as well as claimed, it is safe enough that it doesn’t matter. I bought horse dewormer and will take it at the first sign of sickness. It also really bothered me that they did not promote Vitamin D which is super cheap, super safe, and there’s plenty of evidence that is helps. Lately I’m pissed off about the push to vaccinate children. Children don’t get sick from covid, but there’s plenty of evidence that the vaccines might harm them in the short term, and we won’t know for years what the long term effects are. It is evil.

          You’ll enjoy today’s interview with the head of Brazil who’s apparently one of the few leaders in the world that was not vaccinated. He explains why and says that many deaths could have been prevented with early treatment. He also talks about other leaders using covid as an excuse to act like dictators. I saw and see that in our Canadian Prime Minister.

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          1. I have heard Jair on this and he waffles on this topic depending on how the wind blows.

            Truth being that we are not far apart on all this. The ultimate goal as with all US Imperial exploits over the last 50 – 75 – 100+ years has been/is demand destruction. Everyone … all the alt media… focuses on resource grabs – the resource curse but that is only half the equation. We live on a finite planet.

            Rob – I know you were part of the oil drum way back when…you must remember “Export Land Model”. The concept was that as a resource rich country produced their resources they would use more and more of it to further their own economy until they were no longer exporting. The US could NEVER allow that. We take their resource production but more importantly we make sure they will not be consuming their own resources. Bomb back to the stone age. We have done this a hundred times.

            We… the West have done this consistently and aggressively on every continent, all around our 800 military bases placed around the world , for the last century. The US has been the one and only driver of world policy this whole time. We have decide all resource extraction and all environmental destruction parameters involved in that process on the planet for the last century…no other entity has had even a hint of influence. Few if any can accept this reality…many as you say choose to deny it, the vast majority of the population simply do not have the information they would need to form an opinion either way. That is not denial by the way.

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            1. I do remember the export land model. There’s a hell of a lot of people now in Saudi Arabia that need to be fed, watered, and air conditioned.

              The US seems to be losing influence. In looks to me like Russia is kicking the US’s ass. And our dependence on Chinese manufacturing is a serious risk.

              If the US tries a military option with either Russia or China it will be the end of most of us.

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              1. Yes I do remember all that. I still believe that by definition denial means having the information but choosing not to use it or acknowledge it. My position is that the vast majority of people do not have the information they would need to act appropriately.

                America in particular and the West in general are perhaps the most lied to population in the world. Our education system has been severely degraded as to be embarrassing.

                I used to believe that change was coming and more people would learn the truth, get the information, but the opposite has happened. TPTB can now tell nothing but a steady stream of lies and get away with it as we have just seen with “the pandemic” and now wrt Russia. Try and help someone acquire the information they need and you become the enemy.

                People are mostly not in denial, they have had ignorance forced on them without their knowledge.

                Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of people who choose to be ignorant aka in denial too. This is a choice, it is a behavior, and it is my commitment that instead of condemning people for behaving badly I try and understand WHY they behave that way, what is it that elicits this behavior?

                I too am looking at and trying to understand overshoot, how we got here, and how we might do it different.

                I also agree that we are heading for total collapse from so many angles and we must do something or else but TPTB making the decision that we do not get to have the information to do what is needed and instead we need to be lied to, manipulated, and killed off is straight up evil and wrong.

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                1. You’re probably right because every person in the world that is aware of and writes about our overshoot predicament agrees with you that the universal solution for every problem we face is more education.

                  The only person in the world that disagrees with you is a cranky old retired electrical engineer who thinks behaviorally modern humans exist with their uniquely powerful intelligence because they evolved a tendency to deny unpleasant realities so depression inducing awareness of their mortality could be blocked despite having the intelligence to understand mortality.

                  That engineer has tried hard to educate family and friends who trust and love him without success and has concluded that some other force is in play that blocks education from working on deeply unpleasant topics.

                  That engineer also finds it very odd that after many many years of working hard to educate the public with zero success, activists and environmental organizations have not concluded that their education strategy needs to to change.

                  He also thinks it odd that those same organizations universally agree that we need to violate the laws of physics so we can stop using fossil energy, and that their education programs never focus on population reduction.

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                  1. There is a often repeated quote;

                    “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair.

                    I would say it differently if you want to truly understand the world as it is;

                    “it is absolutely impossible to get a person to understand something, when their salary and therefor their life and the lives of their loved ones depends 100% on their not understanding it.” – jef.

                    Cheers for now! jef

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                    2. Please Rob, There is absolutely no one who will verbally agree with me on the fact that people behave badly for a reason. It is a forbidden topic. Everyone disparages everyone for behaving badly but refuse to talk about why. You insist that you and Varki are the only ones who DO know why and you refuse to talk about any other possibilities. That is completely non scientific but I guess thats how the world works now.

                      I would add to my earlier comment on the Sinclair quote. The other side of that coin;

                      It is incredibly easy to get someone to do absolutely anything no matter how evil if you offer them vast sums of life changing money. You seem to have “enough” money so you probably can’t understand this.

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                    3. Sorry, you discussed many different things, I did not pick up on your core idea.

                      I definitely agree with you that people can behave badly for a reason. Examples I can think of include:
                      – a father will steal food with violence to feed his hungry children if necessary
                      – citizens will riot and destroy things if they are struggling to make ends meet in a society with too large a wealth gap

                      Is this what you are talking about?

                      How does your idea relate to my focus on why we are unable to see overshoot and act responsibly, like voting for population reduction policies, so that we reduce the coming suffering?

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  12. Oh I should add that the Gene Jabs have none of the traditional elements of what used to be defined as a “Vaccine”.

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  13. Chris Martenson today says his instincts tell him something big is going to break soon. He says the high rate of change of too many important things for him to keep track of, plus less energy available to the system guarantees it.

    I agree. And it’s not just economics, something’s haywire in the climate. And what’s up with Europe? They used to have decent leadership but seem to have lost their collective minds.

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    1. Today I sent this reader-article to my local newspaper here in Germay (near Dortmund).
      Probably they will not pubish it:

      “Energy poverty means collapse in the medium term

      The consumer center warns of energy shortages. This is truly not new information after the sanctions imposed on Russia, which have a boomerang effect.
      Capitalism requires growth. The business model of industrial civilization depends on cheap oil and easily extractable raw materials. Germany and the EU in particular. Many are not aware of the degree of dependence. But our politicians are certainly aware of it.
      As is well known, Russia has great potentials of raw materials and fuels, very close to us. Thus, it is incomprehensible that Germany has allowed U.S.-dominated NATO to take very offensive action in Eastern Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union. The war started by Putin could probably have been prevented by politicians acting in Germany’s interests. Russia has long sought proximity to the EU. Kohl and Brandt pursued such a policy. Now 50 years of détente have gone down the drain. The losers are Europe and Russia. The profiteers are elsewhere. We are now faced with a shambles.
      As a result, we will probably not only freeze, but there will also be no peace. We have gambled it away here in Europe in the interests of third parties. Third parties who, for competitive reasons, have historically had no interest in a good neighborly relationship between Europe and Russia.
      If we don’t get access to affordable energy, Germany and the EU, which is interconnected with us, will collapse. Perhaps our government can still turn the tide.”

      Translated with http://www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

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      1. Be interesting to see if it’s published and if it gets any replies el mar.
        Most of what you say is obvious to un-denialists but there are not many of us (as yet).

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        1. 50 years of detente went down the drain but primarily because Russia invaded another country, after unilaterally annexing a substantial part of it. It may have had reasonable security demands (debatable) but the invasion of a sovereign country and the targeting of civilians is not reasonable. Patting Russia on the back for such a move is also not reasonable but should we let a bully get away with murder just because it causes us some suffering by not doing that?

          As el Mar said, capitalism requires growth but we all know that such a situation is unsustainable and may be unsustainable in the very short term.

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          1. Russia was clear on its red line. We crossed it several times. Now Ukraine will lose a big chunk of its territory.

            If Russia put weapons on the Mexican border the US would attack instantly.

            We should expect them to behave as we would behave.

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            1. Oh, I thought they were better than that. So Russia are just doing what any other country would do? Why so much support for Russia, then? If they are doing what any other country would do, they deserve our scorn and derision, as for any other country. I would still hope, though, that most other western countries wouldn’t deliberately target civilians in a country that didn’t even have enemy weapons placed there when invaded.

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              1. No, Russia is not doing what any other country would do. Russia is doing what any powerful country with nuclear weapons would do. Especially a country with a vulnerable border that has already been attacked twice, and that lost 24 million people repelling the last attack. Europe/US leaders lack any common sense at this time.

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                1. Well, there are nuances but if any country became powerful enough and well armed enough, then they would do what Russia is doing. In my opinion, you seem to be trying to accumulate reasons for Russia, today, wreaking devastation on another country which didn’t attack it. I can’t see a justification for it but others’ mileage may vary. At least, if we dislike what our leaders are doing, we can vote them out.

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                  1. Hi there Mike,
                    Pardon me for my confusion but I am having a very difficult time trying to discern what the difference is between what you ascribed to Russia and what the US and before that, the British Empire have done to mow down swathes of countries in multiple continents with gay abandon, just to make triple sure they never had the chance to become powerful and well armed enough. I am sure that those sovereign nations couldn’t see the justification for imperialism running over them like a steam train, but of course we the beneficiaries got a lot of mileage from it. And every four years or so, we are given a chance to rubber stamp a choice between two pre-selected candidates and feel validated in our robust democratic process. Yes, we can vote one out, but the problem is that another one more or less just like it gets voted in. I completely agree with Rob that the US and Europe have lost all common sense but also add that we have never even come close to seeing things from another country’s perspective, because if we have ever tried, we wouldn’t have done what most other countries haven’t. I know I am not being subtle here, but I just can’t nuance it any other way.

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                    1. Well, GG, I was simply responding to what I saw as an attempt to justify what Russia has done because of something some other country might do in what could be seen as similar circumstances. I don’t think it can be justified, from my point of view. Though neither of us are residents of the US, I agree that there isn’t much choice for citizens there but remember that their primary process does give ordinary people a chance to get the candidate they prefer (and, in some states, you don’t even need to be registered with the party). Of course, the two main candidates are always (at the moment) from the same two parties and I agree that, insofar as the health of the planet is concerned, they are very similar. But there are always other candidates and that people don’t feel inclined to vote for alternatives is really down to their choice. In some other countries, they don’t really get any choice and candidates or parties that pose a threat to the rulers are either banned or imprisoned. So there is a big difference in my opinion.

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  14. I disagree with many of the items on the list of things that don’t make sense, though there are some I do agree with, vaccinating young children for one. The list depends on believing some information given by contrarians (some might be true but not necessarily all) and others are simply corollaries of others (such as several related to not enough testing of vaccines). But the list may make more sense in the US than in other countries (for example some countries did recognise immunity from infection in providing passes).

    However, the way data is presented in my country, NZ, seems bizarre. The data we get make it impossible to determine the efficacy of the vaccines (in the case of kids, there simply is no data). One wonders why, especially as the data we do have suggests no current efficacy for the vaccines (though there was for Delta).

    I really don’t understand how digital currencies can do anything claimed, though this could be my ignorance on such currencies. Lockdown policies were weak in almost all non-authoritarian countries, so it’s hard to see how they could be used effectively. In the US and some other countries, individual states had quite varied policies. In many countries, they simply couldn’t wait to get back to long-distance travel as normal. China had some childbirth restrictions for a long while but abandoned them. Why? The US is going backwards on abortion so are actively encouraging a booming population. Many states are also quite anti-vaccines.

    Our leaders are mostly inept and, for me, completely incapable of devising and sticking to a plan for a great reset. I remain unconvinced of any such plan and, therefore, of COVID-19’s place in it. In any case, it looks like nothing will stop a civilisational collapse, the only question is when it will become obvious to most people that it’s happening. Perhaps the idea of a great reset is comforting because it provides some kind of reason for the deterioration we see around us and perhaps absolves us of some guilt in that deterioration. Just a thought.

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    1. I think digital currencies would be extremely useful for maintaining social order and fairness in a world of scarcity.

      Imagine that the only way to buy anything was with your government issued currency card. They could set the interest rate negative to motivate you to spend your money before it loses value. There would be no way to remove your money from the bank. They could set rationing limits so for example you could buy only 10L of gasoline and 100g of butter and 1Kg of flour this week. If done right there would be no way for a black market to flourish as happened in WWII, and the rich could be prevented from cheating on rations. If you’re suspected of organizing violent protests they could reduce or turn off your rations. They could make it impossible to buy weapons and ammunition. Prices and wages could be set to manage inflation. People working in jobs not needed for everyone to survive could be sent home to conserve resources with some money credited monthly to their account for living expenses. Central banks could print money and credit it to citizen accounts directly thus making it possible to close all the (now weak and failing) commercial banks. There would be no way to bypass the official system with gold or cryptocurrencies.

      Digital currencies are the perfect tool for a shrinking economy with many scarcities.

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      1. Oh, I thought you were referring to cryptocurrencies as digital currencies. I agree that if all money was only digitally available then a lot of those actions are possible. It already is, to some degree. There has been a lot of talk, here in NZ, about removing paper money and coins. I don’t see it happening for a very long time, though. Perhaps when economies are constantly contracting, it might happen.

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      2. Oh I do hope they will still let us barter in pumpkins, or at least set a good exchange rate for trading in such jolly commodities!

        In all seriousness, I am confident that you have described what is about to become our material reality, the only question remains, will it be effected by carrying a card or by implanted chip?

        O Brave New World, we have been awaiting thee, your arrival has been portended for so long now. And now that you are upon the doorstep, is it with trepidation or anticipation that I tremble so?

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  15. I always thought the 3 locations chosen by Jack to settle the entire world population seemed a bit odd. Two centres of population in the americas and only one in the entire Eurasian and African land mass. Why can’t we make use of the hydro dams already in existence in Norway which is in a seismically neutral area and well located for climate change? Or another small population in Switzerland with similar circumstances. The Chinese and American located hydro civilisations proposed are both in humid climate zones that will only get worse with climate change.

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    1. I’ve never checked Jack’s calculations but I think the logic went something like this:
      – assume about 15M people so there is sufficient critical mass to maintain science, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, fine arts, etc.
      – calculate the watts of energy needed to sustain that society
      – find a location with reliable long-lived hydro dams nearby that can provide the required energy
      – ensure that location also has sufficient nearby fertile agricultural land to feed the 15M

      Jack’s plan I believe assumes no dependencies or trading between the 3 regions since long distance travel is no longer possible.

      I too think climate change disruptions to hydro power availability and agriculture are big risks.

      On the other hand, what alternative is there if the goal is to maintain a modern civilization? It’s worthwhile for us to refine his plan and at least try.

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      1. As a bonus essay for the final exam in this compulsory Pass/Fail course entitled The Future of Humanity, here is a thought experiment opportunity–Knowing what we know about the parameters needed for maintaining some form of modern civilization, what are your top three candidate locales for humanity’s last stand at this present time and why? You can start with likely countries and narrow it down to specific locations. What is the evidence, if any, that such a transition is already underway in these places? For extra credit, Would you want to be part of the chosen new world population and why? List pros and cons for your choice. Time limit for completion–you have the rest of your life to work this out if you choose. Good luck and may the best answer win!

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        1. Jack Alpert says the US Pacific Northwest, China’s 3 Gorges dam, and I think someplace in Brazil are the only locations with enough hydro power and good agriculture to sustain a modern civilization.

          I like where I am on Vancouver Island and I’d like to exit by my own hand after the nuclear war starts.

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          1. I hear you, Rob and more power and awe to you! From what I’ve gathered of this intrepid little band, we are all more than content with where we’ve been planted (or transplanted) on this green earth, and that’s cause for more gratitude than we can ever express. There will be hardship ahead no doubt, but I trust we will all find a way through our remaining cycles of the sun with the least suffering and the most fulfilment. Go well and in peace, everyone.

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        2. I can’t see any country actually doing any planning to keep its part of the planet in a modern technological industrial society. And country economies are so intertwined that I don’t know how a single country will extract themselves from that web. Maybe poorer countries have the best chance as some may not be as dependent on a global economy.

          Michael Mann was interviewed on a New Zealand programme a few weeks ago and basically said Australia is the worst place to be and New Zealand is one of the best, so far as the effects of climate change is concerned. I live in New Zealand, so that’s plus.

          As I’ve pointed out, from Tim Garrett’s work, only a complete cessation of economic activity will halt the growth in emissions. So I can’t see anyone getting away without extreme hardship. Sadly.

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          1. Hi Mike,
            Yes, I hear you, too, loud and clear! I’m glad you are happy and well in NZ, along with monk, Campbell and I trust all your families, too. Sorry for missing any other members living in the Land of the Long White Cloud who gather here.

            I am hoping that there will be first nations in all continents that will be able to return to their traditional way of life once we of the western world diminish, for it is their turn again for self-directed evolution after being so rudely interrupted. Alas, we leave a far more degraded land, flora and fauna scape in return, not to mention the lasting poisoned gift of climate change, but trusting that Nature and time will find a way to heal some, if not all, wounds.

            Things here in Australia are pretty shaky indeed with more catastrophic flooding in the Sydney area, the third “wave” in under one year. How much longer before people wake up and pack up, but to where and with what means? Maybe some will see the light and emigrate to New Zealand, I wouldn’t be surprised if you experience a significant influx of climate refugees from Oz in the coming months. Tasmania has always been an escape pad for mainlanders but our infrastructure here will not cope with too many more. And the spectre of supercell bushfires always looms large on the horizon, even more so now after two relatively mild and wetter than average years with rampant undergrowth in the easily tinder-dry forests.

            Ah well, it is our turn for hardship, perhaps just another shade of what all our ancestors have had to overcome so we may have a chance at life on this planet. May we prove to be as steady and courageous, and moreover, humble and kind. I think we’ve long lost our bid for increased wisdom and temperance.

            Hope this winter is going well for you and your family. The days are getting longer for us again, and as long as we have breath and wake up to a new morn, we can make each day a full life. All the best.

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            1. Thanks, same to you, GG. I don’t hold out much hope for what you call “first nations” people in New Zealand reacquiring the skills needed to survive without modern civilisation. Maybe that will be true of other countries where there are indigenous people who could trace a thread of ancestry back more than several hundred years and who may have kept up those skills. For myself, I’m keen to get back to planting my food forest after a lot of disruption over the last year and a half which has sapped a lot of drive from me but I’m sure that will return soon.

              Sadly, we don’t really have our ancestors to point back to as I think we (or our kids) will be the first humans to have to live in a world this warm and this depleted, with chemicals lacing the air and most non-human life extinct. Oh what fun!

              Yes, things aren’t going too badly for us this winter though we’ve only had one frost so far, where we are, which is a bit strange. Some trees need more. I think we’re about to get some of Sydney’s rain but I hope it’s not anywhere near as bad. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like.

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    1. Absurd EU regulations regarding nitrogen pollution? Whats the alternative? Happily poison our soil and water? We grew into the situation Borlaug warned us about. Anyway, the take from the linked tweet is highly stup … simplistic and I would expect better from you Rob.

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  17. Today Sabine Hossenfelder discusses population trends and carrying capacity referring to “doomsters” LOL as those who are worried about falling population, like Elon Musk, and concludes:

    1) Estimates of our planet’s carrying capacity vary widely with conservative estimates being our current population of 8 billion and optimistic estimates being 100 billion.

    2) If we played our cards right we could almost certainly squeeze some more people on this planet.

    How is it possible that a really smart PhD in physics could discuss human population and not mention the rapidly depleting, non-renewable, non-substitutable energy necessary to support 8 billion people? It’s not unless Varki is right.

    Nate Hagens would say Hossenfelder is energy blind and needs more education.

    I say you can’t have a PhD in physics and be energy blind without genetic denial.

    Hossenfelder is already on my list of brilliant polymaths in denial:

    On Famous Polymaths

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  19. Interesting insights from HHH @ POB.

    I’m thinking that if he’s right and oil falls to $25 there will be shortages rather than abundant bargains.

    Wrong, oil prices are going lower much lower as a repeat of 2008 plays out.

    There are a lot of opinions and misconceptions of what 2008 was all about. Be it bad mortgages or high oil prices.

    2008 was a global dollar shortage as the banks in Eurodollar system became risk adverse and stop creating loans also known as bank deposits.

    As the global reserves currency there is a synthetic short on the dollar as dollars are borrowed to fund pretty much everything.

    Btw more dollars are loaned into US from banks that are outside the US than are from banks inside US.

    Global reserve currency is actually the Eurodollar market. There is a big difference between banks reserves created at the FED and bank deposits created in Eurodollar market.

    Eurodollar curve is screaming dollar shortage. Keep ignoring it. But when oil is back at $25 I told you so.

    When dollar’s are borrowed your effectively shorting the dollar and going long whatever it is your buying.

    The whole world borrows massive amounts of dollars to do business. That’s the short.

    Dollar strengthens as banks that do all the lending for whatever reason become risk adverse or balance sheet constrained due to collateral or lack of collateral. Sometimes it’s a regulatory constraint. Banks either won’t or can’t lend.

    In Europe a lack of natural gas is a huge reason not to lend. In US companies are sitting on record amounts of inventory. Corporate debt is also at all time highs. So corporate profits will be tanking. Good reason not to lend.

    China’s #1 and #2 customers are the US and Europe. Good reason not to lend into China.

    What we are seeing in currency markets isn’t capital flowing into the US dollar. It’s a lack of US dollars flowing or being created.

    Strong dollar is inflationary if you live in Japan. Japan is paying 50% more in dollar terms for 5% more imports by volume. That’s year over year month of May.

    Similar situation in Germany. 25% more for actually 3% less goods and services.

    As dollars become harder to source. And debts harder to service. We will see a deflationary debt unwind.

    And yes low oil prices.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/eias-june-2022-oil-production-outlooks/#comment-742186

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  20. As I said I have made a commitment to be very careful to not blame someone for not having the information they need to act appropriately. I don’t feel right accusing someone of denial when they have never been taught the truth of what is happening.

    That said I do believe that there are lots of people who do have all the info choose to be ignorant ie live in denial. I just see from my life experience that that is only a tiny % of the population.

    The main reason that people do not “do the right thing” with regards to overshoot, AGW, resource limits, destruction of the biosphere, etc, is because…and they will tell you out loud, heads of nations are on record stating it… it would cause massive economic collapse, suffering and death. No one will willingly enter into that bargain. You can try and tell them that they will suffer if they don’t do something but all they know for sure is the absolutely will suffer NOW if they do all of what is being presented.

    We must make it abundantly clear that with the power down plan no one will suffer, everyone will pull together and everyone will get through this in the most equitable way. Do not think I am advocating growing out of this…quite the opposite. I have been advocating for over 15 years now for stopping all the nonsense bullshit jobs and activities and just focusing on making sure everyone is OK and that means that means everyone.

    Thats all for now. I actually have worked most of this out over the last 10+ years but I don’t need to go into it here.

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    1. I’m not sure what you mean by “the power down plan”. If you mean the Oil Depletion Protocol, then I still don’t think it will ever be done in an equitable way but Oil (or fossil fuels, generally) is only one depleting resource and climate change is only one of the environmental stressors. I can’t see any way that everyone will pull together unless the collapse is rapid and hits everyone at the same time (though, even then, I think many will try to get an advantage over others in an attempt to maintain some semblance of a modern technological society). However, I don’t think collapse will be a sudden tipping point. It’s probably more like a “long emergency” or a “long descent”.

      As Tim Garrett and others point out, even a contracting economy will require increasing amounts of energy and governments will try everything they can to minimise recessions. So there is no getting through this equitably or in a controlled way.

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      1. As I noted there are dozens of way in which we are killing off all life on the planet. All of which needs to stop ASAP.

        There are no incremental measures. TPTB are not doing anything to minimise recession in fact they are doing the opposite. As Rob/HHH pointed out TPTB is removing money from the global economy. This is catastrophically deflationary. TPTB has done this before over and over;

        “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered.”

        This is the future and there is no hiding or prepping for it. Either we let them control “power down” which means bottom up suffering and death (same as it ever was) or we insist on controlling it by taking down the “Golden Billion” then making sure everyone else is ok for the next 10+ years of “simplifying”.

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  22. I think I might have linked some stuff of Dr Gary Fettke’s on here before. I watched this on YouTube last night and thought it was good. Basically the dietary guidelines issued by our government are wrong, the bodies that issue these dictates are hopelessly corrupted and you should completely ignore and unlearn what we’ve been taught in school about good nutrition.

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    1. Thanks, excellent fact filled talk. I mostly agree with Dr. Fettke’s views.

      I was not aware that many of our dietary guidelines are based on hallucinogenic visions experience by a Seventh Day Adventist church member, but I’m not surprised. I am familiar with Ancel Keys’ role in the demonization of saturated fat which has an equally putrid history.

      One caveat about red meat has made me wonder. Dr. Ajit Varki, an originator of the the MORT theory that is this foundation of this site, has done first hand research that convinces him there is a link between red meat and cancer. He’s a really smart guy with integrity so I’m hesitant to dismiss him. Either way, it’s not a big problem for me because red meat is too expensive to eat except as a treat.

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      1. I’m fairly sure that various studies have linked the consumption of red meat to an increased risk of cancer but even if your risk goes up by a factor of 2, it may still be a tiny risk. The risk factor is often not useful on its own, in many statistics, it has to be taken in context with the absolute risk after the factor is applied.

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        1. I haven’t studied this enough to have an opinion.

          What I do know is that Dr. Varki thinks it is serious enough to use as an example of genetic reality denial the fact that researchers in his lab still eat red meat with gusto.

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          1. People’s beliefs about food are often religious. Not uncommon to see a scientist thinking they’ve found the food answer and becoming a quasi-cult leader on their chosen bad food / super food.

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      2. Hi Rob,

        When you differentiate between CAFO meat and grass-fed, many of the associated health problems disappear.

        On a separate note, meat from grass-fed animals can have net carbon sequestration.

        Thanks and good health, Weogo

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  25. Neither clinical trials nor real-world data showed that “vaccinated people don’t carry the virus.”

    Vaccine manufacturers convinced the FDA to give them EUA based on trials that were designed specifically to avoid testing whether vaccines prevent people from carrying SARS-CoV2.

    But that didn’t stop people like the CDC director, Dr Fauci, and Joe Biden, from saying that “vaccinated people don’t carry the virus.”

    This was a completely unscientific fabrication to try and get as many people as possible to take the jabs, and to rationalize immoral mandates.

    When their fabrication was proven false, they told another lie: “The reason vaccinated people DO carry the virus NOW is because the virus mutated.”

    If that were true, the vaccine manufacturers would have developed a vaccine responsive to the newer strains by now. They have not.

    Bonus lie: “the virus mutated because of the unvaccinated.”

    Anyone who’s learned to properly use fungicides, pesticides, or antibiotics, knows strains resistant to (<100% efficacious) treatment evolve in treated populations because that’s where selective pressure is greatest.

    When their web of lies got too thick and tangled, there was really only one place left for them to go. They took a page straight from Orwell’s novel and modified our language:

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  26. You can’t make this f**king shit up.

    NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will not require companies to submit clinical trial data on COVID-19 vaccines modified to protect against the BA.4 and BA.5 versions of Omicron in order to authorize those shots, a top FDA official said on Thursday.

    https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fda-will-not-require-clinical-trial-data-authorize-redesigned-covid-boosters-2022-06-30/

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    1. Let me get this straight.

      The regulators ignored that tests and data were distorted and fatal harms covered up to get the substance approved.

      Then the regulators ignored adverse events 100 times worse than would have caused them to withdraw approval in the past.

      Then the software program of the substance is updated god knows how and the requirement to retest it is waived.

      Then the regulators get to keep their nice jobs and fat salaries.

      Nice work if you can get it.

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      1. sucks to wake up. It will only get worse Rob. Your darkest fears about what drives humanity are being realised.
        stay tuned for more updates or upgrades.

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    2. No, you really can’t.

      I guess what the FDA is trying to say is “Since you’ve already successfully been able to produce an ineffective inoculation agent, we trust that you will be able to do the same again this time, and besides, if we require the same shoddy clinical trials as you submitted and that we accepted the first time around, that might be a bit more revealing than we are comfortable with, so let’s adopt our don’t ask, don’t tell policy which works for everybody.”

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    1. It always cracks me up that people think that people give a care for those that they don’t know. Truly when you drink your tea or coffee in the morning (a simple pleasure) do you ever think about whether the people that brought that to you through all the processes were suffering, living horrific exploited lives. Of course not. That would ruin your morning, stop the pleasurable activity (did you really check that fair trade is real). So why would those higher up the food chain give a toss about you and your suffering. Nothing must get in the way of their rituals and pleasures – most of which are making money and spending it. They care not for those beneath them. We are all the same so therefore expect sh itty outcomes as a trend even if Jef is right and people can behave beautifully or badly.

      Mike good to see you are no longer a vax supporter FE misses giving you sh it.

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      1. I don’t see the benefit of vaccines with the current variants, that’s all. If there is a benefit to more vulnerable older folk, it seems to be minimal and yet to be demonstrated to me. For young children, there seems to be no benefit. That’s all. My views change with the data. That’s not true of FE. I’m surprised so many over there put up with his insulting behaviour and fixed opinions (including the high opinion of himself).

        As for the rest, it’s true that we generally don’t think about who may have suffered to bring us our daily pleasures but can cry about a sob story on the news. It has to be in our face for most of us to be affected, I think. We’re all contributing to the crazy messed up world but find it easy to blame others.

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      2. Hello James,
        Oh how true your words are and perhaps it is high time we learn the truth in this time of reckoning. You are so right about us in the exploitative nations denying the existence and suffering of those who allow us to continue our rarefied lives. To remind myself of this great injustice, I have come up with a new definition for fair trade, that is I will consider something truly to be fair if we are willing to trade our own daughters (or sons) to do the same hard labour work under the same oppressive conditions and receiving same pathetic subsistence pay, day after day for the remainder of their earthly existence without a hope of reprieve or amelioration. I can never look at the little fairtrade sticker on the coffee packet without a thought for this and it only makes me want even more to grow my own coffee beans, if nothing else to become more empathetic about what it takes to allow this ubiquitous simple pleasure whilst another human being is only trying to survive. But then it multiplies into just about everything I see or touch or use throughout the day, the weight of this knowledge and responsibility building up relentlessly like the bewitched buckets in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice!

        Over the years of trying to justify my own existence at the expense of countless, nameless others, I have come up with just one ray of hope for myself, and that is just try to be kind and compassionate as best as I can, to the most people I can, for as long as I can, and in attempting to do so, I believe there is a good life lived. I can only be where I am and accept responsibility of the consequences of my choices, but if this privilege can propel me to become more than I thought I could be, then that is grace enough for me and my way of paying forward. Thank you for bringing this thought back to the surface where it should be a discerning and radiating beacon to guide our judgment and bring us to humility. And it has not escaped my lesson learning that whatsoever befalls us, if we have the humbleness and honesty to admit and see truth, we will know that we have already visited that upon another, if not in the same quantity, then at least with the same quality. As you say, we are all the same in possibility, and we each crave one another’s understanding and compassion.

        Namaste.

        PS Growing coffee is a relatively successful attempt here in subtropical Far North QLD, but the processing of it is a whole another story! So many steps and all quite fiddly, too, to come up with a handful of beans to make a passably recognisable brew! I am not a confirmed coffee drinker (the caffeine content does not agree with me) but I thought I would give it a go since so many are. I have a few Camellia sinensis plants from which tea originates, but here, too, it is more than just picking some leaves and boiling them, somehow the flavour isn’t quite the same, but hopefully the antioxidant value is still there. Never mind, I’m sure in the times to come we will be only too grateful for a few leaves to colour the water! For those food forest fanatics here (and we are a goodly bunch), you do know that mulberry, persimmon, and loquat leaves all make a very delicious tea and with many health benefits, too.

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        1. Hi Gaia,
          A challenging path. Good luck with the coffee and tea growing. I too need to get some tea plants, I have coffee and they grow readily down here in the Warning of mountains region.
          regards
          James

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        2. It could be argued that growing your own coffee (and everything else) denies others the opportunity to make a living. However, in the end, we’re all going to have to do that, as much as we can.

          I’m actually growing coffee, here near Auckland. I’m just south of Auckland and do get frosts from time to time, which the coffee bushes haven’t enjoyed. However, I’ve recently planted them in the ground, transferring them from pots, and so far so good. I did manage to get enough of a crop one year to make some coffee, which tasted good. Yes, it’s a fiddly process but not very difficult. One of the hardest parts is actually roasting them. You have to keep them moving. I’ve done it in a pot and in a popcorn maker. The latter is easier but it needs a good machine – one I tried couldn’t move the beans around. I won’t go into the details but I hope to be able to do that again, we’ll see if I get any beans this year. I’ve also tried tea and that tasted good too but the bush is looking a bit bare. Again, that was initially in a pot but now in the ground. Hoping for great things!

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                  1. Seriously, a few bottles of drug store caffeine were my first “prepper” purchase when I started getting my head around all this stuff. That was back when I thought I could survive what’s coming.

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        4. Existence is fundamental I’d say. No one is asking you to justify your existence so why ask yourself that question? Even if you were a mean old cynical gal you would still have the right to exist. In my books anyhow.

          Now maybe if you were a stowaway discovered on a manned mission to Mars and had no usable skill set to justify your existence you would be dragged to the airlock and blown out the hatch. Different situation entirely.

          But as it stands you have as much right to existence as anyone else and I would help you defend that right even if you didn’t know how to garden.

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  30. When I was young, Canada led the world at being a good global citizen. Now we lead the world at being an evil global citizen. Shame.

    Boosters? Every Nine Months? Go Fuck Yourself!
    I mean, no thank you.

    While the recommendations are to get a Jab every 6 Months, you will be required to get one every 9 months, in the off chance that you catch COVID in between Jabs.

    They 100% are going to try to run this passport bullshit again…for travel, social outings, federal jobs, Employment Insurance…we’re back to September of 2021!

    https://sheldonyakiwchuk.substack.com/p/boosters-every-nine-months-go-fuck

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  31. Tom Murphy today with a new essay arguing we have no free will over choosing a more sustainable path.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/07/the-ride-of-our-lives/

    The central idea is that any development conferring a short-term competitive advantage will come to dominate the landscape, so that failure to adopt it means losing the race and dropping out of the future. It’s a meta-evolution selecting for something other than our best interests. And it’s winning, as it must.

    The idea is simple enough, and has played out over and over and repeatedly and repetitively throughout our history. A tribe that utilized fire could access food (via cooking) that others could not, stay warmer in cold periods, alter landscapes to their benefit, flush out game, and use it as a weapon against competitors. Should a tribe either not develop the skill or opt out of utilizing it, they simply lost the competition and faded.

    The same logic applied to agriculture. Those who opted in enjoyed surplus/stored food, increased numbers, freedom to specialize, and could afford to stand up full-time soldiers. Those who didn’t play along—especially if they occupied valued land—were destined to fail. The fact that agriculture emerged independently across the world and came to dominate once the climate became sufficiently stable speaks to the de-facto compulsory nature of the “choice.”

    Next we stumbled on Enlightenment (scientific) thinking. The advantage is obvious, in that the underlying principles work every time. Just as a game player who has absorbed all the rules will have a substantial competitive edge over someone who is just winging it, mastering the rules of the actual universe is a winning strategy.

    The fact that fire exists is independent of human existence. Likewise for the concept of agriculture (ants also farm), fossil fuels, etc. Taken to their logical conclusion, these forces become so effective at resource exploitation that ecosystem collapse (the waterfall) is a built-in feature. It’s just what this river does. It was always so, and here we are, finally able to anticipate the consequences.

    Nature does not care about our fate. Evolution results in many blind trials. The fact that a self-destructive, yet obligate pathway exists is both fascinating and unfortunate. The “river” does not have our best interests at heart. Fire does not care what its adoption does to us. While wheat enjoys a genetic advantage from having domesticated us (settling us into permanent homes), it cannot know or care where this ultimately leads. Fossil fuels give us superpowers to accelerate our overshoot in spectacular fashion. None of it is about us. The world possesses dangers. Slippery slopes and harrowing waterfalls are a part of the landscape.

    After making a persuasive argument that we should stop fretting about bad choices and simply enjoy the ride, Murphy ends by oddly arguing for more education so we can choose a more sustainable course.

    But I’m not one to acquiesce. Again paralleling Ronald Wright’s sentiment above, I hold that understanding the situation is the first step in crafting a strategy to avoid total failure. Just because we have never effected agency in our route to the present (we never really had to) does not mean that we cannot try to learn something new and finally step up to the challenge. The mere possibility that we are capable of understanding the situation is huge. If we can collectively acknowledge our peril and recognize the need to make radical changes—to fight or ignore the forces that have pushed us onto our current path—then that is a feat worthy of song. Is it at all possible? I don’t know. But I’m energized to do what I might. As I keep telling folks, I am a wild-eyed optimist, deep down. To characterize my message and efforts as pessimistic is too narrow an interpretation: a reflexive rejection/denial of the necessary pretext (the bad-news portion). The overall context is rooted in hope.

    Once again a brilliant polymath misses the key question. How is it that a uniquely powerful intelligence can be selectively disabled to enable the universe to do what it wants to do, which is to dissipate energy gradients as fast as possible? Answer, you need an evolved behavior to disable that intelligence by denying unpleasant realities, as explained by Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory.

    Click to access B200.pdf

    If you are someone like Murphy that still hopes for a rational conscious course change to reduce the coming suffering resulting from human overshoot, then the only good path is to focus on finding a technique to override reality denial. I think that technique is to understand and acknowledge MORT, and to put policies in place to minimize its harms.

    For example, we understand that alcohol makes one feel good, is addictive, and impairs judgement, so we have created policies with enforcement methods to prevent airline pilots from drinking while working. Perhaps we should screen and prevent candidates from running for office if they have normal denial genes. Only people with defective denial genes, like Tom Murphy, would be permitted to hold key leadership roles.

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    1. I left this comment on Tom Murphy’s blog.

      https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/07/the-ride-of-our-lives/#comment-12209

      Tom made a persuasive argument that we should stop fretting about bad choices and simply enjoy the ride because we have no free will. But then at the end he shifted gears and oddly argued for more education so we can choose a more sustainable course.

      It seems that most overshoot aware people that have not given up and still want to make the future less bad believe more education is the correct path.

      I think more education is a complete waste of time because the problem is our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

      I’m not saying we can overcome genetic denial, in fact my personal experience of trying to raise awareness for 10 years suggests denial of denial may be an impossible barrier, however I am saying that if you want to improve the future then you must focus on denial awareness because it blocks all other paths.

      In summary, it’s either enjoy the ride or find a way to deal with denial.

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  32. A compelling story of an awakening to the ultimate taboo 😊

    Secondly, we realize unconsciously, and to varying degrees consciously, that acknowledging civilization’s inherent flaws will bring with it psychic pain, difficulty in functioning and possibly ostracism. Thus, our own defense mechanisms kick in and aid civilization’s own mechanisms in bolstering our denial.
    […]
    Finally, we are, in a way, numb to discussions of collapse. There have been doomsday prophets crying wolf throughout the centuries and, since they were always wrong, it makes it hard for us to believe that this time it’s real. At present, this is still probably my own greatest barrier to complete acceptance of civilization as unsustainable.

    And it only gets better from there. 2007(!). SystemsThinker ftw! 😍😘

    Bonus: a link from ↑ link, civilisation as a graph

    What makes collapse a certainty, rather than a probability, is, ironically, the very thing that defines civilization in the first place: complexity.

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    1. Hi Howard, thanks for introducing us to your blog. In your essay you say awareness of overshoot led you “into some confusion again about what are the most appropriate next steps for me. Some aspects of my life now seem less important than before, others more important. It will take time to again reassess my priorities in light of this even greater understanding.”

      I see you stopped writing in 2016. Do you have any new insights in light of world events today?

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      1. You’ve watched Melancholia one too many times I’d say. Maybe give the movie Ted a go. It’s about a guy and his friendship with a beloved teddy bear.

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  33. Gail Tverberg published a new essay today arguing that central banks are making a critical mistake by increasing interest rates to control inflation. The gist of her argument is that a higher interest rate is effective at damping inflation caused by rising demand, but ineffective and dangerous against an inflation caused by supply constraints, such as coal and oil growth that are constrained by depletion of low cost reserves today.

    Tverberg makes a good argument that higher interest rates will curtail energy availability but oddly does not discuss the implications of keeping the interest rate low, and how that will result in a better outcome. It seems to me physics says we have to become poorer. That can occur via less money, or money that is worth less.

    Tverberg also provides some evidence that supports my speculation that covid was cover for preventing and preparing for an economic collapse:

    The economy was already sliding into recession in 2019. The 2020 shutdowns hid the very poor condition the world economy was already in. If people were forced to remain in their homes, they could not take to the streets to protest their poor wages and pension plans. The shutdowns helped give the impression the world economy was doing better than it really was.

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/07/05/why-raising-interest-rates-to-reduce-inflation-may-work-out-very-badly/

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    2. He’s sired more kids than Captain von Trapp. Maybe when they assemble for Christmas they can all sing together and Grimes can play Maria.

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      1. I read somewhere that to become a CEO of a successful company you need a sociopathic personality. Kinda fits with Musk.
        AJ

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        1. I read that Musk said to his first wife Justine,

          “if you were my employee i would fire you”

          I suppose we all say things we shouldn’t from time to time. Despite his gaffes he’s a likable bloke in many ways.

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        2. AJ, a lot of people seem to agree with you that Musk is evil. I haven’t seen that evil. I see someone worried about the future of humanity that denies the underlying problem.

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  38. Rob someone else writing about collapse talking about Varkis theory.

    https://stevebull-4168.medium.com/todays-contemplation-collapse-cometh-lviii-721a00a87c2f

    “The widespread adoption of magical thinking to avoid anxiety-provoking cognitions is in no way surprising. It is perhaps, as Ajit Varki argues, that “Some aspects of human cognition and behavior appear unusual or exaggerated relative to those of other intelligent, warm-blooded, long-lived social species — including certain mammals (cetaceans, elephants and great apes) and birds (corvids and passerines). One such collection of related features is our facile ability for reality denial in the face of clear facts, a high capacity for self-deception and false beliefs, overarching optimism bias and irrational risk-taking behavior…”

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    1. Nice find, thanks.

      It’s great and rare to find someone mention Varki’s theory in the context of overshoot.

      Scanning Steve Bull’s other essays suggests he has a psychology focus and attributes our overshoot predicament to many different factors (like Nate Hagens) which differs from my claim that our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities is a keystone behavior that enabled both the existence of our uniquely intelligent species, and our many destructive behaviors.

      I see also that Bull tends to blame our unsustainable path on the elites which I disagree with because the majority of citizens would like to be an elite and would do the same things if in power.

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  39. I know we have discussed it before, but man o man are there a lot of muppets on OFW. Rather embarrassingly for me, a lot of them are New Zealanders. Rob’s comment sections are full of good information, discussion and top notch people. There’s so much value over here. Thank you Rob for all the effort and time you put in to this little corner of the interwebs

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    1. Thanks kindly monk. I’m really pleased with the intelligence and civility of the people that hang out here.

      I feel bad for Gail Tverberg because she does such good work, but the crazies on her site don’t seem to bother her so I guess it’s all ok.

      I worry a little about being labelled a nutter myself after a post like this one, but it makes me a little crazy trying to explain what’s going on with covid. Nothing at face value makes sense and “why” is always my first question.

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        1. To be more clear Rob, I was referring to taking things at “face value.”

          I agree with Nicholas Taleb that “IQ tests select suckers for noise who overdetect patterns…

          They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)”

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            1. Some of your points/observations are valid. I also think you have also fallen victim to confirmation bias. And that’s all I have to say about that.

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              1. I worry about confirmation bias. I’d like to find a super smart person with integrity that goes deep into the data and concludes our leaders are making the correct decisions. I’ve been unable to find such a person.

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                  1. I’d like to find someone that is super smart who has done a podcast or written an essay regularly for over a year going deep into the data of every decision our leaders have made and concluding they did most things, or even one thing, correct.

                    It can’t be a one off essay because we need lots of time and exposure to assess their integrity.

                    I tried listening to my health minister who put out regular updates but she is an idiot and provided no data.

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      2. I pinged Gail about this a couple of years ago, apparently she’s just not interested in doing any comment moderation. She’d be better off without comments at this point IMO.

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          1. You’re the one who said you were worried. I simply pointed out that having a Ronald McDonald Red Nose reset button accompanying your headline looks a tad suspect. And lo and behold you push the red button (deign to read the post) and out springs a Jack in the Box. Last name Alpert.

            And writing “let’s go all dark and scary” might come across as one flew over the cuckoos nest. Not too far removed from FE CEP. I hope you view this as constructive criticism.

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            1. Thanks. I still don’t understand why they are pushing experimental substances with zero benefits and many probable harms into children.

              Assuming that all of our leaders are brain dead stupid or evil also seems crazy.

              I remain confused.

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              1. I really think most of the leaders in the West are brain dead stupid. Look what kinda degrees they have. Economics, Political Science, Communications, Gender studies, etc. Not exactly hard science/math types that are used to logical rational thought. Then a lot of them became lawyers – not a bright profession either (always defend your paying client even if you hate, despise or think they are bat shit crazy). I learned a lot being a lawyer – but mostly how dumb and just plain stupid lawyers as a group are. So, I go with brain dead stupid.
                AJ

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    2. I echo that, monk. Many here may not agree with some of my comments but I get good discussion back without all the insults and bad humour. So this is my favourite hang out, at the moment, when I get time. My apologies for the few New Zealand “muppets” that seem to congregate there – most are pretty good.

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  40. The birth rate is already much lower than it was in the past. It’s the death rate which has to go up. We’re looking at it wrong here.

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    1. Dude that’s trepidaceous. You might want to break out the white board like Turd Blossom and explain how that works.

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    1. Google doesn’t give me any insight into what Flow Dojo means.

      Why not join me with your real name?

      I started this blog with an anonymous name and Gail Zawacki criticized me for not having the courage of my convictions to come out of the closet so I stepped up.

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      1. I’m wary of convictions. Cotton Mather had convictions and look how that turned out. The way I see it, convictions too easily morph into fanaticism. Even so called positive convictions lead ppl astray – “here let me show you how virtuous I am by stabbing you in the back!” So sorry, I just don’t feel comfortable joining you and Gail. Especially not since hatred has become the all American pastime.

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        1. I agree, some anonymity is helpful. I have a couple of my rural neighbors that are full blown right wing “let’s go up to Portland and shoot some liberals”. They were born and raised here and feel their country has deserted them. They spend an inordinate amount of time shooting off their assault weapons (not that I don’t have one too – you know, self-defense). I just fear that in a collapsed situation they already have me pegged as a liberal because I moved here from the SF Bay area (of course I used to be a liberal, and still might be on some issues but eschew any illogical irrational position – and doctrinaire liberals have plenty of them).
          So, I would have no fear of anybody on this site knowing who I am but I’d be scared of some people at some point doing a Google search and saying look he’s a liberal. Just can’t be too careful.
          AJ

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            1. Already had all the neighbors over individually (or as families) for an intro cookout when we first moved here. Probably a bad idea because for some reason lots of native rural Oregonians blame California (and Californians) for the liberal state of the urban population of Oregon that out votes them all the time.
              AJ

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              2. Yeah, your guests at the cookout probably thought “there goes the neighborhood,” but hey – this pesto and crostini ain’t half bad.

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        1. For those interested in the gyroscope you can find it in the Menu under Train – Live Events.

          And Bonus – good training for the future Mars mission.

          Serenity Now.

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    1. I really despise this person’s analysis!
      He just parrots the MSM presentation of the West vs. Russia in everything he says. No mention of how Russia is not the USSR. How the West (U.S.) promised Gorbachev not to expand NATO if the USSR would allow Germany to reunite. How the West went back on that promise again and again. How any need for NATO disappeared with the fall of the USSR and Warsaw pact (yet the west made NATO into an offensive force). How the West tried to export Capitalism to Russia after the fall of the USSR (rape Russia of it’s natural resources and impoverish all the people) in the early 1990’s. How Putin has asked again and again not to have NATO expansion and how this is seen in Russia as an existential threat (would the U.S. see Mexico or Canada as a threat if they joined in a Chinese defense pact?). How U.S. (CIA) engineered a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and got rid of the elected president, who was friendly with Russia. How since 2014 NATO helped train Ukrainian troops and wage a war against the civilian populations in the Donbass. How Crimea was always a part of Russia (since 1783?)(Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in a drunken party in 1954). How Germany and France got Russia not to invade Ukraine in 2014 with the Maiden agreement which Ukraine violated again and again. How Ukraine intended on annihilating the Donbass republics just prior to Russia invading. How Finland (who sided with the German Nazi in WWII) has a treaty with the USSR, and by extension Russia, to forever be neutral (and thus avoided becoming a part of Russia after Stalin/Russia defeated Germany in WWII.
      Need I go on? The West/U.S. is pushing a war against Russia because it wants to maintain it’s former status as the world’s only superpower. To read history and respond to politics as if the U.S. (and the West) is some kind of paragon of virtue and light is totally at odds to the behavior on the world stage (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria)., Yugoslavia (Bosnia, Serbia) .
      To have to explain all this is a waste of time just like this blogger’s analysis is.
      AJ

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      1. I agree with you and thanks for the nice summary of the sordid history.

        I support Russia 100% in this conflict and think Ukraine made a fatal mistake by provoking Russia.

        Joe Blogs is totally blind to overshoot and parrots the MSM without thinking but he also tends to do more independent research and presents more fresh data than most. So I listen to the interesting bits and ignore the rest. In this video, I found the summary of who has nuclear weapons and where they are located to be interesting.

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        1. Rob, do you think that those responsible for the shelling of civilian homes, hospitals and infrastructure are not on the Russian side? Or does 100% support mean that you support the principle of Russia invading a sovereign country, presumably with the aim of annexing more or all of that country, without necessarily supporting its tactics? What about the laws it brought in to try to ensure that only its leader’s narrative is published?

          Whatever the supposed provocation of Ukraine (that is the country Russia invaded and is demolishing in parts) it seems bizarre to me that Russia can be seen to be totally pure in this.

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          1. We’ve had this discussion before and we disagree.

            If Russia put weapons on the Mexican border I would support the US using force to remove the threat and to prevent it from happening again.

            Ukraine has made a huge mistake and will have to live with the consequences for a very long time.

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            1. We’ve had part of the discussion before. I didn’t realise that the US had put weapons on the Ukraine/Russian border before the invasion. In the hypothetical Mexican situation, should that force include the shelling of civilian homes and infrastructure, and the near levelling of major towns?

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                1. What makes you think the military are sheltering in civilian apartments, shopping centres and hospitals, Rob? The Russians tell us they are liberating the people living in razed cities and never target civilians. Sorry, I think what Putin is doing is 100% wrong. There was never any justification for it – complaining that their concerns were being overlooked is pathetic and definitely not justification. He has made his concerns worse by pushing more countries into Nato. Good job. Not. However, there will always be small strong-willed men who feel they need to make their mark. He’s certainly done that.

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                    1. Rob – please ignore mike, he has trolled several sites until everyone ignored his ignorant incendiary comments and he left.

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                    2. OK, Rob. I see this thread has yielded no new information. However, I just find it hard to believe that you think it’s 100% acceptable for Russia to invade a country, inflict a huge toll on its civilians, because another country didn’t accept and act on Russia’s concerns.

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        2. As a supporter of Russia are you willing to fly a Russian flag outside in your yard? Post a pic? Courage of your convictions and all that.

          Speaking of flags, Bastille Day is coming up. I was thinking of erecting the French Tricolour with a sign that reads

          “Happy Bastille Day Citizens!”
          And in smaller print, “Generally not celebrated by those whose surnames are preceded with a ‘de’”

          The lyrics of La Marseillaise are so peaceful. It’s always interesting to see young tykes in short pants singing about bloody flags.

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    1. I agree 100%. If you read his article he is in complete denial of overshoot/collapse. He takes a right wing/libertarian view point I have seen before – the socialists/liberals wanted clean energy to stop fake global warming. He and others (Market Ticker – Denninger) think the solution to our energy problem is to drill for more oil – I wonder if they are even aware of Peak Oil? The problem is that Global Warming is real, but the liberal solution, more renewables is subject to both Jevon’s Paradox, limited inputs and the substantial fossil fuel necessary to construct and service them.
      Denial is paramount to avoid any cognitive dissonance.
      AJ

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    2. Gosh, this is why I’ve become disillusioned with his site, apart from not wanting to dish out even $9 a month just to comment. I’m guessing he’s making a lot of money and he’s put on weight since shedding so much. Sorry, that’s not relevant but it sure is odd.

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          1. They just got divorced, she is still around on the interwebs. One of their grownup children had a serious cancer illness (pre-covid). That sort of thing normally puts a lot of stress on a marriage

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      2. So I’ve been buying the new subscription, lowest possible level, and I’m not impressed sadly. You can get everything you need for free on his website – the part 2s are more of the same but with more blame the global leadership stuff. I won’t be renewing my subscription. Once you’ve got a good grounding in our predicament, his website isn’t as helpful. He also has gone more and more down the global kabal conspiracy route. I would however 100% recommend everyone do the crash course

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  47. Astute observations from Tim Watkins today.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/11/a-flaw-seldom-mentioned/

    For much of Britain’s history, its leaders were smart enough to recognise that, appalling as war always is, in most cases foreign wars should be considered none of our business. The conflict in Ukraine is “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing,” as evidenced by Foreign Secretary Truss’ apparent early belief that Ukrainia was an island in the Baltic Sea. But unlike the conflict those words were originally uttered about, and for all of the establishment media bluff and bluster to the contrary, Putin is not Hitler, and the incursion into Eastern Ukraine is not an existential threat to Britain, Europe, or even the former Soviet states in the East of Europe.

    What really is an existential threat to Britain – and, indeed, to the western empire as a whole – is the ill-conceived sanctions salad which has destroyed the basis of the Eurodollar system itself. By sanctioning the Russian central bank and, crucially, by helping ourselves to the assets of individual Russian oligarchs, many of them ambivalent to the fate of the Putin government, we have destroyed the very reason that these assets were parked in London in the first place. If London, along with the smaller European banking centres, is no longer a safe place to park dollars outside the USA, then there is no point in seeking to hold and store dollars at all. Far safer – if not better – to convert them into gold or commodities. And if, as is now accelerating, an alternative commodities-based currency was to emerge from the BRICS, why not use that instead?

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  48. Preptip: I have put a great deal of thought into how to configure my life for what’s coming. One decision I made was to not invest in solar PV for backup power. I instead have opted for redundant forms of lighting, cooking, and heating that can operate on kerosene, propane, butane, naptha, alcohol, gasoline, and diesel, with a good down sleeping bag and warm clothing as a backup. I have a small fuel efficient generator for temporary outages to keep my refrigerator going, and if the outage exceeds my gasoline supply, I’ll make do without refrigeration.

    Today Jim Kunstler discussed problems he has experienced with the $35,000 solar PV system he invested in 10 years ago. I observe that future problems will be MUCH worse when trade with Asia becomes unreliable.

    I much prefer the simplicity of my kerosene lantern and the $5 investment I made in a lifetime supply of spare parts (wicks).

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/its-not-working/

    …last week, after considerable hassle with my solar company setting up an appointment for a techie to visit and evaluate the problem here, the guy came up (at $150-an-hour) and informed me that my charge controller was shot. The charge controller processes all those chaotic watts coming from the solar panels on the roof into an orderly parade of electrons. He also told me that my back-up batteries — for running critical loads like the well-pump during grid outages — were at the end of their design life. Subtext: you have to get new batteries.

    There are four big ones in a cabinet under the blown charge controller and the inverter (for turning direct current into alternating current that is the standard for running things). The techie had some bad news, though. New building codes forbid his company from replacing the kind of batteries I have, which are standard “sealed cell” lead-acid batteries. Some bullshit about off-gassing flammable fumes. Now the government requires lithium batteries, which would cost me sixteen-thousand dollars ($16-K) more to replace than new lead-acid batteries.

    Now, it’s theoretically possible for me to replace the less-expensive lead-acid batteries — they’re still manufactured and sold — but the catch is: I’m on my own getting them and installing them. I’m in the middle of that learning-curve right now. These particular batteries cost about $850-each for the four of them, plus a hefty charge for “drop-shipping” about three hundred pounds of lead and plastic. I will almost certainly go that way, though. A new charge controller will run about $2-K. All together, replacing these components represents a big chunk of change.

    At the risk of sounding like some kind of pussy, I confess that this whole business of repairing my solar electric system has put me into a welter of anxiety and fury. I am trapped in the cage of sunk costs, a.k.a. the psychology of previous investment. Not only do I have $35-K (in higher-value 2013 dollars!) tied up in all this equipment — the solar panels themselves, the wall of electronic devices, the conduit, control panels, and digital read-outs — but now I have to dump thousands more into it after only nine years. It pisses me off because I should have known better. I walked with eyes wide shut into the pit of techno-narcissism.

    The hyper-complexity of a home solar-electric system is extreme. There are hundreds of little integrated components that can blow, all of it adding up to a case of guaranteed fragility. There are no easy fixes or duct-tape work-arounds for any of it. I can’t make any replacement parts in my garage. They come from faraway factories via supply lines that get sketchier every day on trucks that don’t operate profitably at $6.50-a-gallon diesel fuel.

    In a low-grade epiphany while going through this ordeal last week, I realized that back in 2013, instead of getting the solar electric system, I could have bought the Rolls Royce of home generators and buried a 500-gallon fuel tank outside the garage, and had a manual water pump piggy-backed onto the well, and maybe even purchased a fine, wood-fired cookstove — and had enough money left over for a two-week vacation in the South-of-France. Silly me.

    Of course, these travails with my home solar electric system are a metaphor for the complexity and fragility that is, all of a sudden this year, causing the operations of Western Civ to fly to pieces. My investment in solar was as dumb as what the entire nation of Germany did in attempting to run itself on “green energy.” (Not to mention their more recent dumb-ass decision to forego imports of Russian natgas in order to please the geniuses at Tony Blinken’s State Department, the dumb bunnies.)

    Of course, even when I get the solar electric back up-and-running again, something else is sure to go wrong. And in another ten years, the solar panels will be at least half-dead. So, if you’re reading this personal lamentation, consider bending toward simplicity. Wish I had.

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    1. WOW,
      I read Kunstler’s whole post. Am I living a dream???? His whole solar debacle mirrors my own. I did the same thing 5 years ago for about $30k. I now wish for the same simple things too.
      I built a tiny house just recently and the solar system (for lighting and water pumping) only cost $2000. It’s simple and “should” last for 20 years and for the difference I built a solid tiny house for 3 people. It has metal siding so hopefully it will survive the forest conflagration that is coming – and provide me with somewhere to live a much more modest life.
      AJ

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      2. I think if someone purchases an EV they should be made to put in solar panels at their house so they don’t increase stress on the grid. For myself, I didn’t see the point of solar, we have very good hydro schemes in New Zealand run by the power companies. I think our time is better spent learning skills to live without electricity, than doing everything we can to keep the lights on. I am young-ish by the by, so I’m often thinking about what skills and tools would be value to pass down to others.

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        1. We also have excellent hydro electricity here in British Columbia.

          The scenario I think about living in a remote low population density area is that after a bad winter storm causes an outage I may be without power for an extended period due to diesel shortages for the repair trucks, or because they can’t get spare parts from Asia to fix the grid.

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        2. Yes, living without electricity is what humans had to do for almost the entire time they have been on this planet. It’s clearly possible. Hydro is very destructive of nature, as are all cars (EVs included) and so-called renewable energy. If only I was 30 years younger (I’m 68), my aim would be to develop the skills to live without civilisation. Sadly, I don’t really have the time or strength to do that now so have to do the best I can.

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          1. I’m in my early 30s, so very keen on practicing these skills. Even if I don’t use them much, they can be passed on to future generations when I’m older. We have this knowledge gap between say my grandparents generation and maybe the children or grandchildren of millennials. What information we steward will set the tone of the future (assuming there is one for humans)

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    3. The average utility bill in the US is $ 2000, that seems very low as most people I know it is $5000 or more and all my middle income friends and fam are at $12,000 to $20,000 per year. Over 10 years $100,000 to $200,000, solar is a massive savings and can easily maintain its self.

      If you need to redo all of it after 10 years you have been screwed. I have had Solar for over 20 years, both thermal and electric and I have replaced about 1/3 of it in the last 10 years. Point being that I consume about 75% less than most households. All comparisons of energy and/or transportation are usually about keeping things the same as they are now, not about using less so ….forget about it.

      Having said that there is no way that even one billion people could do this.

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    4. I have repeatedly considered solar and repeatedly rejected it. Mainly because it is almost as bad as fossil fuels in its impact on our planet but JHK’s travails just cement that decision. I will shortly be installing a wood-burning oven to act as a heating source and a cooking device. So long as we can collect wood (I’ve also planted some trees that can be coppiced for this purpose) we’ll have a way to heat the house and to cook food. Water is my main concern as we are dependent on it for getting water out of our rain tank and into our house. My aim is to construct a header tank that can provide water to the house, without a pump. Still looking for a suitable hand pump to pump water from the main tank to the header tank, occasionally, though some windmill device would be ideal (for mechanical pumping, not for generating electricity). With water secured, we’d be set up for a fairly good existence, even without lighting. We do have a Berkey water filter for emergencies, though.

      Regarding tiny homes, I am also keen on them. However, I’m not the only one to consider, as I don’t think my wife would find it suitable. We’re having a sort of experience of it now as we’re temporarily (for over a year) living in a small cabin (10 metres by 2.8 metres). The main problem with the cabin is that it is really not set up for long term living (it’s rented) so we are constantly finding it difficult to do things in it. The new house we’ll shortly be moving into is small (just under 70 square metres) but not tiny. The extra space will be very noticeable going from a cabin. If we’d moved from our last home to the new house, it would feel very small so having to squeeze into a cabin for over a year is great preparation!

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      1. Nice Mike. We’ve only been in our place about 18 months after 5 years in a house bus (24m2) so we’re used to small spaces. Our house is around 100m2 but our kids have that while Nikki and I still have the bus. Trying to sell our bus diesel hot water and space heater to replace with small wood burner / cooker. It’s very efficient on fuel but cost of diesel making it less attractive for potential purchasers.

        We’re also on the look out for a hand pump for the house. We currently get water via gravity from the creek and use without filtration. Nice big spring fed creek in summer but in winter gets runoff from neighbouring farm so need a few days of no rain before clean enough to fill the tank. Hard to find a gap in the rain here in Northland at the moment. We’ve purchased another tank for roof collection which will gravity feed ground floor but not upstairs. Want to be able to pump rain water up to smaller tank higher up hill for when power outages mean the pump fails.

        Also about to install a big old Stanley wood burner oven with wetback in the house.

        I have about 2kw of secondhand solar panels I’m wondering how best to utilise. We also have potential for micro hydro from the creek but would require about 200m of cable plus inverter, battery etc. One option is to utilise batteries from our old Nissan Leaf (sorry Monk we’ve ended up with 2 small electric cars 🙂).

        Or maybe we just jump straight to wood world.

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        1. Good stuff, Campbell. Lots of rain here, too. I’ve seen lying water here for the first time in the 3-4 years we’ve had the place.

          We had a Stanley Donard in our previous house, with a wet back. It was quite efficient but I wasn’t really happy with the quality as the fire door didn’t quite fit properly so couldn’t be fully damped down to keep it ticking over all night on cold winter nights. Also, a wet back can’t be turned off so using it in summer didn’t work too well (we also had solar hot water which couldn’t be turned off).

          One thing I wonder about with wood burners, though, is the need for replacement fire rope, every now and again. And, it doesn’t last for ever, needing some replacement parts from time to time. Still, it’s the best we can do for now.

          I’m collecting primitive and old-fashioned skill books slowly. Hopefully some will come in useful (as they already have) in the future.

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          1. Yes our Stanley has just seen reconditioned with new rope, wetback and bricks. Might add spare rope to the parts list. I’m also thinking about summer hot water heating options and collecting books.

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        2. Campbells – I have several small stand alone solar set-ups 500W each. One at the house, one in the shop, and one in the greenhouse. 500W controller and 1000W and 3000W inverters are all very affordable and yes I have spares.

          I built one set up on a hand truck with 2 Trojan batteries so I can easily trundle serious electricity anywhere I need it.

          My idea for tiny house is to get several of them in a sort of circle the wagons set up with a large indoor/outdoor common area in the middle or something like that.

          So far everyone I know is going big with massive house or two so no takers.

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          1. Thanks Jef. Good food for thought there. We’re also looking at small cottages mainly from materials off the land for the kids. Planning appropriate post fossil fuels locations and infrastructure is a good challenge.

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  49. If you ignore the denial and/or ignorance about energy depletion, this is an intelligent discussion about Europe’s idiotic Ukraine response and the coming energy/economic problems.

    He predicts lockdowns to conserve energy and “screw climate change we must burn coal again”.

    Who’d of thunk it?

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  50. I’ve already posted this June 16, 2022 2 hour discussion between Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche but it’s so deep and wide, and therefore difficult to absorb, that I’m on my 4th listen and will probably give it another couple listens on future walks.

    Where are the intellects of comparable quality and integrity that support government covid policies?

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    2. Thank you so much for posting this, Rob. The response of the medical community to the pandemic has made things immeasurably worse. It’s not a good prognosis, but it’s good to know. Haven’t seen this info anywhere else.

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  52. Hello everyone, hope all are traveling well. What a lot I’ve missed in the past week or so from this site when we’ve been flat out brushcutting, pole-pruning, mulching, and planting here up in Far North Queensland! I am happy to report that the land is looking a bit more tamed and I’m getting ready to start a few new projects which fall very nicely into this section of self-sufficiency living, our most important contribution to present and future. Thank you all for your wonderful descriptions of how you’re making your home space a more sustainable and utterly fulfilling haven.

    As I was reading, I found myself saying Yes, Yes, and Yes! because so much of what has been presented is what my husband and I have been trying to learn and do in the 24 years or so we’ve been here in Australia. It was a huge learning curve coming from a studio flat in San Francisco to a small hamlet in Tasmania, population 250, and it took us months to figure out how to use the slow combustion stove in our new home (the only form of cooking then), dinner was cereal and crackers for many nights in the beginning! It had a wet back and we did manage to heat all our water for several years using wood (now we have caved into convenience of using the electric back-up for the days we don’t get a fire going). The wet back set-up is a huge investment and eventually the copper-lined low pressure tank will corrode if you are using rain water which has a much lower pH (ours is 5.5), we found this out the hard way. Now we add sodium bicarb to the rain tank to increase the pH, but it seems that for every problem that we try to fix, we fall into more complexity and reliance on something else. If you don’t have a gravity fed system for water, you will still always be reliant on a pump and a hand transfer set-up won’t be practical for the amount of house water we are all used to, and for the head you would need for adequate pressure. In Tasmania, we collect rainwater from our little (relatively, but it is far from tiny) house of 80m2 and it is pumped to rain tanks which are elevated so we have gravity return to the house–at least during power outages we still have running water as here in the rural areas we don’t have town water. For all the wood-eyed enthusiasts here wearing rose-coloured glasses, I must say that it takes a whole heck of a lot of wood to heat even a small house in a temperate climate, and also for cooking, not to mention hot water. We happen to have enough trees on the property to perhaps be self-sufficient in our own wood needs but many of them are in a ravine and huge and we don’t have the skill to cut them down ourselves–one mishap with the chainsaw would either see the world population down by one or add another dependent to the social system. So, we rely on getting wood delivered and amuse ourselves in having a part in the process by splitting some larger pieces. What will happen when the chainsaws fail. both in fuel and parts? Not to mention getting the wood to our properties, we seem to be short in mules around here.

    In version two of our self-sufficiency dream, we chose a climate where wood heating isn’t critical for survival, although it still adds a lot of comfort in the few winter months here in the subtropics where the night time temps still dip low enough to be chilly. Here we have a baker’s oven type of woodstove, a kind of compromise between a woodheater and slow combustion stove, an Esse Bakeheart which I highly recommend for it’s efficiency and usefulness. It can be configured with a wetback but we decided that’s not the way to go here as we won’t have the stove on in the hot summers. I am now researching other ways to provide hot water, I’ve got some ideas on using black polypipe, anyone tried this? We have discovered that bamboo burns quite well but quick, (Campbell, your curse of excess bamboo may very well be a blessing in disguise!) and is much more easily harvested even by hand tools and is an incredible renewing biomass. We are also experimenting with coppicing several different species of soft and hard woods, but no matter what, without power tools, getting wood from tree to where you need it, in the size that is useful, is bloody hard work. Does anyone here profess to have proficient axe skills? We certainly do not, although we have a copy of The Axe Book, so phew, that should take care of it if we need to skill up in a hurry-NOT! We have experimented with rocket stoves and top-lit updraft stoves for more efficient burns (using small diameter wood of kindling size and any dry biomass) that can be used for cooking and heating hot water in reasonable quantities. There are many designs one can make and commercial ones on the market, we got a SilverFire rocket stove about 8 years ago, don’t know if they are still imported in from China from whence all things come. Does anyone else have experience with these?

    We have also decided that solar isn’t going to be viable in the long term, but we are considering getting a small solar generator of 1.3kW just to charge up power tools (we have battery powered brush cutter, chainsaw, pole-pruner, hedger) which will be a boon for the intermediate stages before we all go back to scythe, saw, and axe. And my Vitamix blender is currently a non-negotiable, as smoothies with all our fruit and veg are going to hopefully remain a main source of nutrients, and this small generator will do the trick. Here is the link for the unit here in Australia, I’m sure you will have something similar in the States and NZ.
    https://itechworld.com.au/collections/lithium-power-stations/products/lithium-portable-power-station-1300-watt-100ah-itech1300p

    Of course, all this is transitionary but it will go a long way to making life hopefully just that little bit easier in the first instance when fuel and parts supply dwindle. I suppose we better start reading up on how to use these hand tools which all our ancestors were experts at–of course we need to practice the skills! I have suddenly had the desire to re-read one of my favourite series of books from childhood, The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, she chronicles her family’s pioneering adventures in the 1870s-80s. Anyone else read these classics? Was it only an American thing? I never watched the TV series, but I’m sure they would also be instructive as well as heart-warming. Boy, people were of a tougher stock back then, but their lives seemed ever so fulfilling despite all the hardship which they just knew as freedom to live their chosen lives. Which is what I wish for all of us, in whatever time we have remaining. Remember as Marcus Aurelius exhorts us from yet an even more distant past–“Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within ourselves in our way of thinking ” (and doing!) I’ll sign off with another one of his pithy and wise quotes “Accept the things that fate binds you, love the people with whom fate brings you together, and do so with all your heart.” Namaste.

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    1. Damn, battery banks are expensive.

      Our ancestors were tough. I’ve always been impressed with the skills and effort required to build early wood ships. Imagine falling, hewing, and transporting huge beams by hand.

      I’m going to add Little House on the Prairie to my library.

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    2. I read Little House in the Woods so many times as a child, and then the rest of the series later as a teenager. I love those books.
      I read on Alice’s blog there is a limit for how far you can go out to get wood before you are burning more calories than you will get back in value from the wood. I think it was based on a mule pulling a cart, and how much you would need to feed them

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      1. Hi there monk,

        So heartened to hear that you love those books, too. So glad that they became popular in New Zealand as well, which is not a surprise as there is plenty of pioneering spirit in all the Commonwealth lands, a bit too much really! Given our generation difference in age, (I am 52) it proves that the Little House on the Prairie books are truly timeless and there is something we have definitely lost in leaving the past so distantly behind as we hurled headlong into our technological wonderland of the future. I have often thought that we couldn’t last even a few days thrown into Laura’s world but yet, their family could still live in ours, by high-tailing it into the wilderness and doing what they always did, that is if they could find some wilderness left anymore. Of course without their community and inputs it would be very different, but they could survive because they had the skills and mindset to do so. Our world just expects so much to appear from China at low cost after clicking a few buttons linked to a bright screen.

        Methinks you may have read another children’s book series that was a favourite of mine, The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald? Once again, based on real life memoirs and the setting is a small town in the western state of Utah, just before the turn of the century 1900. This one explores the escapades of his older brother Tom whose great mischievous brain leads him to come up with various schemes to swindle people in his community which he rationalises by claiming he was only teaching others a lesson whilst making use of his greater God-given faculties. There were about 8 books in the series, all entertaining and also gives a snap shot into life in those times.

        And my absolute favourite (I read a lot as a child and as an only child, books were not only my escape but friends), the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander? Beginning with The Black Cauldron and the fifth book is The High King. These are loosely based on ancient Welsh mythology and you will recall a lot of the Lord of the Rings themes here, too. Once again, part of what enchanted me and still, is the description of how life was then in the middle ages. We think we use our fill of CPU now with our technological overwhelm but I would argue that the challenges of overcoming the elements and being completely self-reliant in any situation are the more stimulating and fulfilling uses of our unique brains and bodies. It is hard to justify that in just over 150 years we went from near complete self-sufficiency to near total dependence, and without an inkling of knowledge or ability to get back as a society. Not to mention nearly completely destroying the planet in the meantime. But, in the inception of progress through the ages, this end was already foretold, unfolding as it has, chapter by chapter, because it was written by a strange but spectacular hominid species with a MORT leaning brain. It’s enough to make you want to bury yourself back into the comforting depths of good children’s books which take us back to a simpler and wholesome time when we thought anything was possible.

        I think that after the collapse, these books would be excellent comfort material to be read by candlelight. I think I will go onto eBay and with a few clicks on the keyboard, make secondhand copies magically appear at my doorstep. It is so disconcerting to be so disconnected with our not so distant past, but it looks like we’ll have another chance to make it up very soon.

        Happy reading, everyone! Just the thought that we can read (and write) is a mind-blowing idea. Will we continue to do so?

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        1. Pardon me, an errata addendum here. The first book in the Lloyd Alexander Prydain series is The Book of Three, not The Black Cauldron (that’s the next one). But you would know that if you love these books as much as I do. I really do recommend these for everyone, and if you happen to have children or grandchildren in your lives, do yourselves a huge favour and get a set to read together. It will be wonderful sharing time in these very interesting times indeed.

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        2. Happy reading Gaia Gardener, Thank you for sharing your favourite books. I haven’t read any of those so I will add them to my list 🙂

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  53. Our leaders did the opposite of the correct thing for every single one of dozens of covid decisions. Rather than assuming that all of our leaders are stupid or evil I speculated in the last 2 posts that our most senior leaders have an agenda other than public health, specifically that covid is being used as cover to prepare for an economic collapse.

    I also speculated that their visceral hatred and irrational behavior towards Russia may have been caused by Russia refusing to participate in their covid plans.

    I seems I may be wrong on my Russia speculation. Riley Waggaman today took a deep dive into the history of Russia’s covid policies. Although Russia charted a path independent of the west, they made most of the same mistakes, which can also be explained in the context of planning for a reset.

    I am paying attention to people like Dr. Weinstein and Dr. Malone, who are much smarter and more knowledgeable about covid than me, for alternate theories to explain what’s going on. As far as I can tell they know something big is going on but they don’t know what it is. Because they are in denial of our overshoot predicament this makes me think that my “covid is cover for collapse prep” theory remains the most plausible explanation.

    I should add that I don’t know Waggaman so I can’t vouch for him.

    https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/07/investigative-reports/resetting-without-schwab-russia-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/

    Are Moscow and Beijing resisting the Davos-endorsed path, or are they building a parallel system using a similar blueprint? Are these two “sustainable development” partners opposed to world governance or do they instead want to be equal “stakeholders” in existing and future global superstructures?

    The argument that Moscow is begrudgingly mirroring the West as part of a biothreat-fueled technocratic arms race raises a whole other set of questions. Can Russia responsibly harness technologies that have been abused and misused by western governments? If a PCR test is not fit for purpose in the West, can the same test protect Russia from biological threats as part of its Sanitary Shield program? Is the global adoption of CBDCs an attack on financial freedom in the United States, but a necessary measure to ensure Russia’s economic sovereignty?

    These are the kinds of questions we should be asking ourselves as our increasingly chaotic world fragments into seemingly irreconcilable blocs.

    Whether in the East or the West, will the “client path” be fundamentally different?

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  54. My favorite Canadian covid data analyzer, who by the way stays away from conspiracy theories and only looks at official government data, although that data is becoming scarcer because our officials don’t like what it says so are cutting back on the data they make available, is predicting that we will be in a full on pandemic with overloaded hospitals this fall.

    This is consistent with Dr. Bossche’s prediction although I can’t tell if both predictions have the same underlying cause. I left a question in the comments hoping he will discuss any link to Bossche’s prediction.

    https://sheldonyakiwchuk.substack.com/p/a-snapshot-of-the-current-covid-situation

    As more and more provinces remove data on COVID, it’s difficult to actually bust down the stats to see exactly where we are at.

    Of course, this is the intent – they don’t want us to know.

    With that data that is still available is quite troubling and while I hope I am completely wrong, I don’t think we’ve actually seen a true pandemic…nothing like what we will be looking at in the Fall of 2022.

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    1. Hi Rob and all friends,

      Things are starting to go pear shaped even more quickly here down under in Australia with Covid cases spiking in every State and territory more than the initial “waves”. Hospitalizations are increasing steadily, too, although outright deaths from Covid remain small, all cause mortality has increased in every age group throughout this year. Every other week or even once a week, we are reminded on the national news (I read our main news outlet daily just to see what is being filtered down to the masses) that this year’s Covid and flu season is going to get worse as our winter progresses, and Australia’s government has spent mega dollars on a snazzy new advertising campaign called “Take on Winter” to encourage uptake of Booster number 2 (that’s four shots) for everyone over 30. I’m not so sure that is a good proposition, as I would place my bet on Winter having the upper hand any day, especially as fuel prices continue to soar. It is not clear whether or not they are also encouraging the elderly and immunocompromised to take a 5th dose as many already took their fourth earlier this year. The child vaccination campaign continues but uptake is not as robust as they would like in the youngest groups, so we’ll see how they’ll swing that. One territory has changed their testing requirements to 28 days after a previous Covid positive if you have any symptoms of a respiratory infection, meaning that they are admitting that people are now regularly getting re-infected in shorter time frames. Tasmania has a population of 525,000 and the official Covid cases by testing is now 210,000 which really means easily double that as many have not tested, so practically everyone in the State has gotten it or more likely, a good number of people have gotten Covid twice or three times, all within the space of a few months. Even with reduced testing and confounding with high number of flu cases, we are averaging now 1700 cases a day and climbing (so double this at least) which is about the same as the peak back in March when more people were tested. And we’re only just into winter as the population’s Vit D status is just starting to wane. It looks like Geert’s theory is still holding course, very sorry to say but not at all surprised.

      (For what it’s worth, no-one in our little 3 person household has officially gotten Covid, my husband had two shots but my mother and I are unvaccinated. I have been exposed to many people but I haven’t had a cold or flu in more years than I can count on my fingers. Since Covid, we do rinse our noses after every foray out to the public, but I think the main thing is doing the right things to stay healthy–proper food, rest, fresh air, sunshine, and physical exercise, preferably in natural surrounds. Nothing new here, and if any one is interested in what I eat and why, you only need to ask. I thought about entering this topic several times when the opportunity seemed to arise, but something told me to just wait and observe.)

      Add to this our repeated major interest rate hikes of 0.5% each month and our once happy-go-lucky country is poised like Wiley Coyote jumping off the cliff, this is the moment when we’re spinning our legs as fast as we can before the free-fall.

      For the past several years we have been trying to get our mortgage down as much as we can as fast as we can, and in another parallel universe we may have just made it before collapse. But for what purpose now? For the past couple months, we have been borrowing back from our paid-ahead mortgage fund to buy all manner of goods and food whilst we still can. The solar generator even at a couple grand is worth more to us in the hand than any more excess money we can funnel into the bank’s coffers at this time. I am trying to balance stocking up hand tools with battery powered tools, but for the garden, there is always the need for good quality tools that can be sharpened. For everyone who is scythe minded, this is the time to invest in several kits, and don’t forget having a left handed snath around for the south paws! Even if we are not physically able to scythe for hours a day, there will be others who can and need to. 5 gallon buckets with lids will be a very important commodity, I recommend everyone stocking up on these for food storage, water carriage, and yes, collection of human urine and manure. And hopefully in due course, you will have a bountiful harvest to pick and carry back from the field, overflowing from the buckets.

      Just another idea, this is a good time to obtain whatever musical instrument you ever wanted to play or used to play as a child, and some books to learn from and music to play. If you can fit it into your small homes, a piano will be a morale-boosting addition, usually someone knows how to play and if you’re lucky, you or someone you know can play by ear, and gathering together to sing around the piano will probably be a much comforting past time, just as it was in days of yore.

      All the best, everyone. If for some reason we are disconnected in the near future, I just want to say again how much comfort and joy being part of this group for this short while has meant to me, and thank you all. All gratitude to Rob for bringing us together and being brave to live and share his convictions so we might do the same.

      As for my name–well, I could tell you but that’s not important now. I am just a fellow earthling wanderer like you.
      Gaia is our home and gardening seems what we humans now need to do, in a more wise, compassionate, gentle, and generous fashion. It seems more than fitting to call myself that now as I aspire to become more skilful and wonder-filled trying to live up to my chosen name.

      Namaste.

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      1. Thank you Gaia for a most interesting update from Australia and for the excellent preptips.

        I would be interested someday to hear about your diet.

        FYI, I am unvaccinated, have never been tested for covid, and have not had any illness of any kind since covid began.

        P.S. In case anyone is wondering, I try to include the unique word “preptip” in any useful content for collapse preparation to make it easier to find it later with search engines.

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  55. Nice round-up of global economic problems with a focus on energy and food from friend Panopticon.

    https://climateandeconomy.com/2022/07/12/12th-july-2022-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/

    Rising Social Unrest Over Energy, Food Shortages Threatens Global Stability…

    “This increasing level of instability resulting from rising fuel shortages, supply chain disruptions and the rapidly-escalating prices that inevitably result are now creating food shortages that have placed hundreds of millions of individuals in developing nations around the world under a very real threat of starvation.”

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    1. Thanks, I wrote this review of Harari’s Sapiens book in 2015:

      Yuval Harari’s Sapiens

      I thought I found some support for Varki’s denial theory in a new book by Yuval Harari titled Sapiens.

      Harari makes the case that humans dominate the planet because we cooperate and we cooperate because we are uniquely able to construct and believe fictional stories.

      This is no doubt part of the story but misses the bigger picture and lacks a satisfying explanation for why.

      We dominate for many reasons. Cooperation yes, but also sophisticated symbolic language, ability to manage many relationships, forward planning, analytic skills, long term memory, learning ability, etc. All of these things fall under the umbrella of CPU power.

      The important question to be answered is, why did only one small group of one species in Africa evolve this higher CPU power, despite many similar species being exposed to the same selection pressures?

      Varki provides a plausible answer. Harari does not.

      And of course, why with this exceptional CPU power do we believe in wacky economic theories and even wackier religions but not climate change or peak oil or almost anything that matters?

      Again, Varki provides an answer. Harari does not.

      I then re-read his book and wrote this updated review in 2020:

      Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (revisited)

      After watching this book sit near the top of popular book lists for several years I thought I should re-read it to see if I missed something. I posted the following refreshed review on Goodreads.

      Another fine example of Panglossian cognitive dissonance in the tradition of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Ridley’s Rational Optimist.

      Harari gets everything right except what matters: human overshoot and the total dependence of everything he admires about humans on rapidly depleting non-renewable resources.

      Harari does seem to get the fact we’re trashing other species and the planet but then leaves that thought unfinished and shifts to an abundant future with genetically engineered humans and artificial intelligence.

      By pandering to and reinforcing the human tendency to deny unpleasant realities it’s no wonder his book is popular.

      Despite being very well read he’s just another clever monkey in denial.

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  57. El Gato is seeing the same bad trend in the data as other truth seekers and as Dr. Bossche predicted.

    I repeat, where are the intellects of comparable quality that support current policies?

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/higher-vaccine-rates-associated-with

    higher vaccine rates associated with greater rise in hospitalization
    if vaccines work to stop severe outcomes, then why aren’t they working?

    the bottom line is we’re seeing exactly what we would expect if variants were now homing in preferentially on the vaccinated and either becoming more severe for them or (more likely in my view) still providing some protection level of zero or greater but more than swamping it by making contracting covid more likely.

    the fact that variance by vaxx level is so much greater in overall than in 70+ bolsters this.

    we’re seeing strong association with more vaxx, greater rise in rates of hospitalization for covid, and more oddly, it’s well out of season in most of the high vaxx states.

    this sudden unseasonable surges pattern is aberrant relative to past covid outcomes which adds further cause for suspicion of new external drivers. (i suspect one could advance an argument about immune exhaustion from repeated boosting here as well)

    july this year vs july last year does not look good and they have already had one big surge that far exceeded last summer. another seems to be beginning both early and from a worryingly high base. this starts to look more an more like a virus “jumping the banks” due to herd immune fixation and/or a people less and less able to resist it. one would always expect to see that signal most in the oldest whose generalized immune systems are less capable and thus cannot pick up the slack from inapt antibody response.

    i realize i’m becoming a bit of a one note flute here, but this signal just keeps popping up everywhere in completely independent data series.

    i’m not sure any one can rise to the standard of “proof” but as a mosaic, especially given what we know about the underlying biology, this starts to get awfully compelling to ignore.

    the simple fact that this vaccine program is not working on society scale is getting far to obvious to ignore.

    if we could get any health agencies interested in actually stepping up and assessing this, then we could all go grab a beer and put our feet up, but as it appears they are disinclined to do so, the pulling of threads is left to us.

    and so we shall.

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    1. So far, here in NZ, I haven’t seen the higher hospitalisation, ICU or death rate, because of vaccinations but I don’t see any benefit to the vaccines, with omicron. It appears as though vaccination currently is a zero benefit decision (whether there are increased risks is open for debate). However, that may be due to change as our health ministry has just corrected downwards the hospitalisations and ICUs that are unvaccinated. It may turn out that being unvaccinated gives one a higher risk of hospitalisation and ICU from COVID-19. Or it may have been a one day typo. Not enough info on deaths yet.

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  58. Very interesting mega-thread from Dr. Tim Garrett today in which he discusses the implications of classifying sandwiches and wine as capital rather than consumption.

    So why then is inflation rising now? Two reasons. We try to grow access to new reserves that sustain us but can’t. It’s just too hard because they aren’t there.

    Or, depreciation of what we have previously produced is rising due to physical decay, perhaps due to climate damages.

    Both decay and decreased reserve discovery are things we can expect to increase this century. This is why I think long-term inflation is here to stay, and eventually hyper-inflation will kick in as we enter the phase of civilization collapse.

    Is there a solution to inflation? It’s tricky. Finding lot’s of new energy will help, for a while, because the bigger we get the faster we need to find the resources.

    Or we could address inflation by solving the climate crisis, but that’s hard to do if we’re busy addressing inflation by looking for new energy.

    I think we’re stuck, but at least we have a means now of understanding why inflation is a thing, tied to the major forces of this century, resource depletion and climate change.

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  59. I remain fascinated with the centrality of energy to everything we value, and the aggressive denial of that centrality.

    I have in the past pointed out the top 2 commodities by value are:
    – coffee: energy for our brain
    – oil: energy for everything else

    Today I saw another interesting observation from Grant Williams that the only two asset classes that are positive this year are:
    – hydrocarbons
    – carbohydrates

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    1. Pure energy! Energy is the economy. Currency is a proxy for ‘ability to burn energy’. The basics of life that very few seem to understand

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    1. LOL, I don’t even know what a troll is so you can relax.

      I watched it twice because I so want it to be related to Varki’s theory but I honestly don’t understand the message of the video.

      Would someone less dense than me please explain it.

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      2. Hey there Rob,
        I’m not less dense than you, but just a different kind of dense so I perceive some things in another way. Here I will try my best to explain what I saw in this diversion offered by our friend the Mandrake.

        This clip was sort of amusing because of the repetitive droll monotone “I don’t deny it” response for everything that you could just simply say “yes” to instead. Somehow that double negative answer makes it more sophisticated or serious sounding and causes one to pause to wonder what the responder really means, when a simple “yes or no” would have sufficed.
        For example, when the woman figure asked the man “is this ugly” referring to her outfit, and he responded “I don’t deny it” and she bursts into tears because that means he is really saying yes, that is ugly. She probably expected him to say “no, you look great” but not only did he not say that, it came out in a totally unanticipated way. That is what is supposed to be humorous. I think a large part of the comical factor is in the presentation using these toy figurines, whatever they’re called. They always have a plastered on smiling expression even when matched up to whatever voiceover words in any tone from solemn to facetious.

        The whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with your brand of undenial and certainly Varki’s theory is not even in the same universe as this little production’s reason for existence, which I believe is just pure light-hearted fun.

        Hope that helps explain what I see in it, for what it’s worth. I must say that on a scale of 1-10 for humour for me, this one doesn’t even rate but Mandrake chose it obviously because of its distinguished title of Undenial. I think you should think about copyrighting that before others start to bandy it about without appreciating the total seriousness of its implications.

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        2. I’m pretty sure Rob was being “un-serious” with his response & playing along with the whole denial schtick in a Dead Parrot sketch kind of way. Cause Rob knows what a troll is. Every blogger does.

          Yeah the clip is totally unrelated to Varki other than the title. Maybe if you watched it 100 times you might see an association but only because you’re tired and starting to hallucinate. Anyhow, I thought Rob might find it useful to know that the search term “un-denial” brings up some surprising results.

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          1. Thanks, glad I didn’t miss something.

            For the record, my brain doesn’t have a troll category for people.

            Categories I use for people I wish would stay away from this blog include rude, crazy, and stupid, but never troll.

            Fortunately we haven’t had any undesirable people here for quite a while.

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  61. Nate Hagens interviewed Joseph Tainter today.

    https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/27-joe-tainter

    Joe Tainter has been a professor at Utah State University in the Environment and Society Department since 2007, serving as Department Head from 2007 to 2009. His study of why societies collapse led to research on sustainability, with emphasis on energy and innovation. He has also conducted research on land-use conflict and human responses to climate change. He has written several books, including The Collapse of Complex Societies and Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma.

    Key highlights:

    Hagens: Are you aware of any civilization that decided to consume less than all available resources?
    Tainter: No

    Hagens: Are you aware of any civilizations that voluntarily decided to simplify?
    Tainter: No

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    2. This is succinct and exactly what I’ve been trying to get across to the enviro-optimists. This is because humans are a species. That species has a characteristic behaviour that can’t be voluntarily changed and, as far as resources go, they act like most other species, using all the resources they can at ever increasing rates until the availability of those resources stops them from doing that. Then there is a die-off. It doesn’t matter that humans may be the only species that knows it is doing this, they (sorry, we) can’t help themselves.

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      1. Your are correct and yet we have a uniquely powerful intelligence capable of calculating that our behavior will cause great harm to ourselves and loved descendants.

        The interesting question is, how did evolution selectively disable intelligence so that we behave no different than yeast when it comes to overshoot?

        I of course think Varki’s MORT provides the answer to both this question, and importantly, why we have a uniquely rare and powerful intelligence.

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    3. I didn’t have the chance yet to listen to this latest podcast but I already beg to differ on Tainter’s conclusion that no known civilization has learned balance with its environment. Here in Australia, and there in the Americas, I believe we have supreme examples of peoples who have lived in greater harmony with their environment for millennia, the Aboriginals of this Great Southern Land (60,000 years and more), and the First Nations of the Americas. They most certainly did not consume all available resources otherwise they would not have experienced such long continuous culture, until of course colonization happened. I think they did voluntarily simplify, or rather, it was inherent in their philosophy that all of Nature was interwoven and ultimately One, and no one element was superior to another so to take more than necessary was a cardinal transgression to the natural order of things.

      I suppose Tainter is not considering these premiere cultures to be “civilizations” because they did not organise into city-states with agriculture and permanent buildings? The hubris of our flash-in-the-pan dominant Western civ to label thus! How much there is to learn from humans who have chosen the Great Simplification from the beginning of their development as we are now forced back, kicking and screaming, into some semblance of balance in an environment we have already thrown akimbo. When I brave it to consider that our Western paradigm has utterly extirpated so many other forms of human societal experiments, some of which harken back in continuous existence of tens of thousands of years, I am reduced to only silence and shame. Yes, we have our technology, our monuments, our piercing into atoms and outer space, but they are going along with us in a blink and what do we have left to show for all that has transpired? A trail of tears and suffering which we already forced many upon, and now it is our turn to walk in their wake.

      This brings up something coming into my consciousness–do you think MORT applies to all human societal formations or just the ones that became dominant in and controlling of their environment? It is very interesting to contemplate if this theory holds across all human cultures. If white colonization of the Australian Aboriginals did not happen, let’s pretend there would never be any contact from the outer world, and the physical environment remained the same, then what would prevent a culture of 60,000 years from continuing? I’m not saying the original cultures didn’t have their forms of denial, but something in their make-up allowed for them to exist in relative balance with their environment, even the most challenging and changing, in a reproduceable culturally distinct way for many thousandfold years than we can claim for the dawn of our own branch of civilizations. Why can we not admit or honour this unequivocal success and how dare we deem it a primitive existence as if it is a reduced form of humanity? What very important lessons are there to learn from this before it becomes even more late?

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      1. 1) Would your belief that sustainable civilizations have existed change if we added the qualifier “consumed only what available technologies permitted”? If no, please provide the name of your favorite sustainable civilization and then let’s do some research to determine if your belief is true.

        2) Varki’s MORT theory applies to all 8 billion behaviorally modern humans who descended from a single group in Africa that experienced simultaneous mutations for an extended theory of mind plus a tendency to deny unpleasant realities about 100,000 years ago.

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      2. Yes, I’m sure the aboriginal groups wouldn’t have been thought of as a civilisation, for the reason you mentioned. I understand civilisations to be based on cities.

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    4. Those questions are irrelevant. You might as well ask;

      Are you aware of any current civilizations that consume human flesh?
      Tainter: No, but we have massive amounts of grain to stuff into the population.

      Are you aware of any civilizations that voluntarily decided to keep their population ignorant by piling on lie after lie from kindergarten to PhD thus making sure they don’t make the right decisions and act better?
      Tainter: Only the US and its hangers on.

      We live in the modern world where we have the ability to know what needs to be done but are not allowed to to do it because it would mean the end of the massive wealth that allows 1% of the population to walk the planet as GODS!

      I will put words into Tainters mouth;

      Hagens: Are you aware of any civilization that decided to consume less than all available resources?
      Tainter: No because they had no idea there is only a finite amount just like NOW!

      Hagens: Are you aware of any civilizations that voluntarily decided to simplify?
      Tainter: No because all the media and information everyone receives says we don’t need to and in fact encourages that we do MORE!

      I will ask the right question;

      Will anyone simplify or consume less resources or mandate that that happens when it means loss of jobs, income, money, food, housing, healthcare?

      NO!

      Nothing changes until we change how money works.

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  62. Dr. Bret Weinstein interviewed Dr. Mattias Desmet today.

    Bret Speaks with Mattias Desmet on the subject of mass formation, a topic Mattias has spent a great deal of time exploring and has written a recent book on (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), linked below. They tackle this process from their differing backgrounds of expertise and discuss what it suggests about our path into the future.

    P.S. Desmet’s new book is available for download at the usual sites.

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    1. I agree with both of them that a mass formation probably explains the insane covid behavior of the majority.

      They did not discuss whether the mass formation emerged spontaneously or was encouraged by senior leaders with an agenda other than public health. You already know that my opinion is that our leaders deliberately stoked the insanity to prepare tools necessary for managing an economic collapse. I acknowledge that I might be wrong and that our senior leaders may also simply be caught up in the insanity. There are historical examples of both deliberate and spontaneous mass formations so it could be either.

      I disagree with both Weinstein and Desmet on the forces that enable a mass formation.

      Desmet has a social sciences background and looks to things like social isolation and a lack of purpose as the enabling forces. Desmet also has a touch of woo and so dismisses science’s ability to explain everything.

      Weinstein is a hard sciences guy and is seeking a evolutionary explanation for mass formations. Trouble is, Weinstein is in denial of our overshoot predicament and so does not see things clearly.

      As for me, I only have a single hammer in my toolkit, and so everything looks like a MORT nail. 🙂

      I think a mass formation is an evolved behavior of social species with an extended theory of mind that causes groups to align around some belief creating a fitness advantage that results from less conflict and more cooperation.

      Religions are of course the most obvious example of a mass formation. All religions began with a core belief in life after death to reinforce our genetic need to deny mortality, and then evolved into more elaborate belief systems to further aid the success of the group.

      It matters not a whit to evolution if the belief is true or not. What matters is that everyone who believes it belongs to the same club and follows the same rules. This explains why most people don’t care what the data says about vaccine effectiveness and safety.

      Mass formations can turn ugly when the group senses danger from a threat like a virus. Doubly so if that group has been primed to be nasty to other groups via signals that scarcity is imminent, like a falling standard of living or wacky weather.

      Because our species evolved to deny unpleasant realities, we seek someone to blame for the symptoms of overshoot, like the unvaccinated and the Russians.

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  63. Interesting discussion by Erik Townsend on the US strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) starting at 39:55.

    The SPR is being significantly drawn down for the first time in 50 years, right before the first time in 50 years that the SPR might be required for its original purpose. Putin again seems to be winning the global chess game.

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  66. In the original post above I encouraged readers to provide any bad covid decisions I missed because I want the list to be as complete as possible to demonstrate just how badly our “leaders” screwed up, and continue to screw up.

    A reader sent me a list of 21 more bad decisions compiled by Dr. Vinay Prasad. I have appended Dr. Prasad’s list to the post above.

    I like Dr. Prasad’s fairness and integrity by only listing those items for which a functioning brain looking at evidence available at the time would know was wrong.

    https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/a-checklist-for-covid-policy

    Welcome to my Substack. I’m Vinay Prasad, and I am a hematologist oncologist and Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco. In these pages, you will get my thoughts on medicine, cancer, health policy, evidence and whatever is in the news. Hopefully, by reading, you will become better at critical appraisal of medicine, and thinking through policy issues.

    I run a Youtube Channel, and, I host and cohost the podcasts – Plenary Session, and the VPZD show.

    I have written 2 books: Ending Medical Reversal (w Adam Cifu) about all the flip-flops in biomedicine and Malignant, about cancer drug policy. I have also published more than 350 peer reviewed articles, which you can check out here.

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  68. Canadian “leaders” are either evil or stupid.

    https://sheldonyakiwchuk.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-your-children-and

    Health Canada approves first COVID-19 vaccine for kids under 5

    Simply disgusting…

    I’ve threaded out all of the data showing why this is a terrible fucking idea but unfortunately won’t be able to jam it all into one Substack – without a Twitter Account, you can still see the breakdown here:

    What we are already seeing and have already seen in relation to the Vaccines has moved past Gross Negligence and is now simply pre-meditated murder. Coming after infants is the most disgusting of it all.

    Shameful day for Health Canada.

    Shameful day to be a Canadian.

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  69. Isn’t it interesting that the few people who understand the importance of energy and the impossibility of sustaining 8 billion people without abundant fossil energy never discuss the only thing that will help: population reduction.

    Instead they criticize government policies intended to move us away from fossil energy while ignoring the implications of continuing to depend on a depleting non-renewable resource.

    https://doomberg.substack.com/p/running-from-empty

    Until quite recently, Sri Lanka was a pretty good country. With a GDP-per-capita exceeding $4,000 in 2018, the World Bank classified it as an “Upper Middle-Income” nation. As benchmarks, consider that Ukraine had a GDP-per-capita of roughly $3,000 in the same year, and India about $2,000. As is widely known by now, Sri Lanka has undergone what can only be described as a complete societal collapse – its government in chaos and its desperate citizens rioting in the streets.

    To some, the fact that Sri Lanka achieved a “near-perfect ESG score” and then collapsed is ironic. To us, it is causal. For all the nuanced specifics involved, including government corruption, insane fertilizer bans, and submission to foreign know-it-all experts, at its core, Sri Lanka collapsed because it flubbed its energy policy. Fertilizer and food are nothing more than derivatives of energy – rather important ones at that – and Sri Lanka stands as powerful evidence that energy is indeed life, and the absence of energy is death. As videos of Sri Lankan citizens ransacking their Presidential Palace went viral on Twitter, we could not help but feel a deep sadness. Absent a massive and urgent intervention by international aid organizations (which does not seem forthcoming), no amount of protesting will win Sri Lanka’s citizens a reprieve. Akin to passengers scrambling through the banquet halls of the Titanic, their fate is sealed. Mass starvation and unthinkable suffering undoubtedly await.

    For more than a decade, Germany has been doing its best Rajapaksa impersonation in pursuit of its disastrous Energiewende policy, a plan meant to transition the country to a “low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply.” Despite investing several hundred billion Euros implementing Energiewende, the plan has delivered the opposite of those things. Germany had among the most expensive electricity in the developed world prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, another strong causal relationship that radical environmentalists refuse to acknowledge. Germany has severely damaged its manufacturing base, eroded its geopolitical power, and risked its people’s literal future in pursuit of Energiewende. Surely, Germany is not in jeopardy of replicating Sri Lanka’s collapse, are they? While the country has a deeper buffer between it and the abyss than Sri Lanka did, it is closer than many would like to admit.

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  70. this might strike a chord with some

    “The ultimate effect of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools,” Herbert Spencer

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  71. Today’s interview by Rachel Donald of Mike Joy will be of interest to the many thousands of New Zealander’s, who for some unknown reason, lurk at un-Denial.

    https://www.planetcritical.com/p/its-not-just-a-climate-crisis-mike#details

    Mike Joy is a freshwater ecologist and Senior Researcher at IGPS Victoria University of Wellington. He has been working for two decades at the interface of science and policy in New Zealand with a goal of strengthening connections between science, policy and real outcomes to address the multiple environmental issues facing New Zealand.

    He explains the multiple links between New Zealand’s dairy industry and environmental damage—giving a fantastic example of what a systems problem looks like in a real-world context—before diving into an analysis of the correlation between human and planetary health.

    Mike Joy seems to be an intelligent overshoot aware person and he does a nice job of demolishing the myth that New Zealand is a green haven in the world.

    Rachael Donald seems to be an idealistic young person in denial seeking a path to sustainability that does not require her to do hard labor in a farm field.

    Joy is a kind person who on several occasions tried to gently nudge Donald into a more reality based view of our predicament, without success of course, because genetic denial is so powerful.

    Some of the interesting facts about New Zealand that Joy discussed include:
    – NZ is the largest exporter of dairy products in the world.
    – Most of the dairy is exported as powdered milk which requires NZ to import and burn coal to dry the milk.
    – The powdered milk is mostly used by other countries to make junk food.
    – To feed the cows, NZ is the largest importer of palm kernel which is the residue from producing palm oil.
    – A lot of Haber-Bosch fertilizer made from imported natural gas is used to fertilize the grass fed to cows.
    – Nitrogen runoff from the fertilizer and cow’s urine has polluted most of the fresh water that NZ’s 5 million people drink.
    – As a consequence, NZ has the highest rate of colon cancer in the world.

    Joy did not mention that New Zealand’s population has grown from 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 since 1950.

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    2. Nice summary Rob. Mike is a real hero of mine who I’ve learnt a lot from about energy depletion and overshoot. He was pretty subdued and indeed very kind to Rachael. He’s generally much more fired up on his media interviews social media posts and comments where his frustrations over the lack of action by our leaders bubbles over.

      I was surprised about how hopeful Rachael was given the people she has interviewed so far.

      Here’s a shortish (14 minutes) documentary about the dairying issue in our South Island that features Mike.

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      1. Nate Hagens has used dairy farming as an extreme example of how a lot of energy and capital have been used to replace labor with technology to achieve amazing productivity.

        I remember as a kid helping to milk one cow twice a day by hand. Then hand cranking a machine to separate the cream. Then cleaning everything by hand. It was very hard work and took several hours every day.

        Now everything is automated and totally dependent on affordable energy and a complex global supply chain for parts.

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        1. Same for me as a kid. My mother did the milking though and I got to spin the butter churn. Very grateful to my parents and their self-sufficiency period. We had bugger all stuff and what we did get was mostly secondhand but life was good.

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  73. To you (?), to us, this video is then both dumb and … criminal:

    It is in the top twenty youtube videos when searching for “human extinction”.

    Fortunately, this one came before:

    (I don’t know how much youtube answers are individualised and vary from day to day, though) I didn’t see this movie, so was surprised to see it address our favourite topic so accurately. In truth, everybody knows, but nobody wants to admit. Denial, you said. Eh eh eh.

    Yes denial, but maybe not because it is a necessity for intelligence. But, maybe just because it’s a necessary transition phase to transform our global enlightenment-based materialistic culture. A culture can only get so far against the forces of Reality.

    So, let me propose an alternative theory… (Anyway, finding a cause, is only to agree on a narration, a myth, because Reality is both much more complex and beautiful than our tiny brain experiments: is there rain because of gravity or the nature of water and air?)
    Reality is fundamentally incomprehensible both at the individual brain level, and at the cultural level. But, in order to function as a society, we must agree on some kind of common logic, values, narration. As long as the common “model” fits our collective experience of Reality, then everything is fine. But, when, ineluctably, we get to the limits of the model, then we must change our collective explanation for the world. But this takes time. There is inertia. Inertia is sometimes a good thing: a model that would be too volatile would not be practical for a society to function.

    And that’s how we get seemingly irrational answers to covid. It’s totally rational as long as we read the answer in light of the old model: triumph of reason over nature, trust in human agency, technology better than natural solutions, success and profit, fear of death, irresponsibility. But it’s at odds with Reality.
    Maybe I am not saying anything fundamentally different than Mattias Desmet… I don’t believe there is some global conspiracy (Lobbying, corruption, silence of media, etc, exist on a massive scale. But the process is not radically different than before). What is making it impressive is the globality. But, that’s because we are almost a complete world-culture monocrop of humans. We all think the same, have similar institutions and are using incredibly powerful megaphones to communicate.

    I see the covid response as an episode in a long and slow process. The society is looking for a new way to make sense of the world. And by the way, the new culture will most probably not be uniform. What’s in our head must reflect our local living conditions.
    I guess, that’s how collapse looks like… It does not fit the expectation of the 1970s to 2000s doomers. That’s why life is full of surprise and worth living 🙂

    Just my 2 cents… (This is all only for entertainment: ultimately there is no explanation as to why things are. Explanation is just stating what we personally believe to be important, because in truth, Reality exists. And is not for our tiny brains to seize in Its entirety. Layer upon layer of causes and effects. Thee are millions ways to see the same object)

    By the way, thank you for maintaining this blog, with its small intelligent community. It is entertaining and enriching.

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  74. Sid Smith today released chapter 3 of his “HTETEOTW: How to Enjoy the End of the World” series.

    Chapter 3 of this series links the previous videos on energy and complexity to the development of civilization, and shows why our own civilization is so unique in human history.

    TERMS AND CONCEPTS INTRODUCED

    1. “Dissipative Structure”—A physical system that is dynamically structured by energy that fluxes through it from an external source.
    2. “Metabolism”—The use of energy for physical and system maintenance.
    3. “Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE)”—The proportion of captured energy that must be used to obtain more energy.
    4. “Excess energy”—The energy left over, if any, after paying for both metabolism and the energy cost of energy.
    5. “Anabolism”—The use of excess energy by a system to increase its size or complexity.
    6. “Energy Return on Investment”—The inverse of the Energy Cost of Energy; the number of units of energy captured for each unit of energy invested in capturing energy.
    7. “Maximum Entropy Production Principle”—The empirical observation that dissipative structures tend to develop in ways that reduce the energy gradient that sustains them as quickly as possible.
    8. “Watt”—A unit of measure of energy.
    9. “Watt-hour”—A unit of measure of the power of a system, of its potential to perform work; the practical application of one Watt of energy for one hour of time.

    REFERENCES AND RESOURCES:

    ECoE and EROI overview:
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332219302209

    Civilizations, definition and history:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization

    How fossil fuel is created:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel

    Human Power:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power

    Energy in a barrel of oil:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent

    Here are chapters 1 & 2 if you missed them:

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      1. I agree, Smith’s very wise and insightful.

        I’ve never spoken to Smith about MORT and I don’t recall every trying to bring MORT to his attention although I may have in the early days with a comment on one of his videos. 99.99% of the time my attempts vanish into the denial of denial vacuum.

        I’m still hopeful that we’ll see an interview by Nate Hagens of Aji Varki soon which will be VERY interesting since Hagens doesn’t buy the MORT theory.

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  75. Alice Friedemann takes a deep dive today into why Canada’s oilsands will not fix overshoot.

    She concludes by predicting that we’ll deny reality to the bitter end.

    https://energyskeptic.com/2022/oilsands-are-not-a-solution/

    I thought I’d republish this post since peak oil was likely in 2018, and shortages are appearing, even if only attributed to political events, such as Europe from lack of Russian coal, oil, and gas. China is past peak coal production and facing coal shortages and low quality coal that are halting andor slowing down production at numerous factories, including those supplying Apple and Tesla. Chinese aluminum production has gone down 7%, cement production 29%, as well as steel, paper, chemicals, dyes, furniture, soymeal, and glass production (Singh 2021). This will only make Europe’s shortages worse as China will pay whatever price it takes to import coal, oil, and LNG (liquefied natural gas).

    In addition, Tad Patzek, former chairman of the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, found that energy-content-wise, global coal peak may have occurred in 2011. By 2050, remaining coal will provide only half as much energy as today, and carbon emissions from coal will decline 50 % by 2050. Patzek used the same Hubbert methods that successfully predicted peak oil to come to this conclusion (Patzek et al. 2010).

    Energy quality matters — China is importing and burning even more coal in power plants, but it is low quality coal that burns up faster, producing less electricity (Singh 2021).

    So as the crisis worsens, tarsands aren’t likely to help with the energy crisis.

    If the electric grid is still up, I hope historians will also find this post and the energy forum discussions at the end of interest. The coming energy crisis has been in discussion with thousands of people all over the world since 2000 on the world wide web, and before that on university internet forums, with professors, geologists, ecologists, and the well-educated public. I rarely show these discussions in my posts but I perhaps should, I expect there’ll be a lot of blame at some point, especially on oil companies and other nations, with still no acknowledgement that oil, coal, and natural gas are finite and will eventually run out!

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  76. In a way, the extremely blind European energy policy with respect to Ukraine may be a blessing.

    People do not want to/can not change their collective behaviour while everything goes (rather seems to be going) fine.

    Without energy, without imports, without industry, without transport, we will have to rely on local production, we can not pump the aquifer, we become dependent on the health of the environment and manual labour.

    It is about time, we collectively go back to sanity, because with current practices all the Mediterranean region is becoming a desert fast. Climate change, soil erosion, desertification seem to me (in the long run) a greater existential threat than loss of energy.

    We have unfortunately reached a point where we can’t avoid mass suffering and ensure long term species existence… Pick one (maybe none).

    At this point, if the species truly wants to survive, it must find its place in the living planet. Our true ecological niche. As small initiatives to green back the desert show, we can be life enablers.

    But it is a lot of hard work and humility. Not a strong point of empires…

    It’s time for reconciliation because nobody wins the war against nature (the insanity of us against all, the insanity of objectification, of idolatry, of identification).

    This is my dream. The dream of Dune (of the fremen and imperial planetologist Liet-Kynes)

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    1. Thanks Charles. You are correct that humans usually don’t change unless forced to change.

      The top news story this morning from BBC, CBC, CTV, and Al Jazeera was the heatwave and fires in Europe.

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  77. Kurt Cobb today reviews the latest estimates of oil reserves and discoveries:
    – Total oil reserves have fallen about 10% for each of the last 3 years.
    – Annual oil consumption of about 30 billion barrels has exceeded annual discoveries of about 10 billion barrels for each of the last 10 years.
    – Last year the industry discovered the lowest amount of oil and gas combined since 1946.

    Can you spot the trend?

    Cobb concludes by discussing our denial of the trends and he predicts a recession:

    The optimists tell us that this will soon all be reversed. They have been saying that for a decade. In the meantime the price of oil—which was already rising before the Russian/Ukraine conflict—has vaulted upward. The ultimate effect may be a deep recession. Some 10 out of the last 11 post World War II recessions have been preceded by spikes in the price of oil.

    Does anyone else think it’s odd that so many people have been predicting a recession for so long and yet our central banks have somehow found a way to prevent it? It used to be that recessions were common and no big deal. Now they are fighting to prevent a recession like our lives depend on it.

    My theory is that our debt is now so high, interest rates already so low, and the barriers to growth so strong, that any “recession” will result in a depression far worse than the 1929-32 Great Depression and our leaders are scared to death which explains their covid responses and their silence on the matter.

    http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2022/07/energy-consultancy-keeps-lowering.html

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    1. Mac10 seems to agree with me.

      STARING DOWN THE BARREL OF COLLAPSE

      …even if it’s true that inflation is peaking – which is far from certain: Currently, the Fed rate is at 1.5% on its way most likely to 2.25% (.75%) or 2.5% (1%) this month. However, WHY would the Fed stop hiking rates at 2.5% when THEY know full well that they cannot offset a recession with that small amount of rate cut firepower? In other words, if they have to start cutting rates in 2023 will they want to start from a level of 2.5%? No.

      History informs us that the LEAST amount of rate cuts required to offset a recession in the past 50 years is 5% in both 2000 and 2007. In 2020, the Fed had only 2.5% of rate cut dry powder but they also had unlimited QE AND record fiscal stimulus.

      The 1990 recession was considered a “soft landing” but it took 7% of rate hikes to create that soft landing scenario. Otherwise, logic dictates it would not have been a soft landing.

      Which means the Fed is now on the horns of a very dangerous dilemma. Do they continue to hike rates and ACCELERATE recession, or do they backoff rate hikes and have insufficient dry powder ahead of recession?

      https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2022/07/staring-down-barrel-of-collapse.html

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  79. This is a wise and loving discussion today on vaccine (un)safety between two heroes of the covid debacle, Dr. Jessica Rose and Dr. Tess Lawrie.

    https://drtesslawrie.substack.com/p/tess-talks-with-warrior-jessica-rose

    Tess Talks with Dr Jessica Rose
    The covid genetic vaccine pharmacovigilance data and why warriors cry

    Dr. Jessica Rose is a Canadian researcher with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a master’s degree in immunology. She also holds a PhD in computational biology and two postdoctoral degrees in molecular biology and chemistry.

    Over the past two years she has been studying the US’ Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) data and sounding the alarm about Covid-19 vaccine harms. In this frank and open conversation, we compare notes on what we’re seeing in pharmacovigilance databases and what the vaccines are actually doing to people. It’s a challenging topic but it does hold a message of hope for the future.

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    1. It’s a very common form of genetic reality denial that involves blaming something that can be fixed by simply voting for a different political belief rather than accepting the reality of overshoot and the dramatic reduction in standard of livings and birth rates that must occur to reduce the coming suffering.

      The human brain can’t comprehend a reality with no happy ending and a best case outcome of a less bad future.

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      1. My critique of this would be a too narrow a focus on emissions. Every living person eats enough calories to stay alive. To produce these calories we use more fossil fuels, but also land and non-renewable minerals. Habitat destruction happens all over the world, not just for the 1%. Once we don’t have abundant fossil energy, it will be harder to produce enough food to go around.

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    2. Hi Monk,

      A longer-form, more nuanced read of Ms. Pelsmakers’ views on population:
      https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/9/26/16356524/the-population-question

      “We already produce enough food for 10 billion people”

      • We need healthy farmers and farming communities. Farmer suicides around the world say that, for many locations, we are not there.
      • Fossil fuels used for food production and distribution will be significantly reduced.
      • Most of the good land is in production.
      • Climate change, soil degradation, pollution and seed manipulation are lowering food quality and quantity.
      • With lower fossil fuel use for transportation in general, there will be an increase in land area needed for feeding traction animals – Dogs, Goats, Ponies, Llamas, Alpacas, Donkeys, Mules, Horses, Reindeer, Camels, Yaks, Oxen, Elephants, etc. (Bicycles have a bright future.)

      “only inhabit a small fraction of livable space”

      • Forty years ago, when I lived four months in rural Burkina Faso, tensions were already rising between nomadic pastoralists and farmers over land use, in addition to villages expanding in to each other’s space.
      • Intact natural systems are important to life and we’ve already taken too much good land for mostly two-legged use. Nature will be taking some back.

      In 2017 Ms. Pelsmakers wrote the UN’s projected population in 2050 would be 9.8 billion. The current projection is 9.7 billion:
      https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

      I predict the UN estimates will be going down yearly for some time to come.

      Rob’s post from 2017 applies:
      https://un-denial.com/2017/08/04/by-alice-friedemann-why-did-everyone-stop-talking-about-population-immigration/

      More than fifty years ago I read “The Population Bomb” and decided to biologically father one child. Over the years I’ve read more on the subject and believe it’s possible that a long-term, healthy, balanced-with-nature world population of around 1 billion is possible. There are so many ifs and unknowns that the real number may be half or double that.

      Kindness costs us little and can do much good now.

      Thanks and good health, Weogo

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      1. Thank you for sharing. People like yourself are on an uphill battle against the mainstream culture to get these very valid points across

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  82. I’m getting ready to close out this thread so I’ve appended the following statement to the post above.

    17-Jul-2022 Addendum
    I’m worried that a future visitor who does not know me will will read this post and conclude that I’m a wack job and therefore should discount everything else I’ve written. This is a statement to clarify what I actually believe is going on with covid.

    If we assume that our leaders are not evil and/or stupid then there is overwhelming evidence to suggest there’s an agenda other than public health in play for covid policies.

    I believe that some of our most senior leaders with the power to influence lower level leaders are using covid as an excuse to implement tools that will be helpful for maintaining social order during an economic collapse.

    I do not know if these senior leaders deliberately released an engineered virus, or if they are just taking advantage of a mistake made at the Wuhan lab.

    All of the evidence I see supports this “covid is cover for collapse prep” theory, EXCEPT the push to vaccinate children which I cannot explain if we continue to assume our leaders are not evil and/or stupid.

    I proposed above, tongue in cheek, that perhaps the child vaccination push could be explained by a humane population reduction agenda, which I think would be a brilliant thing for our leaders to do, because population reduction is the only path to reducing the suffering that is coming due to human overshoot.

    The problem with this population reduction hypothesis is that I don’t think are leaders are aware or smart or brave enough to try it.

    So to be clear, I do NOT think there is a population reduction agenda in play.

    Which means our leaders must be evil and/or stupid.

    I’m pretty sure Fauci and his gang are corrupt, but I do not think all the collaborating leaders in the world are evil.

    Which leaves stupidity as the only viable explanation for what’s going on with children.

    Stupid behavior can have causes other than a low IQ.

    Stupid behavior can result from our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, like for example, doubling down because “I can’t possibly have supported the biggest blunder in human history”, or from a mass formation al la Mattias Desmet that causes temporary insanity.

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    1. Thank you, Rob, for that cogent summary to wrap up another stimulating thread in this tangled web we’re weaving all together. Let me be the whack job and continue to suggest that all this makes even more sense if one can surmise that all global leaders, stupid or otherwise, are responding to yet a higher agenda which includes controlled economic collapse but in all probability also has a hand in population reduction, the one topic no-one can speak of, not because of stupidity or even denial, but because to overtly raise it would bring on immediate apocalyptic mass anarchy especially in the midst of the planned collapse and reset. The one thing no-one can speak of is usually the most important topic to be looked at that everyone knows about but skirts around the edges for fear of upsetting the apple cart, the proverbial elephant (in this case blue whale?) in the room. Boy am I mixing metaphors here. For population reduction, whether planned or not, especially in the Western countries, has certainly been on the cards these past few years with no end in sight given the continued cases of Covid along with possible immune system collapse and other co-morbidities that seem to be increasing across all age groups, resulting in overloaded health care systems which will lead to more deaths from lack of access.

      If population reduction isn’t on the agenda, then surely the policy would have changed tack even a couple thousandths of a degree by now (like taking an iota worth of vit D would be a start, if not outright encouraging early treatment protocols), and we would have gotten a very different result, but so far, it’s the same BAU rhetoric and policy with how the pandemic is being continued, namely vaccine based and clamping down on any dissent. No-one can be this recalcitrantly stupid without something else driving the decisions, and the question of population is even more fundamental to our predicament than our energy overshoot because that is the root cause . And therefore, the question of forcing through child vaccinations does fit into this–if the vaccine has a significant degree of morbidity and even mortality risk, then it’s open season for all age groups, especially the young generation who will become the breeding population. We all seem to concur that we need to reduce the birth rate as well as increase the death rate to get the job done.

      I can sense that the leaders are hopelessly stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and some are really looking like the strain is getting too much to bear. We will have newcomers soon in all the key arenas to keep up the marathon relay, the baton has already been passed in several countries, including Australia and upcoming UK. Now that the race to the finish has begun, there’s no possibility to turn back. Looking at it from a war footing perspective to save humanity from civilization’s end, these are desperate days indeed and I can be moved to give credit to those leading the charge who must be sweating bullets as well as bleeding tears. There may be no-one to judge whether or not these critical days were the right decision; there will be no winners out of this to write their glorified history. We already know how much we have lost, and have yet to lose.

      Looking forward to another clean slate then. It is a fitting reminder that every day is a chance at renewal and we can all live a complete life within our choices in the time we are given. Go well everyone, and boldly!

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      1. You make a damn good point here Gaia. It’s crazy making to think about how bad our covid response has been.

        If population reduction isn’t on the agenda, then surely the policy would have changed tack even a couple thousandths of a degree by now (like taking an iota worth of vit D would be a start, if not outright encouraging early treatment protocols), and we would have gotten a very different result, but so far, it’s the same BAU rhetoric and policy with how the pandemic is being continued, namely vaccine based and clamping down on any dissent. No-one can be this recalcitrantly stupid without something else driving the decisions, and the question of population is even more fundamental to our predicament than our energy overshoot because that is the root cause.

        I’m of the opinion they’ve calculated the benefits of tools to help manage an economic collapse outweigh the costs of a suboptimal covid response. And I’m sure they had noble hopes for the vaccines in the early days.

        There is another possible explanation for vaccinating children that I don’t think we’ve yet discussed. It seems there is political pressure from some moron parents demanding their children be vaccinated with the same safe and effective vaccines that they enjoy.

        I hope you are right that our leaders are trying to do something about population.

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        1. Hiya Rob,

          Thanks for entertaining my thoughts with equanimity and patience as you have always shown since the first I started to add them here. (Am I getting better with the paragraphing?)

          Apparently, I am not yet totally ready to leave this page although I have already been enthralled by wis.dom’s essay and am eager to continue the conversation there. But your Great Reset button is still too tempting not to push some more.

          I am more than a little bemused that on one hand you are completely disparaged by what our leaders have done and here we are speaking namely of the Covid response but it really applies to just about every policy going now, and yet you are ready to barrack for them if they come up with a population reduction policy. Your earlier suggestion of one possible form, that is mandated abortion after one child, may seem more draconian and heartless to some than a “safe and effective” vaccine which may contribute to more “natural cause” deaths across all ages but still mainly in the oldest population. Unlike China, we who deem ourselves democracy and liberty loving are very far from mandating abortion, and in the strangest twist, the US has almost mandated the opposite. But, to come together as one united globe fighting an unseen enemy such as the Virus, and urging populations to do their duty to get the vaccine to protect self and others, well, that is something every flag waving citizen with conscience can take on board.

          Let’s pretend the leaders really did believe at first that this was the right thing to do given all available information at the time, just like the health policy makers and health care givers. But what is the rationale now? For big Pharma, health ministers, universities, medicos, yes, we can paint them with a profit and loss of reputation, job, or funding brush and probably whitewash most of them, with splatters of mass formation thrown in for colour. I don’t believe for a second that the leaders and above operate on this level– career politicians need to be immune to reputational risks (dare I recall Clinton and his cigar?), their job is always on the way out being limited in terms, and the top ones have a salary for life after their service years.

          I reckon what drives the utmost minority of people into these positions is their conviction that they know best how to run the world and they crave the power and scope to be able to try doing so. The most successful of these most select few need both to be ruthless with single-point dedication as well as harbour a genuine understanding and sympathy for the human condition. I believe they began thinking they wanted to make this world a better place, but at some stage the complexity of it all overran them and every emotional decision needed to be subsumed by expediency. Yet they still have the responsibility and power, so the show must go on, at least on their watch. This takes probably more courage than we can imagine, as I am beginning to finally understand. We think it is a lonely space here, thinking and speaking of questions of overshoot and collapse and population, the whys and wherefores are stimulating discussion indeed. Can you imagine how much lonelier, a moonscape even, it would be to know you have the responsibility and power to try to do something about it for unfathomable numbers of human beings? How is it that we can call them evil or stupid (or both) when we are also stabbing in the dark but our musings are child’s play without the possibility of directly harming anyone? Why are they evil when they might be attempting to enact what we all have agreed must be done (population control, etc..)? Why are we not evil for thinking the same, that human are too numerous and many must decease? We are armchair (laptop) warriors, but would we have the guts to actually decree and follow through a plan so unprecedentedly daunting yet absolutely critical for the survival of not only the human race as we know it, but even the biosphere? Maybe it is our own brand of denial to call someone stupid when we cannot or will not imagine ourselves being able to do what needs to be done.

          Let’s say you are the world leader pretend now, what would you do assuming you know everything you know now and most likely much more (with intelligence inputs on every front)? I know you want to spare suffering and total societal breakdown at all costs and because you accept that MORT is a non-negotiable built-in for the vast majority, you realise things have to be done to and for the masses, not await their waking up from denial and making a concerted choice. May it be that your policies look very similar to what is happening now? Is this what we are asking for but dare not formulate for ourselves and others, especially our own family, country, ethnic group, until we realise we are all just one connected life form? Can you share a bit more of your thinking with me on this?

          I know we are all completely in awe of the images that the James Webb Space Telescope has gifted to us. As unbelievably stunning as they are, I am still most moved by two space images which remind me most of our fragility and utter uniqueness as a living, home planet. You, of course, will know of what I speak, the first is Earthrise taken by astronaut William Anders on the Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission and the other is Pale Blue Dot, not taken by a human at all but by Voyager 1 just before it left our solar system, a farewell portrait of the only home all living things that ever lived, has known. Just thinking of it now in my mind’s eye brings tears of I’m not sure what emotion, probably every kind, but now it is solidifying into overwhelming gratitude just to have had the chance at life here.

          Go well, everyone. Remember to turn around and look upon your Earth once more when you decide to journey into the great beyond! I’ll see you on the next post for now!

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          2. Hi Gaia, I can’t find a relevant definition for “barrack” so am checking to make sure I understand what you’re saying.

            I think you are making 2 points:
            1) You disagree with my definition of evil. You think leaders trying to humanely (without suffering) reduce the population would be evil.
            2) You disagree with me that covid is cover for collapse prep and you think the evidence suggests our leaders are trying to reduce the population.

            Have I got your main points correct?

            p.s. nice paragraphs 🙂

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            1. Hi there Rob,

              So nice to be able to flit back and forth between your hallowed pages. Hope you are going well and enjoying midsummer. I can just imagine your nature rambles and feel very happy you are free and fit to enjoy them.

              First of all, let me introduce you to some Aussie vernacular which I had to learn in often humorous ways when we first arrived on these shores. To “barrack for” in Oz and NZ means to cheer or support as in a sporting team. You would say (as I used to) to root for something but funnily enough that means something completely different here, suffice it to say it is not exactly polite language for referring to sexual intercourse. I was the source of much merriment amongst my new Aussie friends when I made this gaffe unknowingly.

              Language is a multifaceted and marvellous thing.

              Except it seems we have misunderstood each other back to front here, so I apologise for losing my point (or perhaps I never found it in the first place) in the above and I am wryly amused you have interpreted my thought rambles so. Your command of precise language is superior to mine but over the course of these months, we have enjoyed very thoughtful and inspiring exchanges despite our very different lenses and antennae to the world.

              1)
              One of the reasons I wrote as I did was because I do not have a concrete understanding of your definition of evil, especially when it comes to world leaders. So, I cannot agree nor disagree with what I am not clear about. On one hand, you say they must be evil (or stupid) to have continued the program as such (with especial emphasis on the child vaccination schemes) but when the end result seems to be in alignment with what we all agree is necessary (population decrease through attrition, reduced fertility due to medical or socioeconomic reasons), then you would claim them to be unsung heroes if this is part of the agenda with the least suffering. Am I understanding you correctly? As for my opinion, which has not changed but somehow I am having a difficult time trying to get across, I do not think of the leaders in terms of evil, but try to see it from their world view which is doing what needs to be done with the tools at hand, or created, to accomplish what might be a unsurmountable task but still it is their responsibility to attempt because of their position and power. That is what a world leader must be. And most certainly I do not think that they are evil if they are trying to humanely reduce the population, rather the exact opposite, I am saying this is what they have their hands tied to do, and nothing must deter their single-minded focus if the plan is to succeed, which to most would be interpreted as evil, but I can understand it as their “fate” and I appreciate their courage to take on this most crucial of decisions in our modern history. I was trying to make the point that they have the guts to do what we, without any responsibility, say must be done, and because in our deepest consciousness we share a sense of compunction that we cannot yet openly acknowledge, that makes us at ease to point the finger and call it out as evil to remove the guilt from ourselves. Perhaps? Language only goes so far to tease out the tangled sinews of the human heart.

              In the formation of my philosophical self over this half-century and odd turns around the sun, I have been swayed to and fro in my notion of good and evil, but through every swing of the pendulum, I have come to see the fulcrum point as the key to balance, for it is always and only in our own subjective thought that we decide when the definition turns from one extreme to the other. There is no unchangeable truth when we speak of human affairs. To the universe, nothing is good nor evil, it just is so. Like your mystical title, un-denial, creator and destroyer, the energy in which all of humanity lives and breathes comes from the potential between our created extremes of being, which are constantly in flux. Perhaps I now see “evil” as a work potential to swing back to “good” and of course, vice versa. As conscious being with choice in thought, if not always action, we can constantly work to stay at whatever echelon of moral being we choose, but the force needed overcome and turn one way or another is inherent in all of us. Thoughts and actions can be activated in different situations in which we do not even realise that we are sliding up and down the same scale that we defined for others. For example, many Westerners can not see that what we have done in Iraq can be labelled equal if not more “evil” as what has unfolded between Russia and Ukraine. And more subtle but no less powerful, we each have decided at some point which lives are more desirable than others and for our own purpose, one only need to give the briefest of glances at factory farming of animals we imprison, torture, then kill for sake of enjoying the taste of their flesh, to quickly pull down the blind of denial to spare us the ethical morass in which we must surely flail and flounder. So it is all a spectrum, and we decide which colours we want to see.

              2)
              I have championed your thesis from the start that Covid is a good cover job for what collapse is to come–don’t you remember pinning my special badge? I keep it shined up and ready for display.

              But that doesn’t preclude that Covid and the aftermath can also be a good vehicle for population mitigation strategies (another PMS, my new euphemism for population reduction, it might go over as more thoughtful and gentle?) A single stone can kill two birds (bad, bad choice of metaphors, especially for a vegan). Nothing has to be either/or, what’s the maths term that allows for all possibilities (I struggled with Calculus, but then again, I was only a Biology major and pre-med, what do you expect?)

              The mark of a skilled and masterful operation is being able to accomplish something as efficiently as possible while increasing efficacy (uh oh, it sounds like the safe and effective mantra we’ve been hammered with). Whether it was planned in the beginning to have this result of increased mortality and morbidity across the board, and especially targeted in the first world countries where “humane” reduction of at once consumers and those most likely to be wild casualties of economic collapse (unmitigated mental and societal breakdown), well, as they say, all’s well that ends well, and in the global leadership playbook, the end always justifies the means. In my opinion, it all dovetails in a bit too tidily for it not to have been in mastermind from the beginning, which has been brewing for many, many years. The unleashing of Covid had its start umpteen thinktank scenarios ago. Have you ever read the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network report of May 2010 entitled Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development?

              https://archive.org/details/scenarios-for-the-future-of-technology-and-international-development-rockefeller-foundation-2010/mode/2up

              Reading it is like ripping the bandages from a blind person’s eyes and suddenly they can see. In the Lockstep scenario, a global pandemic leads to a crippled world economy, population unrest, and eventual totalitarian world, sound familiar? It even foretold that China fared better than other countries in the pandemic response. In fact, just about any publication coming from the Rockefeller Foundation reeks of the New World Order, but here I am not making any judgment, just saying what is patently so for everyone to see. Here’s another example of how the thinkers who have their fingers on the pulse (or around our necks?) see the world being unfolded by their determinants. In this one, entitled “Dreaming the Future of Health for the Next 100 Years” held in conference in Beijing, 2013, integration with AI is directly alluded to, as matter of fact as reading out a grocery list.

              Click to access 1b8843cc-0d4c-4d5e-bf35-4c7b2fbbb63d-the.pdf

              So, what I am trying to intimate is that everything we have seen unfolding has already been thought through with such precision that it beggars belief that everything happening is just a completely natural progression without a good nudge in the intended direction. Here I recall a quote by Franklin Delano Roosevelt “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” He should know, with his mark in bringing the US into WW2 with a spectacular bid after Pearl Harbour. Another way of saying it 1984speak “Whoever controls the past controls the future” so it stands to reason that if you could, you might as well decide what happens in the present just to make sure the future follows suit–maybe that’s the real meaning of “future-proof”.

              Forgive me everyone for another one of my interminable excesses. Please consider this exercise as just talking to myself because there’s no-one else in the room and I’m now a bit sheepish because maybe there happened to be someone who heard me and probably thinks I’m a nut case (as you would when people talk to themselves! : ))

              I am hoping most of you have already fast forwarded onto the next page, but I am grateful Rob if you found me here and can make any sense of what I’m trying to say in answering your response. Thank you, friend. I’ll check back here for your much appreciated reply, you are always full of thoughtful forbearance and encouragement.

              Just to assure you all that I’m still at heart a gardener of plants as well as thoughts, I planted 3 olive trees today, no surer statement of growing hope than that! I may not see the fruit, but all things willing, some other wandering soul can and hopefully will.

              Namaste.

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    2. I think a combination of plain old money making corruption from the pharma peeps like Fauci; coupled with a sheep like mentality (mass formation) from leaders and journalists like in NZ and Canada. Maybe there are other areas where people are just as scared to brake ranks with the approved narrative. This is getting worse and is a feature of our current culture, especially where the political power is held by the left

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      1. Yes, I would say corruption is another good explanation.

        Then we have to assume most of our health officials and are evil, because if they were decent people with good ethics they certainly wouldn’t mandate injecting a risky substance into people that didn’t need it for pharma kickbacks, which is pretty depressing.

        If it is corruption, I hope they all burn in hell.

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    1. It’s a good question. It would only take a few senior leaders whipping up panic, rather than calming things down, to steer policies to emergency authorized vaccination with passports into all people, including those at low risk, at the expense of all other responses.

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  84. Kunstler with his trademark instantly recognizable prose this morning:

    It’s like our country is trapped on one of those swirling carnival rides beloved of the county fairs… only, the felonious mutt who runs the ride has nodded off in a fentanyl delirium with the motor running at maximum speed… and the children-of-all-ages locked in the pods of this infernal machine shriek and vomit with each sickening rotation… as the half-century-old swing arms groan and wobble from metal fatigue on their squealing pivots… and suddenly comes a deafening crunch of gnashed gears, the smell of burning oil, and the pathetic whimpering of nearly dead.

    That’s us. Some terrible midsummer accident-of-state has befallen the USA Carnival, and most are too dazed to know it. Whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president called “Joe Biden” to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. The American visitor muttered something about wanting an ice-cream cone before dropping into a catatonic thousand-yard stare.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-last-days-of-joe-biden/

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  86. Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, one of my heroes, today with a sordid tale of pharma evil.

    https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2022/07/18/the-crushing-power-of-the-pharmaceutical-industry-a-sorry-tale/

    Drug regulators have been bought and paid for by the companies that they are supposed to regulate. But the commercial influence spreads far wider than the regulators. Key opinion leaders (KOLs) who carry out the big clinical trials, who speak at conferences, and who appear at the top of influential medical organisations and write the guidelines – are often bought and paid for too.

    There is virtually no area of the medical world that has not been lobbied, infiltrated and – in many cases – paid for and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. We have a major crisis on our hands, that no-one is doing anything about.

    Aseem’s tale is just one more example of the fact that anyone who dares to stand up to the relentless marketing of more and more drugs, and vaccines, will be attacked and crushed. In this case, under the banner of the British Medical Association. An organisation that I am increasingly unproud to be a member of. If the BMA can no longer support freedom of speech, then no-one can. The future looks bleak.

    To quote George Orwell. ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.’

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  87. el gato malo today updates his theory that pharma will soon be thrown under the bus to cover political asses…

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/throwing-the-vaxx-companies-under

    it sure looks to me like omicron and its rapid evolution into ever more vaccine enabled and immune-fixation optimized sub-variants is a fire rapidly growing out of control. the smoke is already visible for miles and the flames are coming.

    the evolutionary gradient created by widespread use of leaky vaxxes does not lead to good places and the politics are going to have to adapt to how wrong they got the science.

    i continue to suspect that the “friends of mRNA vaccines political society” is going to be having serious membership problems in the near future (and we’re seeing some interesting EU defections as austria gets ready to throw its own doctors to the wolves) and that given the likely outcomes of congressional elections in november, this may be something team donkey wants to get out ahead of so that at least they can claim they found it instead of having it rooted out by political foes.

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  89. Pingback: The Great Reset: An Alternate Theory – Olduvai.ca

  90. What a great article! This site is so jam-packed with valuable information that I can’t wait to delve in and use the tools you’ve provided. I have a similar piece that will undoubtedly be helpful.

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