Today we have another guest post by a member of the un-Denial community, Gaia Gardener, who posted these thoughts on denial as a comment. I thought they were interesting enough to warrant promoting them to a more visible post.
Hello friends, thank you for a very interesting discussion about the realities of denial and how we humans seem to be able to manipulate all perceptions to fit our chosen narrative, whether or not we are consciously aware of our programmed beliefs however they were initialised and ingrained.
I am wondering if we can look at another subject, removed from overshoot, in which denial plays a big role in our actions/inactions so we can step back and dissect out a bit more how denial originates and becomes intrenched without us even realising our immersion in it, just like we in the small minority see happening to the masses and even polymaths in regards to overshoot denial.
The topic I think can fit the bill is the question of the ethics of eating animals, namely farmed animals which we consume in the billions every year. I won’t cover using animals for our labour and experimentation as the ethics of these actions can be construed to be justified in benefitting humankind which the majority of human beings would be in favour of. But the eating of animals in the modern world is not only unnecessary (and we can be spared the example of Inuits or other very minority population cultures who rely solely on animal products for sustenance, we do not have their situation in the least) but in fact there is convincing evidence that it is harmful to both our physical bodies and the planet, but for the sake of this argument, one need not consider either of those reasons to engage in a discussion of why we cannot eat animals nor their products if we believe we have a moral obligation to another sentient being. Let’s face it–we eat meat because we were brought up to do so and it tastes good (to most human taste buds) and it’s readily available without much effort on our part. However, the fact that animals suffer solely for our pleasure, tradition, and convenience is not enough moral ground to do so, for one can easily see how this disconnect can apply to any sentient being, including other humans, which is so obviously not an ethical choice. And yet, we are in complete denial that it is okay to eat chicken, cow, and pig but outrageously wrong to eat dog, cat, or horse. It is fine for us to imprison a member of a food species in the most horrendous conditions but we can be charged with abusing and neglecting other species we call our domestic companions. We can kill a food species animal way before their natural life span in a most horrific manner (everyone knows a slaughterhouse isn’t a happy place) so we can buy our sanitized plastic-wrapped packages of pork, beef, and healthy white meat chicken, but if we organise a dog fight and enjoy it, that is disgusting and shameful. You’re right, it’s not about education (most of us know that a live being had to be killed to get meat on the plate), or even more extreme forms of presenting the facts (how many of us would volunteer to witness what happens in a slaughterhouse, or even more tellingly, choose that as our job?). Yes, we have been lied to about happy free-range chickens or happy cows enjoying being milked on the happy dairy farm, but how many of us actually have spared more thought for what really happens in these industries, we’re only too happy ourselves to buy the more expensive organic or free-range option as if that absolves us from the guilt we still harbour knowing that no matter how happy the picture of the old MacDonald’s farm, we know this is a fantasy. Every animal still comes to an end in a way far from their natural choice and inclination.
I can sense the mounting justifications and counter-arguments–we need meat for our health or else we would get sick and die, if we didn’t raise the food animal they wouldn’t have a chance at life at all, what about if we were stuck on an island with only rabbits to eat, you can see how inane these points are, and generally stated to obfuscate the moral issue at hand. I am talking about modern day humans who now have access to a wide range of very suitable and healthful plant-based protein, and the methods we use to obtain our meatstuffs, even the question of whether or not it is our evolutionary diet (very debatable) isn’t the point here. The point is our denial of other factors which should be considered when making the choice of whether it is ethical to eat farmed animals, or even a beloved family pet lamb (just these words should put it in perspective that it isn’t but somehow we still do it–is that denial? ) What is it that keeps the majority of people still reaching for their burgers and steaks and fried chicken and bacon and eggs despite knowing what everyone should know? Is it denial of the truth because to face the ethical question front on would demand a choice and most humans just cannot overcome the continuation of pleasure, tradition, and ease of living, especially if it means realising it is a morally wrong thing to do so. So it is far easier to adopt cognitive disconnect, join the masses who are in your camp, degrade and exclude those who are not, and just keep doing what you want for one more day after day as long as it can last because at least you got to enjoy it and no one can take that away. Sound familiar? See how easy denial becomes just our way of perceiving our reality, and that is why I chose this example to prove that point. Every thought that is possibly going through your head now is a function of denial, one way or another, and none of it was even conscious before I brought this so called controversial topic up–if one can deem supporting active suffering of sentient beings just because we like it, to have any controversy attached.
I guess what I’m trying to express, which is in full agreement with what has been discussed, is that all of us have the capacity for denial (whether or not MORT is the primal reason) but we can’t see it as denial when we’re in the thick of it because that is just our chosen narrative. The way we dichotomise over overshoot, population control, Covid, Russia, just about any topic you can name, all confirm this. Only others outside that narrative (and usually the minority) can see that there is another perspective (because it’s their reality) and then call out the majority as in denial, which is exactly what the majority thinks of the outliers! It’s like that endless hall of mirrors reflecting back to you ad infinitum, whichever way one looks, there’s another image looking away from you, too, with the prime cause of the illusion being your own presence and perception of your reality. I think denial is a bit like that–it’s what holds us in our place, and helps define our sense of self by creating another version of possible self to bounce off of. I’m not saying there’s any right or wrong in this, it just seems to be how we are wired and until now, it has kept us on the survival ascendancy (that and a whole heck of fossil fuels!)
I think a good question to always be ready to ask ourselves in any situation to draw out denial is “What knowledge or understanding or different perspective that I may not have now but is available to gain or learn, would change or enhance the way I see the situation? ” Try it, it is very hard to allow oneself the possibility of overcoming our deep-rooted beliefs but yet that is precisely the attitude it will take for us to change them. Forcing education upon others doesn’t work as we have seen, it has to come from a self-directed intention to fill the knowledge gaps (isn’t that how we all arrived at our overshoot awareness and acceptance? We didn’t find this site because we were lectured into it, we found it because we sought it out) and then an even more entropy defying self push to change our actions to match our new insights. If the motivation is great enough, this can and will happen, but everyone has a different threshold before the fire is lit under our bums. Maybe that is why we need to head hell-bent towards full-on collapse, perhaps the only way to save ourselves is to first come within a nanometer of destroying ourselves. I still take comfort and security from the once inviolable Newton’s third law and trust that is will prove true for this case, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Let us pray for calamity that we will reach that opposite reaction with the same energy swinging us out of our doom as going into it, and preferably very soon!
Namaste, everyone. Thanks for bearing with another Gaia attack.
Tom Murphy wrote a nice essay today. He starts by constructing a happy fairy tale that the majority believes. Then he deconstructs it.
I observe that the system we have constructed, and our resulting overshoot predicament, is ultra-complex with so many possible and conflicting responses that it’s no wonder the decision process is paralyzing and polarizing. Fortunately, there is one single simple thing we can focus on that improves everything, both for the present and the future, and for all species including humans (and, with a nod to Gaia, our farmed animals): rapid population reduction.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/a-climate-love-story/
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Thank you Rob for curating this very thoughtful essay to be juxtaposed to my own not unrelated musings–I must admit I was a bit bemused this morning (like seeing yourself in a fun mirror) to realise you’ve started a new page with yours truly, but I’m hopeful for interesting discussion and so far, that’s already materialised.
As for what the squirrel, newt, and nuthatch would say, that’s easy to guess. I’ll try to translate their chirrupings into plain speak (and tone down their language)–Please just go away and leave us alone. There’s not a single species on this planet that wouldn’t benefit by the immediate cessation of Homo sapiens, now that distinction is pretty singular!
Now while we don’t exactly advocate immediate extirpation of our species, we do need to get a move on the population reduction whilst there’s still some hope for other species to reclaim their spot on the planet once we step off the mass scale now tipping at 96% us and our domestic beasts (that is just such a sobering fact that renders me speechless, hey, I know what you’re thinking!) Seriously, when I watch wildlife docos and see endless streams of caribou migrating and realise that only represents 250,000 individuals, or an island cheek by jowl crammed with penguins (up to 1.5 million birds) and then think we humans are 8 billion in number, that also does my head in. The only thing to compare to that level of individual organisms (4-8 billion strong) is a super swarm of locusts in biblical plague proportions–’nuff said. Economic collapse needs to and will go hand in hand with population downshift of the top 2 billion consumers, and like it or not, that’s all of us. Maybe a topic for another day (we have started discussion on this previously and come up with more than a modicum of denial there, too) is how we personally take responsibility for enacting population reduction, since that is all we can do. I think I’ve already did my dash in opening up a juicy enough can of worms to go on with for now.
What did Spock always say? Live long and prosper. I think we’ve done that mightily enough. And what did Worf the Klingon always say? Today is a good day to die. Hmmmm.
Go well, everyone.
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Good points. It’s hard for our brains to visualize the difference between a million (wildlife) and a billion (humans) and a trillion (debt). We are a plague species.
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I have a vegetarian family member that agrees with Gaia on the ethics and denial of meat eating. I cooked him this recipe last night, which is my own creation. We both enjoyed it.
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I’m lucky to have a special kind of synesthesia for being able to taste food that is described, especially in a recipe form so I can see, smell, and even hear the ingredients cooking up together. Thanks Rob for sharing that delight, I make something similar and it never fails to disappoint. The only other thing I usually add for a bit of green is chopped spinach. And if you want to change the taste with one other ingredient, add 2 tablespoons or so of smooth peanut butter. I have found that a pinch of sweetener, I use coconut sugar, goes well with any recipe that uses canned tomatoes, the sweetness just balances the acidity.
I just bought a smaller 3L pressure cooker after your suggestion and you’re so right, it makes perfect Basmati rice in 3 minutes with 5 minutes standing time. I have decided that Arsenic poisoning is the least of my concerns at this time and now indulge in rice more often, at least as long as we can still get it. I am expecting that Basmati will be very expensive if even available after the devastation Pakistan has experienced this year.
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Excellent tips, thanks, I’ll try them.
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A 2017 BBC documentary by one of our most intelligent and respected polymaths.
You can’t make this shit up.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0953y04
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Hi Gaia thanks for sharing your thoughts. I do agree that every brain has denial.
I typically wouldn’t use people’s diets to discuss denial because of their connections to religion (ultimate denial). I can’t think of a single pre-modern community that was vegetarian outside of the context of religion. As far as I know, vegetarianism only came about from three/four different religions:
1. upper castes of Hinduism (and Jains);
2. the hippy earth spiritualties of Germany (exported to California), and
3. the strange new-age Christianity of the seven-day adventists and their ilk (Sanitarium/Kellogg’s).
I don’t know of any other vegetarian communities to exist prior the present day. And especially none that were vegetarian for reasons excluding religion, such as to prevent suffering or to avoid killing.
A vegan diet is even newer. Although there are logical vegans out there, I could make a pretty good argument that it is not really a diet, but an evangelical religion.
It is very hard to separate the personal beliefs from the culture one grows up in.
As for myself, I grew up on a beef farm, have raised animals, butchered and ate them. I feel bad when an animal’s life ends, I feel bad killing a carrot, I feel really sad accidentally cutting an earthworm when digging in my garden, I even feel bad pulling up weeds. Plants and fungi are sentient in their own ways, they know the world around them and communicate with others (both in and out of their species).
The great chain of being is a Christian-European concept that puts things in order of their soul/sentience by how closely they are related to God. It goes angels, then humans, men first (naturally), then women, other mammals, other animals, maybe birds before fish, insects, fungi, plants etc. all they way down to dumb rocks. Humans have an interesting form of denialism in that the more closely related a living thing is to us, the more value its living life has (more soul, more pain experienced, more sentience). We shouldn’t need scientists to torture non-mammals like insects and fish, to know that they experience the world, feel pain in their own ways, and want to live. Vegans and vegetarians often draw these strange arbitrary lines deciding for themselves, often with little to no evidence, where sentience should start and end. I am comfortable with not drawing a line. For example, I really don’t care if other cultures eat dogs or horses. If that’s their food, good for them. If some people just want to eat living plants, also great, good for them.
The reality is that all living things eat other living things. Every living thing wants to live. And every living thing will die, and be food for another living thing. When we eat living things we can be sad that a life is ending, while also being grateful that life itself continues.
If we wanted to argue on the technicalities of what is actually a healthy diet for humans or a normal diet for humans then that is a completely different discussion. And from my own years of reading the literature on this, I feel pretty confident is saying we have no freaking clue what the best diet is for humans since we are broad-ranging omnivores. We may have some good ideas about what is really bad: smoking commercial cigarettes and refined seed oils…. can’t think of much else
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Hello there monk,
Thank you so much for the time and thought in your reply to my little “experiment” of testing out our boundaries of denial. In your response I have the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and ask the very question that I suggested to broaden our perspective and engage with others’ views before whitewashing it with our own brush. I appreciate all your comments for I have considered them before, but try as I might to incorporate what you have added, it doesn’t change my own view, which goes to prove at least to me, that once we adopt a belief system in anything, however it arose (imprinted by religion, ingrained societal norms or self-directed awareness) it is very difficult to sway because that becomes our very sense of self. I can truthfully say that although I consciously approached your reply with an open mind for dialogue, I still felt my emotion rising at times when I wanted to interrupt and say “but!” and “that’s not my point!” and “well, that just proved my point!” So, you can see that the experiment worked rather well at least for me, to show that when it comes to confronting a different view, we are not just dealing with our logical, rational minds but a great deal of it is emotional, and that is where overcoming denial is really going to stick. It would be very interesting to hear what your emotional response was when you read through my thoughts, I can imagine it did make an impression of sorts for you to have replied as you did, and it is this very process of exchanging differing views and finding a common ground that we must examine closely if we are to try to understand how to dissolve denial, if it is even possible.
To be clear, it was not my intention at all in writing the piece to promote my particular viewpoint on the ethics of eating animals, rather, it was a calculated choice of a topic charged enough that I thought would bring up a myriad of issues related to our capacity for denial. And I am very much humbled that it showed up for me immediately that which I wanted to test out. And although there is a rather insistent voice in me that wishes to address your points with my counter ones, for purpose of staying true to my original experiment, I am repressing that because it isn’t going to be helpful in fleshing out (oh dear, that’s a bad pun) how denial manifests, and would actually only add fuel to the fire as each of us would respond by digging in even more in our views (either internally or publicly in a new response). So even this consideration brings up the mechanics of how denial extends and takes on a life of its own.
Now back to the topic that’s nearest and dearest to all our beating hearts, that of denial of overshoot, the one denial that rules them all! From this very brief exchange I can get a better glimpse how we can all agree up to a point (like yes, there is climate change and over shoot issues) but then due to our complex individual and social make-up and all the layers of our differing human experiences, we branch out into our own settled and comforting pattern of thought and beliefs (no need for population control, technology will find a way, it’s all about the economy). Even if we were confronted with enough evidence to leave and remake our nest of thoughts, the energy it would take to backtrack on the old and create new ideas, then beliefs, and finally patterns of action relating to those changed beliefs, would be daunting. And in my observation and experience, and it stands to reason, the more overarching the belief, the more difficult to shift, overcoming inertia proves just as challenging as breaking through awareness with new information. And as a corollary, once we do make one massive paradigm shift (like change of religion), it seems that is all most human psyches can handle, it would literally take a cataclysm to shift again. For example, it is rare for one to constantly change religions, the depth of input required is too much of an investment and then to change again signals to the ego that you really don’t know what you want or believe which is exactly what adopting a religion is supposed to assuage. This can be extrapolated to how we have been presented with energy overshoot, during one decade it’s an issue (70s) then it’s not (80s onward as our material economy explodes), and now that it looks like it may be again (unfortunately we are now addicted to that material economy) so no wonder it’s going to be difficult to convince the mass collective consciousness there’s a real problem with drastic solutions–so much easier to do a soft sell, EVs, wind power, and for those lost in fantasyland, even colonise another planet. So we get to have our cake and eat it, too, we do something for the environment and get to keep buying new stuff. We can poke at overshoot from the sidelines but we can’t get too close for comfort.
I think it boils down to pleasure seeking and pain avoidance, to dumb it down to the basics. Even if we were made aware of our predicament, none of us want to be experiencing the world we know is awaiting us so we just put on the invisibility cloak of denial so we can continue to live to seek pleasure another day. The only way to break through is to demonstrate that pleasure can be had in a different way, and pain can be mitigated, but that framework is woefully absent in our society that only pushes growth and immediate gratification. How to get our modern world interested in simple joys that were so satisfying to our forebearers (like singing around a piano) but unfathomable to our young generation? A forced collapse seems the only way to shake the system enough to re-write it with some hope of continuity, the pain will be hard and swift but afterwards, you’ll forget all about it in the new order of things and yes, you will be happy! I think this is why China maintains such tight control over its people, to keep in practice for what will be necessary for any semblance of order in the coming future. Can you imagine any other nation able to lock down cities of 20 million and still function as a unified country? China is betting on coming out with a society that can still be governed to work, feed itself, and possibly colonise other areas once the shit finishes dripping off the fan.
Sorry this post is all over the place, but I guess that’s what a forum is all about and once again, thanks to Rob for keeping it all going. I am once again more than a little self-conscious that my ramblings have headlined again, but if it provokes interesting and forward-moving discussion, then I am all the more grateful for being able to participate.
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Gaia really appreciate your thoughtful reply and I so very much agree with you. I bought into the whole vegan religion about 10 years ago and it did not go well for me. Now I feel really annoyed whenever I see vegan arguments. Main sources of my annoyance are the factual errors, double-standards, and the lack of care for people’s health. I know how good the arguments FOR are, because I used to believe them a decade ago. I also feel so angry that I was duped by the vegan propaganda. I feel like vegan activists harmed me. Many years later it turned out many of those YouTuber vegans weren’t even eating a vegan diet, all the while preaching it to the masses. I’m now super suspicious of anyone who makes any claims about any sort of diet. Somethings I can easily agree are bad: factory farming, cruel slaughter, palm oil (habitat destruction), food miles. I make food choices based on that sort of thing now.
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I suspect it will be tough to stay healthy on a vegan diet in northern counties when the only food available is locally grown.
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It would be impossible. The only good vegan source of saturated fat is coconut oil (maybe a bit olive oil, avocados too). You need saturated fat to form membranes for cells. It is a critical nutrient for the brain. Doesn’t mean we need eat shed loads of the stuff, but yea
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hello monk, thank you so much for your insights and for sharing your experience of your health journey. I understand how frustrating at times that has been, especially that you felt deceived by different agendas and I feel happy for you that you have reached a state of empowerment now about your own health choices. True health goes far beyond the physical requirements, and I can sense you are taking the best care of yourself in all regards, and also care for others’ well-being, too, which is a true sign of well-being.
It is interesting that several of our gang have now commented on the after affects of being sucked into an organised religion or in your case, a proxy cause that effectively has the hallmarks of one. I had similar experiences, firstly by renouncing the Christianity narrative that I was inculcated in, and again when I abandoned the medical career, which was my reason for living at the time. In each case, I found that my initial response was almost diametrically opposed, like a pendulum swinging all the way to the other side. I became very materialist and atheist in the first instance, denouncing God (or at least the Judeo-Christian one) at every turn, and I sought every other healing/health tradition other than Western medicine. Yes, the feeling was of being duped, used, controlled, and like you, I was intensely indignant over the hypocrisy and injustice. Over time, I realised that the source of my angst was actually those feelings and instead of focussing on the immediate cause and running it down, I built up my own sense of self-direction and in conscious awareness I began to make choices that resonated with my values, rather than just as a reaction to the perceived attack. I affirmed that I am a very spiritual person, but definitely not an organised religion one. I also realised that at my core I want to help others with their healing, be it physical or emotional, and just being a kind person has more effect than any medicine. So, I think I’ve found more of a balance and can now be grateful for those epiphanies that led me to make those paradigm shifts. It is interesting to note that it was just after I discarded Christianity (but not the message of love and forgiveness) that I dived head first into my medical crusade, which adds proof that the ego needs a centrepoint, no matter if illogical, as long as it fits and is available, this has been one explanation of the masses’ reaction to Covid.
How does this all add to the picture of denial? It’s becoming clearer to me that denial is not so much about facts and the reality surrounding oneself, but all about emotion and the way we choose to perceive things to attain or remove certain emotions. That’s maybe why just more education won’t change most people. Much of this is unconscious until something so big happens to bring it to our conscious self, usually this involves a serious, imminent threat to our actual physical being (like life or death), not just mental or emotional being, although those can also be impetus for radical change. It looks like for most, it will take not only impending doom, but the actual four horses of the Apocalypse charging through their living room before waking up to say, well, I didn’t see that coming!
Just thinking out loud here–So maybe a desired outcome of this war-mongering, energy crisis, famine, pandemic spinning, economic implosion is to try to get us to that state of wake up before totally going over the cliff. If we can wake up en masse in time and choose differently (like population reduction), we might still have some agency as individual beings in our future on this planet, but in the more likely event that we don’t, the plan is place for a world totalitarian government to just do what needs doing (ie along the lines of China and Russia) Once that is installed out of the chaos, everything will be built back from the bottom and whoever is left will have to adjust to the new reality in order to survive, and it will only take less than a generation or two before there is no memory of how it was before. Notice that almost all dystopian books and films refer to a time before when things got so bad and you’re lucky you live in this new order (which is usually worse), isn’t that the story line of all revolutions? I realise that there are also plenty of creation myths that describe a long distant golden age of peace and harmony before the fall of humankind, so either way, it seems like we humans think that it will never be as good as it was (despite the fact we live like kings, but of course I am only speaking from the perspective of the most elite percent of human beings).
Oh I don’t know. It’s all a crazy mixed up world but it’s the only world we’ve got and this is still our one bright chance at it. Times 8 billion. That’s what we need to remember–we think what we think is the most relevant and important but that is just our bias, every other human on this planet thinks the same, and for many, just getting enough to eat every day is their prime thought, not overshoot or population issues. We can’t really say they’re in denial, they’re just trying to live. We have the luxury of stepping back from it and adding our observation of things to our daily living pattern. Most people just don’t, and even if they did, they won’t choose to focus on a topic that means the end of their world as they know it. We just have to accept the truth that things will just unfold as they will and that’s the story of our little tribe called Homo sapiens on this far flung corner of our not-so-big galaxy. But just to have had the chance to be here, and at this time!
And last but not least, Happy Equinox everyone. May we find that balance point in our own lives every day.
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Happy Equinox Gaia. It’s a beautiful spring day here in Aotearoa. My Japanese Cherry is putting on a glorious show of flowers
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Nice post Gaia. Much to digest.
I helped spread 60 yards of sawdust mulch on the blueberries. Tomorrow I’m jacking up a large shed and moving it with a trailer to new location. I like physical work where I can focus my mind on the task.
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Hi Rob,
I’m totally with you in enjoying physical work outside as a way to get all the blood and sweat flowing whilst zoning out just focussed on task. Funny, you’ve been shovelling cubic meters of sawdust and I’m currently shovelling 12 ton of gravel to spread on the pads we prepared for the caravans and also filling in drainage trenches. I find it quite pleasurable to see the mound go down, slowly but surely, one wheelbarrow full at a time. I think another defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is we always seem busy shifting stuff from one place to another, and sometimes back again! Take care with the heavy lifting work; I take it you have a very strong back and good technique.
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Some good points, monk. I recently read an article in New Scientist that perhaps suggests that plants are far more sentient that they are given credit for: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25534012-800-the-radical-new-experiments-that-hint-at-plant-consciousness/
I agree about what is a healthy diet. In general, though, I think the less refined the better. I have cut down on meat but I’d be loathe to cut it out completely and get a healthy diet that I could put together without modern civilisation.
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Some people are eating gigantic slabs of meat and getting overloaded with iron. Not healthy! Eating the whole animal is much better, offal, bone broth, etc. 🙂 Eating veges and fruit is even better 🙂
Most processed foods contain a very high amount of seed oils and refined carbs. Unhealthy, no nutrients, lots of calories.
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According to https://finance.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-09/faqs-sanctions-russia-listed-goods_en.pdf the European Commision is allowing EU companies to trade, ship and finance Russian shipments to 3rd countries if they are either fertilizers, animal feed, certain hydrocarbons?, essential goods like cement and coal.
Regarding this I read a comment I found pretty funny: “Europe is like the 5 yr old that protests to its parents by running away from home (to the garden shed) and comes back at tea time when its hungry and cold”
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That is funny. Not so funny is that the war is escalating with no sign of an off ramp. Maybe a cold winter will restore sanity.
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No offence to Nate and Martin but they don’t even scratch the surface of the problem. Not only have we been pumping massive amounts of toxic pollution into the biosphere for around 100 years but many of them are accumulating as the cryosphere melts and the land dries out. What used to be Dilution is the Solution” is now lack of moisture world wide is concentrating pollution.
I have been saying for over 25 years now that The Limits To Growth computational run severely under counted pollution by half. Everything humans do/have done ends up in the waste stream. You could “deny” all other problems crashing down on humanity and pollution WILL take us out sooner than later.
Did you know that we make chemical gasses that are 25,000 times more harmful than Co2 and they have been leaking unregulated for 50+ years, sulfur hexafluoride (SF6). There are over 100 simular chems in this category.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/duke-energy-one-top-leakers-gas-25000-polluting-carbon-dioxide-epa-rec-rcna45742
It is not even a matter of denial, it is more the fact that only .0001% of the population understands.
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Thanks, I did not know. It’s definitely ignorance and not denial of an important overshoot symptom for me. I read a lot but clearly have been in a silo.
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I favour ending fossil fuels completely, but I am under no delusions about what this would mean for all of us 😐
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Found thanks to Peak Prosperity, a statement on the dire situation of the oil industry by Aramco CEO Amin Nasser. We would all do well to heed his words:
https://www.aramco.com/en/news-media/speeches/2022/remarks-by-amin-h-nasser-at-schlumberger-digital-forum
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Thanks, very interesting to see a senior oil exec so clearly state the problem. Not sure his solution of more investment will work for long because the economy is struggling to grow with oil at a price high enough to make new investments profitable.
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Dr. Malcolm Kendrick answers his covid puzzle (and also reminds us that butter is a health food).
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2022/09/22/saturated-fat/
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Jack Alpert today explains why net zero means 7 billion starve. Not discussed is the similar (but later) threat from carbon emissions. Conclusion: to avoid suffering we must significantly reduce our population.
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That’s a sobering wee video. Here’s the latest from Planet Critical on overpopulation. I haven’t listened to the whole interview yet but it starts off in a promising way.
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Thanks, I saw that and have it queued. Looks promising.
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Thank you for this link Campbell, hope you and your family are going well. I can imagine how things are just busting out all over in your beautiful property now that it’s Spring. It’s a busy time (I think the whole year is with all the different tasks!) and I can just feel your enthusiasm and energy. It’s just so wonderful that your whole family is on-board with the vision of self-sufficiency and each brings their own skills and talents to creating your homestead together.
I have listened through this interview and am relieved that at long last certain unmentionable topics are finally broached head-on. There is so much I wanted to agree on but throughout it I just felt a sense of urgency bordering on despondency when I realised that if this is the most forward thinking view we have, spoken aloud by only one brave academic, we still have such a long way to go and the time is just running out. They’re still talking change of policy and power and educating people (especially women) to make choices about their fertility (with lots of extra birth control made available) and hopefully it will be the right ones, but nothing is going to happen by free choice until we combine it with Jack Alpert’s in-your-face prediction and by then the suffering will be immense. Phoebe stated clearly that her organisation steers clear from advising how many children one should have, but if someone doesn’t bite the bullet to give us the real facts and numbers, it’s all still too nebulous and carefree. It’s going to take a draconian effort to curb our numbers in the time frame we need to, but nature is up to the task if we cannot or will not.
Speaking of nature, last night I revisited a couple episodes of Planet Earth II narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I just wanted to remind myself what we have and what we have to lose. I found myself with tears streaming down my face as I marvelled at the majesty and wonder of our natural world and all the lifeforms that have found and fought for their niche to be here. The tears were for gratitude just to be able to witness their brilliance, in mourning for knowing that their light might soon be extinguished, and out of remorse and sorrow that we have been the cause. Maybe our entire cosmos is driven by the life force energy, and we have inherited that desire to exist and continue to exist along with every other permutation of life. So, how can we blame ourselves for getting us into this predicament, our special powers of mind combined with uprightness and those infamous opposable thumbs (and a great deal else) could only have gone one way, especially once we mastered stolen energy. When we witness the destruction of habitat and extinction of each species, we are seeing and sealing our own future, afterall, aren’t we the only species that we know of that can contemplate our own death?
Does anyone ever think of themselves getting older and enjoying a long life? Try as I might, I cannot have this image in my head, especially not now knowing what we know is here. If I were true to my beliefs that one life is as worthy as another, I should be at complete peace with this fact, and more than peaceful, utterly grateful that I had my chance at self-directed living and for over 50 turns around the sun, that’s been more than generous. In one way I am, but there’s still that life force in me that wants to see yet another Spring, to watch our trees grow and bear fruit, to spend more moments with family and friends, to bask in the sunshine and slumber through the night, expecting another day to choose how I want to be. Any AI mindform if given all the data we have and asked to come up with a solution, the easiest and most logical, then I would think that leaving one’s life at either an appointed time or self chosen one, would have to be one of the clear and present options. And yet, even for those of us who see the issue, we hesitate and say, not me and not just yet! We justify and bargain–my family needs me, I deserve some freedom time after all the years of working, I want to still experience xyz, at least I didn’t have children, I don’t do air travel anymore, so I’m doing my part to be the solution. We get angry or at least frustrated that others can’t see what we know, and bemoan if only this and that would change. But really, we just want to continue being one of the 8 billion, and preferably include all our family and friends in that number. So who can blame anyone else for wanting to continue their life as they know it?
Just a few thoughts to share with a group that’s held in deep regard and thought of with much gratitude for being here together at this only time we have. I wish for you all as many days in peace and ease as we can gather and hold closely. And I wish for you peace and ease when it is time to let go.
Namaste, friends.
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Listened to the whole thing. Although they talked about population they are both in serious denial about how late in the game it is. We are long past easy (everyone should get to decide how many kids they want, i.e. no coercion) solutions. Collapse of the economy and civilization is not 10 or 20 years away, it’s happening right now. And the biosphere can’t support 3 billion (or even 1 billion) people. They are right however the consumption on the level of Western Civ is part of the problem, but they seem unaware that consumption is going to collapse because energy is no longer available to sustain it. Their conversation should have happened 50 years ago and been acted on. Sadly no one would listen to Paul Erlich and act on it (the leaders and the people were then and still are in deep denial).
AJ
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Thanks for the review, I’ll skip it.
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Hi AJ,
Thanks for saying in several sentences what I waffled on about in my post! It’s reassuring (in an unfortunate way) that we both had the same viewpoint of too little too late but maybe for those who are new to this idea, this presentation already generates shockwaves. We are on completely different wavelengths now but still there’s more denial to flush out.
I also listened/watched the latest Nate Hagens podcast recommended by Rob. Just more proof that we’ve totally fouled our nest and now we and all the rest of the biosphere will have to eat it, possibly for as long as there is a biosphere. However, the prospect of chemicals disrupting our endocrine systems, lowering sperm count, and all the rest isn’t totally horrifying as Nate seems to take it. After all, isn’t that the cost of what we’ve done and also the means of re-balancing with reduced fertility (and thus population!) Nature always bats last and more than evens out the score. It’s an incalculable shame that many other life forms have to also suffer these disruptions to their hormonal systems but maybe that too, in a way, is part of the homeostasis levelling act. After all, this planet will only be able to support reduced numbers of animal and plant life in the toxic overload condition it’s currently in, and over millennia worth of recovery (once a particular and peculiar species has been finally reined in or wiped out), maybe the biomass will return in all its former glory. It will only happen when we’re not here to witness it, of course, but time is still on Gaia our Earth’s side. So, maybe plastics is the great future after all!
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JMG has written a good piece on the whole of energy history and where we are going with energy in the future (sorry no “green new deal” or nuclear). I don’t often read JMG anymore as he is wedded to his idea of slow catabolic collapse (denial of anything different), which I think is doubtful. I think the more likely a fast collapse, ala Caton, Tainter or Korowicz OR nuclear annihilation.
https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-the-peak/
AJ
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Thanks. I stopped reading JMG a long time ago because it usually takes him 1000 words to express a 10-word idea. This essay was pretty good and not too wordy.
I tend to agree with you AJ that the decline will be quick. The reason I believe this is that when growth ends our giant pile of debt becomes a bomb, new credit, which modern civilization needs a ton of, will become scarce, and food and energy scarcity will probably lead to nuclear war.
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Yes, I agree, Rob. I think JMG downplays the interconnectedness of the world and the sheer number of disillusioned and desperate people. In previous collapses, these weren’t factors. And the decline in supply of fossil fuels could well accelerate at some point with all of the sweet spots exhausted and the lack of financial sense in developing hard to get at resources which can’t be sold at affordable prices. So I expect an initially slow collapse (it’s happening now) but which accelerates, perhaps over only a couple of decades.
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Gee, Rob. How can you bear reading some of my posts and with the lack of formatting, too! It must be some form of torture to those like you who are naturally succinct. I can’t and don’t deny that is just how I am and I thank you and everyone else for your longstanding patience and sufferance. I think I better end now whilst I’m ahead, oops, that was unnecessary and could be edited out!
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All of your recent posts have had perfect paragraphs. Sometimes I have to queue them for later when I have more time to read but they are always interesting. Last couple days I’ve been a little distracted trying to help Dr. Varki prep for an upcoming interview.
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That’s great news about the upcoming Great Simplification interview with your mentor, wouldn’t it be good if they can talk about MORT in specific relation to the population reduction denial? If that is our main pressing issue, then we need to rip it wide open no holds barred. Even if it puts Nate on the spot that will demonstrate our tendency for denial even more clearly, as I had tried to do with the eating animals ethical question. Thank you Rob for making this happen and I trust it will move the dialogue forward.
I appreciate the time and interest to consider my posts, quite humbling really. Even if they are not read, I am already very grateful for the opportunity to sit down and compose some thoughts even if it just clears my own head. Like I’ve said many times, this site has been a knowledge and sanity oasis. I feel very content that we will have company and encouragement through to the time we can no longer communicate, and even then we will know a certain comfort that there are others out there who have witnessed, understood, and shared our journey.
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I share your feelings. I would keep writing even if there were zero visitors here. It’s therapeutic to try to describe what’s actually going on when surrounded by ignorance and denial on all the important issues.
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By the way, I wouldn’t call Dr. Varki a mentor. He proposed a theory that answered many important questions for me. I ran with it and tried to spread the word that MORT is central to our overshoot predicament. Later he and I connected and we communicate once in a while on MORT issues. Varki is very busy with his day job leading a lab that has nothing to do with MORT. I wish he would quit and focus on MORT.
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I like Tim Garrett’s physics of civilization as a heat engine the best of all. Discovering it was like hitting the stone wall challenge of changing cherished beliefs as explained by Gaia.
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Woohoo!! Nate Hagens has made contact with Dr. Varki. Fingers crossed there may be an interview in the future.
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If you have not yet watched the interview a couple comments above by Nate Hagens on chemical pollution you should try to find time. I was unaware what a serious and long-lasting problem we have created.
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Interesting experiment underway. The UK is printing money to lower the cost of energy. That’s causing the value of their currency to drop which increases the cost of energy (and everything else they import).
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Why is China continuing with their zero covid policy?
Why does China not use mRNA substances, but Taiwan does?
Why are western media & leaders silent on China’s policy? If it’s a good idea there should be debate about copying them. If it’s a bad idea there should be criticism for harming health & freedom.
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My thoughts:
Because China is already on war-footing and being able to mobilise their military and civilian forces to control the masses on a moment’s notice is an exercise they need to always keep at the ready. Also this extended Zero Covid policy with lockdowns smokes out dissenters and they are marked and will be dealt with in due course as other policies even less savoury come into play, also with the aim of mass control when things go even more pear-shaped. And also, there is probably some concern the virus isn’t through with us yet, or rather, the combination of inoculation and engineered virus possibly damaging the immune system, still may carry a sting in the tail and if there’s an outbreak which proves to be the mutation that GVB is predicting, then having that happen in populous China will not be good. And, and probably the number one reason, the Zero Covid policy is a perfect foil for reducing their own economy which in turn sounds the death knell for the Western economies and thus their power, which is favourable for China.
China knows that the mRNA substances are up to no good. Taiwan follows the West, and therefore had no choice but to take what their overlords proffered. China isn’t too concerned about the health of its current Taiwanese population if their aim is to overtake the island.
Western leaders also know something is up to no good and don’t want to keep highlighting what the public can now clearly see about the failure of the Covid policies and shots. It will become even more obvious with the coming winter. We certainly don’t want to advertise now that 1.4 billion people were specifically kept from getting the experimental mRNA shots, especially since they are the Chinese. I mean, that would almost be like a control group and that means we were the experiment!
To keep focussing on China’s lockdowns will scare the public more with uncertainty for supply chain issues and shutting down economies and that may throw an unpredictable wrench into the works when the increased interest rates, inflation pressure due to energy costs and general unease with the system is already doing its job in a hopefully controlled collapse. In a few short months, everything will coalesce into a giant boil ready to pop.
If this whole thing were a strategy board game, and I were world leader pretend, and knowing that China harbours a longstanding grudge against the West and now China and Russia have decided that they can take over rule of the world, then I would have to say with some certainty that China will make its next big chess move very soon. In a one/two punch with Russia leading with starting off the Ukraine conflict which has effectively paralysed Europe or will this winter, now it should stand to strategic reason that its ally China will deliver another finishing blow by forcing the Taiwan issue, especially when Europe is down and the economy is ready for free fall. What can the West really do to retaliate then, short of declaring war on China? This time, there need not even be a single shot fired from China’s side, they can stop shipping goods and we would be absolutely and fatally crippled overnight. In fact, just the very idea, just the rumour that China can stop supply will decimate the markets, how many people have even considered this? I think this is how China and Russia plan to take over, one with withholding energy and the other material goods, and hopefully between the two, avert nuclear war. It would be wise for the Western leaders to remember that China is the nation whose philosophy produced The Art of War, and this is their bright shining moment to effect those principles. Theirs is a more subtle strategy than the West’s shock and awe might, but will prove to be far more far-reaching and effective.
Does anyone else here see what I see? Am I going a bit crazy thinking like I do? I have been thinking along these lines for a very long time, maybe I’m blinded by my own biases.
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Very interesting insights Gaia. All sound plausible to me with new ideas I had not considered. The idea of leveraging energy and material goods to obtain power without war makes sense. When we look around our homes and think about the supply line from China stopping it’s clear we are very vulnerable. Also like the idea of viewing China as a vaccine control group.
I watched a BBC documentary last night on China’s zero-covid policy. It was very lame with no hard questions asked. The only insight offered not mentioned by you is the upcoming re-appointment of Xi for another term. It was suggested they are trying to clean up any covid messes to make him look good.
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Thanks Rob for the validation of my overactive mind and loquacious means of expressing it.
I think the foregone re-appointment of Xi is independent of any Covid policy, in fact the population is getting very titchy over these rolling lockdowns but can only vent so much on their State controlled social media. But following popular opinion is not how China works, and there is a purpose behind decisions that seem so contrary, maybe even more so. Something in me says that China’s people do have an inkling that there is a reason why their government is doing things so differently from everyone else and because they can’t do very much about it anyway, they will just have to trust their leaders.
There is a very deep national psyche, at least with the older and ruling generation who have been shaped by the political and economic transformation of modern China, that China through her epic history overcoming greatest challenges, has now evolved to become what they consider to be the worthiest and noblest of nations to lead the world. This has been a long time coming but every bit earned and commanding due respect and acknowledgment from the global community. I don’t think the West truly understands this, for the longest time they considered China to be a poor developing country good for cheap labour and deprecated their Communist government for their hard handed ways and human rights abuses. There was little understanding and taking responsibility for the Wests’ role in compressing China into the second class world citizen status, and for all the exploitations degrading her sovereignty. China had to take it then, because it was not yet her time, but now there is no doubt of her ascendancy. The sun is setting on the West and ever rising in the East. That is why recent US actions rankle China so much, it considers the West to now be in a subservient position or at least no longer dominant, and thus lacking proper form and respect in the way it conducts itself in world affairs in relation to China. In the Chinese mindworld, everything is about relationship of one to another and knowing one’s rightful place given one’s capacity and authority. The continued hubris and arrogance of the West is an enduring sticking point for many previously dispossessed nations and peoples. For China, this cannot be tolerated and when the opportunity arises to deliver the decisive lesson that will expose once and for all who wields the real power, I believe she will take it.
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I won’t blame China for extracting revenge for the 1840 Opium War. Our actions were unforgiveable.
Covid has left me so deeply disappointed and disillusioned with all western leaders that I would trade them for Xi any day. I still struggle to comprehend the incompetence, indifference, and evil of our leaders.
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Nice round-up of economic news from Panopticon. The world is unraveling in front of our eyes.
https://climateandeconomy.com/2022/09/24/24th-september-2022-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
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h/t Dr. Robert Malone
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Much food for thought and reason to worry about nuclear war in this thread by Doomberg.
I don’t agree with his conclusion. I think denial of the unpleasant reality that climate change cannot be addressed by turning off fossil energy use is a better explanation for what he observes.
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I still can’t tell if Mattias Desmet is a brilliant man with an insightful scientific explanation for the covid insanity, or a dim psychologist that has strung together a bunch of impressive words that describe the default state of the modern human.
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Perhaps THIS will bring clarity to you?
The official framing of the mass formation (or mass psychosis) “phenomenon” is misleading and wrong in terms of what the whole true reality is. The false hope-addicted psychologists and their acolytes want you to believe this is “just some temporary occasional” madness by the masses when it is but a spike of a CHRONIC madness going on for aeons with “civilized” people — read “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room –The Holocaustal Covid-19 Coronavirus Madness: A Sociological Perspective & Historical Assessment Of The Covid “Phenomenon”” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
One of these mainstream psychologists who have been spreading this whitewashed reality, Dr. Desmet, also fails to see that the PLANNED Covid Psyop is a TOTALLY deliberate ploy because he doesn’t think (after more than 1 year, even 2 years, into this total PLANNED scam!) it’s ALL intentionally sinister as he stated in a prior podcast (this makes him witting or unwitting controlled opposition).
In the May of 2022 podcast with James Corbett he stated that “some people tend to overestimate the degree of planning and intentions” (behind the COUNTLESS, VERIFIABLE, FULLY INTENTIONAL, FULLY PLANNED atrocities by the ruling tribe of psychopaths over the last century alone) and see all of it as being planned which Desmet called “an extreme position” … Sound logical thinking is “extreme” and therefore false and sick in his demented delusional view!!!
In his overpriced misleading whitewashing old material regurgitated book the psychology of totalitarianism he too states that “There are countless … examples that seem to point in the direction of a plan being implemented, such as the fact that the definition of ‘pandemic’ was adjusted shortly before the coronavirus crisis; that the definition of ‘herd immunity’ was changed during the crisis, implying that only vaccines can achieve it … [he continuous with several other obvious facts of an ENTIRELY PLANNED event, especially discerned through the totality of all these facts].” “SEEM to point in the direction of a plan”??? No! They most evidently, clearly, and irrefutably DO demonstrate and prove it IS a COMPLETELY AND FULLY DELIBERATE PlanDemic! A big scam. An Entirely Planned Holocaust against the non-ruling herd of people (see cited link above). A coherent 12-year old kid can figure that out.
It clearly shows Desmet’s own complete lunacy. But because almost everyone in the culture is a member of mass formation (madness), including the “woke” people of the alternative media domain, hardly anyone recognizes Desmet’s lunacy. Not surprising that he has even become some type of popular “guru” among the adherents of the alternative media landscape and his whitewashed fake narrative strongly resonates with both mainstream people and alternative mainstream folks.
With his false use of language Desmet obscures or hides the true reality instead of directly and uncompromising exposing it — aiding the obfuscation of the vital reality of what the ruling authorities really are. He does the same thing when he speaks of ‘the elite’ (as he does in a number of podcasts) when, in reality, they are THE SCUM OF HUMANS because they are REALITY-VERIFIED PSYCHOPATHS (see referenced source above). Yet in the Corbett podcast he “teaches” us that we, the masses, need to start thinking differently. Right… how about YOU start with sane instead of insane thinking/talking/”teaching”/etc, Dr. Desmet?
How do self-styled “truth-tellers” wake up the masses to the so-called truth when they THEMSELVES use lies with their deceitful fake language???
No one is “teaching” or “waking up” the ignorant masses to the CORE truths with lies, with the official “language of lies” (see cited source above).
This all means Desmet is ALSO a member of the masses of lunatics, an ACTIVE CARD-CARRYING MEMBER of mass formation!!! When, if at all, will he wake up from his state of mass psychosis, his “invisible” stupidity? When, if at all, will he face the TRUE and FULL reality instead of hiding behind fantasies such as his whitewashed “reality” of human civilization?
It shows we live in a global mental asylum with criminal and/or delusional mainstream psychologists, scientists, and docs as the guards, “teachers” and “therapists” … The blind/criminal/mad leading the blind/criminal/mad; the blind/criminal/mad adhere to the blind/criminal/mad = the human madhouse.
Worst of all, perhaps, the mass formation/mass psychosis notion frames the problem as the public being a mere unaccountable non-culpable victim in this phenomenon (the gist of the circular argument is: the masses should change their thinking but they got brainwashed so they’re victims). Nothing could be further from the truth (see referenced source above).
Desmet is right in that truth-activists must fight against mass formation psychosis (human madness). That also means exposing HIS deeply destructive mad part of it. This comment serves, in part, that objective.
If you are in the United States and your employer has mandated the toxic/lethal COVID jabs, you can register to receive a “Medical Exemption Certificate” for free at https://drgastonmedicalexemption.com or https://lc.org/exempt
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Thanks! I lean to agreeing with many of the conclusions but think the rant did not make a strong case. It would be better to simply show that each of Desmet’s specific conditions for a mass formation are the default state in modern society.
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We can now be sure food inflation is here to stay.
I’ve been watching Campbell’s chunky soup steadily increase in price from $2.00 to $2.50 (25%) per can over the last year. Today they held the price at $2.50 and reduced the can size from 540 mL to 515 mL (another 5% price increase). That’s 30% in one year.
They must be desperate. The 540 mL can has not changed for more than 40 years.
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I normally keep 120L of gasoline for emergency use in the winter months. Now stepping that up to 200L.
Are any of you changing prep plans given world events?
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No. Not sure what else can reasonably be done. I’ve now got 2 acres which I’m slowly planting out and keeping some chooks and ducks. I do keep some petrol but not much, nor would I know what to do with it if collapse comes. A lot of people are going to be trying to survive as well as others trying to gain an advantage. Whatever I do is probably not going to change that but the more skills I can learn, the more likely it is that me and mine can survive a little longer than most. But I sometimes wonder what the point of survival is. Not that I’d ever do anything other than also try to survive.
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There’s a limit for me too. No point in continuing if things get too bleak. I’m ready for shortages of most things and I live in a location where I could be happy with nothing more than subsistence food.
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I’ve decided to stay onward bit longer here in our subtropical block to get more stuff done like securing the solar generator and hot water system which is going up in price by the month. I’ve got the gear but until they are installed, it’s pretty useless. I’ve been waiting for tradespeople for months now, several cancelled my job. That’s another sign that things are reaching a crisis point, when you’re ready to engage work but can’t get anyone to return phone calls.
I am trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels for immediate day to day living, which is why even though all this solar stuff isn’t sustainable on the whole, and costly up front, it’s still my best chance to live on this property as comfortably as we can for as long as we can whilst siphoning more energy into growing food. I’ve got lots of trees here that need processing for wood to use for cooking and a burst of warmth through the colder nights of the short winter months we have, and I am encouraging more seedling trees to grow onward to a reasonable size that can be eventually chopped with an axe once our battery powered tools give out. Fallen branches and bamboo which will be easier to harvest and chop up into cooking fuel will hopefully be our mainstay source. For night time warmth, I’ve got more sleeping bags and hot water bottles, and vacuum flasks to keep boiled water hot.
Most importantly the most recent change of plans that we’ve embarked on is preparing to open up our property to others to create a community where hopefully the more input will not only increase our comfort and survival through the difficult transition time but actually encourage well-being by being part of a group working together, seeking and fulfilling a meaningful human life in relationship with each other and our natural world. I believe that is the only way through, to remake our pattern of existence as Nate calls the Great Simplification, but no one is an island in this process as we’re all going to need to support each other through these early attempts. In any case, when times get desperate, those of us with small holdings in rural areas that can potentially grow food and have some source of energy will be inundated by people leaving the cities in search of shelter and a chance for survival. I’m just pre-empting the scenario by preparing to welcome whoever finds their way to our gate. With this in mind, we’ve bought two old caravans to put on the property as extra sleeping quarters and we can turn our main shed into a community shared space. If funds allow, we might purchase another, or at least prepare more sites for people to come with their own. I can’t envision turning any one away who needs help, and it seems to us that turning whatever we’ve managed to pay ahead in our mortgage back into potential living space is a worthwhile investment. Whatever we’re heading into, we will need the kindness of strangers, whom we will come to know as another version of ourselves, to help us through if we are to have any chance at all. And if for some reason (and there could be many) our own family doesn’t live to see or cannot partake in the fulfilment of this goal, then at least I know that I did everything to the best of my ability to prepare this environment for whoever finds this property. And that really is the same result in the bigger picture.
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Very impressive Gaia. You are actually doing what most only dream of. Congratulations, you should be proud.
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Thank you Rob, but my intentions and what accomplishments I have directed do not deserve congratulations. I am not at all proud that I have only been able to do so because fate allowed our family to be in the top echelon of privileged humans. Humbled only begins to express how I feel. In addition to all the countless human lives and their labour which makes my own efforts seem almost obscene in their limited scope and personal hardship investment, I have the 500 billion energy slaves that Nate reminds us of carrying me through. What motivates me more than anything, more than the actual overshoot predicament and push for survival, is my great sense of obligation to everything and everyone for making possible the life I have been able to choose and live with such ease for so long. The overwhelming feeling of being beholden to all things and lives, seen and unseen, is a moral compass for me, providing connection to all that I perceive. It at once grounds and centres my actions whilst lifting my spirit to purpose and meaning. I do not consider it a burden, just like a bird would not think the wings on its back to be. For the remainder of my time here, I want to give back in thought and action to help another or the earth be what it will be. And since through my particular denial-coloured glasses, we are all part of Gaia and the cosmos, that is the same as giving to myself.
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If you can’t stick a gun in somebody’s face and pull the trigger to protect what you have built then you will lose it. Reality is a bitch. The level of denial here about how collapse is going to be like working through a permaculture manual is staggering. If fast collapse occurs then extremely harsh measures will be the order of the day. Pray that JMG is right because if not………………..
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Hello niko,
That is precisely what I cannot and will not do. I am under no delusion that the transition period ahead will be traumatic, but I will not add to the suffering, especially my own, by thinking that violence is the way to defend my life. If things get to the point where my role in being useful or meaningful is finished, and/or I decide my physical and mental suffering is too great, then I am prepared to end my life and allow space for whoever might want to continue their living experiment in these times. I plant the trees and prepare the land with the intention that it might help someone through whatever we will be going through, it doesn’t have to be me or my family. To create a more self-sufficient homestead is a small little dream I’ve harboured for so long, trying to keep the tiny light aflame a bit longer has been a beacon in the night for me and a source of great healing and peace. I cannot see the harm in continuing each day as I can to the fullest measure of my ability, indeed, that is the only way to live and die.
All the best to you and your family.
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Could you help me understand this: slide 9, https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/scientific-blog/risk-benefits-of-covid-19-interventions-by-dr-marian-laderoute? It seems so huge, that I am unsure (and statistics and lies)…
Does this mean that if we consider 100000 unvaxed people and 100000 vaxed people and suppose 10 died in the unvaxed group over the 17 months, then 69 would have died in the vaxed group?
Is the source trustworthy? What are the raw numbers? How is this comparable to a war, or other crimes against humanity? (I’d like to get an idea of the scale)
If I am understanding well, I am baffled. I knew the vax was not safe, but I would have imagined by a few percents.
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Sorry Charles, I’m not comfortable trying to answer your questions without first establishing the credibility of the source and that takes a lot of time and more information than a single presentation. I would first find a source you trust and then seek their analysis on all-cause mortality. The people I trust say the risks now exceed the benefits and it gets worse with each boost.
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Thank you for your answer. It makes sense.
To give some context: this publication is from the site of Geert Vanden Bossche.
I found the original raw data, which is published by the UK Office for National Statistics (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathsbyvaccinationstatusengland).
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I noticed that Bossche did not comment on the presentation and I also don’t recall him having expertise in all cause mortality analysis. But I might be wrong.
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Chuck Watson today points out the shocking decline in competence of our leaders.
See also AJ’s comment.
https://blogenkiops.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/signaling-virtue-or-just-ignorance/
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This article is a bit off topic of the current post but still relevant to the main idea of the blog.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/09/24/how-to-make-the-oil-industry-go-bust/
The author looks at the cleanup liabilities for oil companies in Alberta Canada. (It may be later than we think.)
We have passed / about to pass / will pass shortly, the point at which all the future revenues from oil production would be needed to pay to cap and clean up all of the old wells in Alberta.
Now of course, these liabilities will for the most part be defaulted on, but it does indicate that we have not be paying the full cost for obtaining oil in either monetary or energetic terms.
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Thanks. I saw that earlier and it’s interesting. We’ve created a big mess. I expect the nuclear power industry will be worse when most plants need to be shut down due to diesel shortages.
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Rob, Gaia, et.al.-it’s been very good to spend my time between patients getting caught up on the conversation today. I haven’t been so stimulated since the days when Jay was still with us, and would host such a provacative sharing of ideas! I’d about given up on the overly insular group over at Megacancer; this group is more what I was hoping to find. Gaia, your essay on denial and veganism was especially good; my partner has tried to “convert me”, and doesn’t appreciate my pointing out that it is another quasi-religious movement. Your reasoned, thoughtful, compassion-based take on it has given me a much deeper appreciation of it, and an excellent way to reflect on my degree of denial, I’m much more open to considering it now. Thanks again to everyone here; Rob, you sent me Varki’s book 5 years ago, time to immerse myself, so I can make informed comments! Looking forward to more stimulating conversation !
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Hi Peter and welcome to our little tribe of aware misfits.
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Hello Peter, thank you for sharing how my thoughts have resonated with you. I want to say that I hope everyone comes to their own conclusions from a place of self knowledge, and awareness of any barriers to knowledge–that’s our denial which is every bit part of us but needs to be recognized if we want to allow ourselves full agency for choice. That’s all I really wanted to bring up with my essay, but I am thrilled it has generated some interesting discussion and deeper searching for which I have no attachment to any outcome.
If you would like a suggestion on some reading on the ethics of animal eating that really highlighted for me a way of looking at it from a simple moral perspective, I can wholeheartedly recommend a small but powerful book called Eat Like You Care by Gary Francione and Anna Charlton, both law and philosophy professors at Rutgers University.
You mentioned checking in between patients–more power to you as a medical doctor navigating in today’s challenging waters. I bailed out almost as soon as I had begun, but I will always appreciate and honour the intention for helping others to health and well-being. All the best and thank you for charting and staying your course.
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Gaia, thanks for the book recommendation, I look forward to reading it. Fortunately, my calling was in the area of holistic health care (Chiropractic), but I’m nearing the end of my working years-I’m 70! Currently I’m helping a colleague in his chronic pain practice, in which we try to help people come to grips with the outcomes of a lifetime of questionable or downright harmful habits! I guess you could denial-based living is paying my salary! I’ll continue to benefit from the mental stimulation here-glad to be part of the conversation!
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Here’s a weird thought I had at lunch…maybe not eating animals is a type of death denial. I’ll posit in theses since it’s easier to follow:
A. The more similar an animal is to us, the more empathy we have for them.
B. With empathy, we may fear the animal’s death on their behalf. We have existential dread / fear of death on behalf of animals.
C. Treating a similar-to-human animal like a commodity and / or eating it triggers an uncomfortable feeling.
D. Part of this uncomfortable feeling is realising that the individual human is no different to the animal (there may also be concern for the animal itself etc. outside of this thesis).
E. The animal’s life can be viewed as ‘just food’ or a commodity. This causes the human to view themselves in the same way. (A tiger would enjoy eating a tasty human).
F. How little we care about the individual animal reminds us how little the universe/God cares about our own life.
G. The human concludes there is nothing special or different about a human. Human death is the same as animal death – scary, messy, meaningless, probable, impersonal, with no ceremony or significance.
H. Denial is initiated in several ways: Some living things have a similar soul / sentience to humans; or Animals go to the “afterlife” like humans. Other humans may resolve this by trying hard not to feel empathy for animals.
I. Another possible response is that the human decides to not eat the similar-to-human animals to avoid the uncomfortable feeling. Essentially, the human is trying to bribe the universe; if I care about the animal and recognise its soul, maybe God will do the same for me.
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You could replace the word ‘animal’ with ‘living thing’ to make the argument even more interesting
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I found Lierre Keith’s “The Vegetarian Myth” excellent. It looks at various, different, arguments for vegetarianism/veganism and debunks them. She was a vegetarian and (for a while) a vegan. Actually, my daughter switched to being a vegetarian and lasted about 6 years before she realised that it was doing her health no good, even though she enjoyed vegetarian dishes and was quite happy, otherwise, with the diet. She’s a lot healthier now.
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I read that book too! There were some things in it that weren’t accurate due to out-of-date science referenced, e.g. there was a table that said the human stomach has no bacteria in it. But overall a thoroughly good book. Lierre is really good at mixing big picture with micro examples, and a great story-teller
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I’m glad your daughter is doing better. Being female you can often get a good clue about how good a diet is by how it effects your cycle. It’s alarming how many vegan women say they don’t ever get a period! If your body isn’t healthy enough to reproduce, it’s not healthy right…
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I also enjoyed that book. I remember the paragraph where she described her body vibrating with pleasure after she ate her first can of tuna after years of no animal protein.
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It looks like I need to read that book, too! I really think I have a completely different metabolism than perhaps many of you, for I absolutely become toxic on animal protein and fats and seem to thrive on fruits, veggies, and all manner of starches. I adopted a vegetarian diet 21 years ago and segued naturally for me into vegan about 14 years ago. It is a very balanced vegan diet with minimal processed foods which I think is one of the main points for health in any diet. monk, you may have just found one of the answers to our population issue–if veganism can turn off the menstrual cycle, well, that’s a bonus at this time!
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Send me a message if you’d like help finding the e-book or audiobook.
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Vegetarian diets are very different from vegan diets. The health effects generally seem to be for vegans. Milk is your liquid meat 🙂 If you are a vegetarian that also eats eggs, I think you would be just fine health-wise. In India, most religious vegetarians do not eat eggs.
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In my self-justification for sticking with an omnivorous diet, I think that a vegetarian, and particularly a vegan, diet would need supplements or need to import certain foods from other regions in order to get the correct nourishment. Is that the case with you, Gaia, or can you access everything you need without such things?
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Hi Mike,
Hope you’re going well. I am so intrigued and delighted by all this discussion which has highlighted for me that we as a human species are still evolving to find our biological niche in the environment which we are now the main drivers in creating, and therefore what are possible choices for our survival and hopefully more than just that. At one point, hunter-gathering was the main survival paradigm, but that of course wouldn’t be the case for 8 billion of us now. When we moved onto agriculture and domesticating animals, that of course opened up a whole new world of possibilities of foodstuffs and for more people, and we are now on the cusp of another revolution in which the means of how we obtain our food and what we will be eating will change radically as the energy and climate crisis ramps up.
I think there will need to be mass migration from geographical places that would not be able to sustain the amount of population that they do now without our current globalised system totally dependent on fossil fuels. That pretty much means most of our Western population centres and all countries with extended winters–there just isn’t enough seals, whales, caribou, and fish left to feed those who are living in those northern climes. All of us, not just vegans, are utterly dependent on the great hand of energy to feed us, now seemingly abundant and always giving, but of course that is not so for the other 2 billion members of our species whom we are about to join in scarcity. So, perhaps we can say the ethical issues of meat eating is now secondary and even an indulgent diversion, when we know the true crisis is just obtaining enough nourishing food of any order. If we set aside all our denial, it is clear there will necessarily be a dramatic reduction in our meat consumption for the majority of the population who do not have access to field, forest, or waters to catch and kill their own. We don’t have to call this vegetarianism or veganism then, these are luxury terms when we have the choice, it will just be who gets to eat, what, and when.
I have embarked on my own self-indulgent journey a long while ago when I set the goal of one day living in a place where I may be able to try to live a more simplified (ha!) and self-sufficient (ha! ha!) life where I can grow all the food I need to eat and take care of my own energy requirements. How naive of me to think that just happens without the full might of every cog and wheel of our current energy mad society working in perfect order, just so I may have the privilege of “living off the land”. I am under no delusions that it is only a delusion that our family has found our paradise corner and will be protected in a bubble of communing with nature, enjoying luscious fruit dripping from the trees forevermore. But after all is said and done, it is still the best dream I have with the time and resources I am given, so I am giving it my all to manifest this reality, if I can.
It just happens that my body type and physiology as well as ethical perspective fitted well with deciding to eat foods of non-animal origin, which is another luxury for me as I no longer have to grapple with that choice but can focus on maximising its reality. It is far easier to grow and harvest foodstuffs to directly feed myself than to also grow and harvest enough fodder for any domestic animal which I aim to be a portion of my food. Even keeping chickens for their eggs requires quite a bit of grain, as many of you well know. We don’t even have to extrapolate on how much more input a dairy cow would need (and you need a bull, too!), yes, this might be possible on a sizeable family farm with lots of available labour, but for the general masses, milk would be a thing of the past once fossil fuels become even more scarce. Does it really take so much denial to realise this? So, unless you really have the means to produce your own, many people will suddenly find themselves on a more vegetarian or even vegan based diet, like I said, these are privileged terms we use now, but for the great masses of the rest of the developing world, it is just how they eat every day, for all their lives, and if they are lucky. There are many people in the world who only eat the same 3 or 4 foodstuffs every day, and yet they are alive as Homo sapiens as us and spin out their days as we do. In fact, most animals eat very similarly every day and thrive on what suits their organism best, maybe we have so much difficulty now is because we have created so many choices of items we can put into our mouths, of which so many do not actually have nutritional value. They are teases for our tongue and pleasure centres, but they are not food to sustain, build and repair.
I chose to make the “hill we will die upon” literally a sloped property with a creek boundary in the highlands of Far North QLD where we have a subtropical climate with adequate moisture and deep basalt soils. Once again, it is only fortune that allowed us to take this opportunity, and I see it as a very deep privilege that I hold with reverence to care for this land whilst I can. It is foreseeable that we can grow everything that we need to eat on this property, with a lot of physical labour, but it can be done–and this is even more possible because I am willing and ready and content to only eat what we can grow. Our main food calories will come from the myriad of starches that can grow here, there is an encyclopedic world of tubers (thank you, Campbell for getting me onto the Susannah Lyle books!) which are so much easier than grain to grow, harvest, and process. Pulses and other legumes are no problem, many thrive in the heat. And we should have plenty of fruit, if not exactly dripping from the trees, it should be regular and seasonal. Our secret weapon is that this is the bona fide land of the avocado–people are trying to give them away here and our 5 trees are starting to bear. I can easily live on avocado (I sometimes eat 2 a day!)
I know what you may be thinking now, what about Vit B12 and all the trace minerals and such? Well, this is an issue for all of us, not just those who don’t use a middle man (animal) to get these substances. I have found with experience that if you eat a naturally unprocessed diet (and I mean to include not overly washing your veggies and fruit), and also let some items ferment, you will receive a great deal of VB12 as it all comes from bacteria. It’s the bacteria that is in the meat that gives you the B12, interesting thought! And if you are eating lots of healthful fibre, your gut microbiome will be producing enough quantity of B 12 and other vitamins which are absorbable. This is how every herbivore gets their intake of these nutrients, they know the right foods for them and their body does the rest. The level of fibre most modern humans eat is only a paltry percentage of the intake of humans before the modern diet, and before the onset of many modern health conditions. It is the fibre, found only in plants stuffs, that really supercharges the gut microbiome, which is now understood to be an extension of our immune system, that which helps us differentiate and protect us from other.
Well, I think that’s enough from me to fill more than one plate, hope it gives more food for thought! Thank you all, for setting this table so invitingly and welcoming all to partake in this discussion.
Let us all enjoy our beautiful, nourishing, and delicious food!
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Hi monk,
I trust you’re enjoying a glorious Spring, and I can just picture the full flowering glory of your Japanese Cherry. My family in Tasmania tell me that this year the blossoms on the stone fruit trees have been especially spectacular. Whilst I am missing the show there, it’s more than compensation to see our mango trees in bloom, and oh the scent is deliriously intoxicating!
Those are very interesting thoughts, thank you for putting them out there for us to contemplate and “chew on”. I am quite curious that you and probably many others find veganism (even more so than vegetarianism) to be a form of religion, and the idea invokes a sense of forced righteousness that stems not from self-directed morality but something that is dictated by an authoritarian source–do you think this is related to your experience of adopting this “creed” in fervour being encouraged by certain personalities and then undergoing a disconnect? It seems that the idea of veganism brings on this comparison and many other counterpoints which may or may not be intended as argument, when in fact, no defence, explanation or justification is required. There are people who choose not to eat animals and by not harming another human being in their choice, there is no conflict and therefore should be no defence on any parties’ part. When I tell people that I don’t eat animals or anything that comes from animals (usually it comes up when I am not joining in eating), I am just making a statement. But somehow, this very simple choice of what one chooses to eat calls up a multitude of defensive postures on everyone’s part. This alone is very curious and encourages us to dig deeper. I know there are so-called rabid vegans who force the issue with whomever they can, but is their response to present their worldview, albeit in tiresomely assertive fashion, any different to the majority who eat animals and able to flaunt the dominant paradigm ubiquitously in our culture, can this not be considered a forcing to those who are not part of that? It is only because this is our dominant culture that we feel it is “normal” and not only normal, but “right” to eat animals, otherwise we would feel abhorrence to be confronted with evidence of that in all aspects of daily life. Can we consider this as the dominant “religion” and those who do not partake in the ceremony of animal eating as the “heretics” who need re-education, chastisement, and if necessary, ostracization? It all depends on which side of the lens we want to look through, doesn’t it?
It seems reasonable and obvious to me that there are three basic reasons we eat animals and their products in the modern day–tradition (dominant culture), taste, and convenience. It is the three-legged stool on which the custom stands–if any one of the legs is taken away, we would not be so easily following it. Whether or not animal products are healthy is an adjunct reason but not a requirement to uphold the habit; our initial reason for turning to meat as food wasn’t because we had a full understanding of nutritional benefits. For example, if we weren’t born into a meat eating culture and you were ostracised if you did eat meat, if barbequed flesh tasted revolting to human taste buds, if we had to hunt or raise, kill, and prepare the animal ourselves each and every time, then I think we can agree there would be far less consumption, and here I stress again in our modern times for the majority of the people of our Judeo-Christian cultural heritage. There are billions of other humans for whom meat eating is not traditional, nor particularly desired for taste, or accessible and affordable. What I am trying to suggest is that meat eating in our culture is not a prima facie condition without those pillars upholding it, and therefore, we should be open to other forms of eating as equally logical and effectual, even without the need for ethical consideration to support it.
Methinks that the death denial resides far more squarely in the camp of those who eat animals. Maybe I’m confused, is it denial of our own deaths that leads to avoiding causing death to another sentient being, or denial of the death of the being we will be consuming? After all, it’s clear that whatever we are eating was once alive, and now dead. I would say for myself that it is because I don’t deny death that I can appreciate what death means to another. The power to cause cessation of life is not something to be taken lightly, but I think the main issue is the power to cause suffering which far precedes and accompanies the finality. I think we have a definite suffering denial, and so we must if we can countenance our factory farming ways. I am not saying this in judgment; let us be honest and call it observable fact. If we consider ourselves to have a moral responsibility to another being, only denial can allow us to be the direct cause of suffering to one we know can feel physical pain, fear, anxiety, loss of freedom and ability to live a continuum of life that is instinctive and innate–especially to one with whom we have no conflict, that is, the chicken is not harming or threatening us, all the onus is on our side.
I have read through your points again, monk, and I believe you have painted a very convincing exegesis on why it is not only our ethical choice to not eat animals, but to treat all beings with the same respect we wish for ourselves. It is Ethics 101 that if we value our own lives, we can extrapolate that to see that the animal also values its life, regardless of how “similar” it is to us, each animal or living being is hardwired to live. Similarly, no one wants to be treated as a commodity or exploitation, especially when one can suffer at the hands of those doing the exploiting, and especially to the point of deliberately causing death. Maybe we can make more a meal of it (sorry!) by bringing in religious overtones, but frankly, I think the moral point has more than been made.
When it becomes known that I am vegan, the most common reaction (besides “how do you get your protein?!!” ) is “I couldn’t ever do that, I like my (fill-in-the blank) too much!” It is my usual policy to not say anything further unless asked, and I find it musing that I am not often asked why I choose not to eat animals. I have an answer at the ready in case someone wants to engage further, one that I believe encompasses my truth, and I always preface it with taking ownership for my choice and respecting others for theirs. “I wish to relieve suffering, that of the animals, myself, and the planet.” or sometimes another version “I do it for health reasons, the health of animals, my own health, and the health of the planet.” It is just a statement, not intended as a thrown gauntlet but I can understand if it’s perceived as such. As a thought experiment, what would you think if you heard that from me or another? What causes the sense of affront, even if slight, if that is what one feels? What is the root source of that emotion, if one can skilfully and sympathetically follow it back?
Thank you all for participating in this hall of mirrors thread. The further one looks, the more one sees that there is no one answer. Maybe just continually engaging in dialogue to tease out all our conceptions and inability to see another’s is the best answer we’ll get to understanding denial.
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The rabid vegans are definitely the ones turning it into a religion. There’s this joke that goes “how do you know if someone’s a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you” 🙂 For people in the vegan culture, stopping the vegan diet can mean loosing your friends. Some people build their identify around being vegan. It’s quite traumatic when they leave, similar to what people leaving cults experience. This is certainly not all vegans!.
I think the reason vegetarians/vegans often face a lot of criticism is because they put their ideas and arguments out there in public. And if there’s logical flaws etc. others will point it out. A bit like if you go around saying god is real, some people might say there’s no proof of that buddy. Of course there are also people that will just respond defensively and defend whatever it is they eat. There’s an idiom that it’s easier to change a man’s religion than it is to change his diet. I think if you’re going to put a point of view out there, people are going to challenge it.
One of the topics constantly debated in the field of anthropology is questioning what is a human norm vs. a cultural norm. I have a degree in anthropology and my main takeaway from that study was it is very hard to find anything that is a universal human norm. Anthropologists will look at historic/paleo evidence as well as current societies to build up a comparative analysis. What I can tell you is there is no evidence (that I know of) of any vegan or vegetarian societies in history or today other than the three modern examples I gave you. The oldest example of vegetarianism comes from the upper castes of Indian Hindu culture and has only existed for a couple of millennia (not a long time considering modern humans have existed for 300 millennia).
Your statement that eating animals is “modern day–tradition (dominant culture)” is categorically incorrect. That’s not an emotional position on my part, it is a position based on anthropological and historical evidence. Eating animals is the cultural norm for 300,000 years across all cultures, throughout our history, expect for the three exceptions I noted (and as far as I know, happy to hear of others if they exist). Based on the weight of evidence, eating animals is the cultural norm. As eating animals also occurs in other primates, related to us, and in ancestor primates, we can also safely assume that eating animals is a biological norm for primates. Modern day people might say we can survive without meat and so we shouldn’t eat it for other reasons, which I guess you could make a good argument for.
“There are billions of other humans for whom meat eating is not traditional, nor particularly desired for taste.” I doubt this can be correct. The only country on earth with a large vegetarian population is India (1.3b people) where only 40% of the people are vegetarian. From a quick search, I can’t easily see what the total number is world-wide, but it’s certainly not going to be a large % of the world pop
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Thank you so much monk for your thoughtful reply, I am loving the dialogue from which I am learning so much, including how to be more precise with my language and ideas, something I have a tendency to get away from me with my enthusiasm!
I’ll try to continue our conversation a bit more later, more gravel shovelling calls!
Hope you’re having a great day.
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Gaia you might like this book by Alice https://www.amazon.com/Crunch-Whole-Grain-Artisan-Crackers/dp/148192267X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366846159&sr=1-2&keywords=friedemann+crunch
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Success! We had a couple close calls when the shed threatened to tip over into the greenhouse, but we recovered with a come-along attached to the tractor. Tomorrow we move it to new location with a proper foundation that won’t rot this time.
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cute doggos! good work
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They are cute but are useless as working dogs. If they were my dogs I would either train them to earn their keep or stir-fry them to reduce my CO2 emissions. 🙂
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Cool. The rustic shed has great potential to be a very inviting tiny house on wheels. Thanks to your skill and of course our friend the hydrocarbon, the shed has moved house! It is pretty amazing to see whole houses being moved in one piece.
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Canadian Prepper made a funny video about denial – if you need some LOLz
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That was funny. It’s easy to forget how broken our world has become.
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A few years ago, a reader asked for my opinion on eating animals. This was my answer.
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Following is an article by Pentti Linkola titled “A Glance At Vegetarianism”:
So many passionate opinions float about vegetarianism, that tackling it may well equal to poking a bee hive. But the subject is too important to pass in ecological thinking. And besides, calculations of ecological balance an d saving recommendations raise anger originating from bad conscience on whatever the area of life.
But let us examine vegetarianism first as a question of health. A perceptive expert on the field, Leena Vilkka, recently described an international vegetarist conference in Juha Rantala’s small Elämänsuojelija-magazine [Guardian Of Life], and told that the health effects of vegetarianism were on the forefront there.
By his build, teeth and bowels man is certainly not a carnivorous predator, and not in any case a pure herbivore. Biologically man is an omnivore, like the bear, badger and rat are.
It is an equally simple truism that a doer of strenuous physical work (like the writer of this), whose life-lasting health problem is the battle against threatening thinning, cannot manage with “grass and salad”, but more like has to strive to get enough high-calorie animal fats.
But, but… Man’s ways of living change, change even so much that the natural biological essence of man becomes questionable. The doer of modern mental work is at its purest a so thoroughly different being from a ditch digger or saw-wielding lumberjack, that these can be seen as part of the same species only with difficulty. Light vegetables and fish fit the new human type without question better than heavy, nutritional warm-blooded animals.
A similar leap in mind has to be gone through by the generation that had experienced war and depression (60 years old or older at the moment), who couldn’t comprehend in their early youth that any dab of meat or piece of fat could have been left uneaten, if one was just able to get hands on such – and who had never heard of vegetarians. Also we elders have to accept now that the new population must “play with food” for the sake of their health – unless they heal their living habits, which is then a much more complicated matter.
But first of all, the problem of man’s sustenance is even still quantitative and not qualitative. One must be capable of eating not too little or too much. What one eats is less important, as long as one doesn’t swallow sharp shards of glass or badly bent nails.
Leena Vilkka lists various vegetarian diets: 1) vegetables, milk products, eggs and fish, 2) the latter but no fish, 3) no products of animal origin in nutrition, 4) a diet of living food, no dead ingredients in it, 5) a diet of solely fruits, 6) veganism: nutrition as in the third entry, no animal-based materials in clothes, medicine and the like.
Reasons for these choices may base not only on health, but also animal protection and ecology. Those of animal protection represent high ethics that must always be valued: an animal must not be killed, suffering must not be brought upon it nor must it be imprisoned to an environment incompatible with the animal’s value.
These factors are hard to shoot down, especially so that a vegan would be assured. Hunting and fishing are man’s primeval livelihood, basic humanity. I, for example, fully agree with this. Yes yes, says the vegan: the slave institution was man’s pristine culture and form of economy… It has been, or is, old tradition and custom in many cultures to burn too wise women in pyres as witches, to force little children to full-day work, to mutilate genitals… What about wars and tortures, then, they are fundamental humanity if anything? And so approved without objections?
I admit it is respectable and excellent in the vegan ideology that the animal’s absolute value is generally noticed, that these great questions are contemplated upon. Even something positive new does shimmer in the atmosphere of our period of horrifying distress!
Nevertheless, there are many counter-arguments. For starters, I’d put my marginal note to that subsection of animal suffering. To me, cattle glows with satisfaction on pastures, and similarly I experience, seeing with eyes and hearing with ears, the happy chewing and mooing in a wintry, warm cowhouse. Besides, creamy full milk is the most divine of nature’s gifts to me, the pinnacle of my life’s pleasures.
Of course, a modern yard byre is even more of a paradise, and certainly the cowhouse is only a winter home. It is obvious that the long summer (here from the beginning of June to October) is spent outside on forest- and meadow pastures. The ban on keeping animals inside summertime should be one of the first articles in the animal protection law. And I certainly agree with every vegan and animal protector about the cage-growing of fur animals and poultry.
I think the taming of domestic animals was one of the most splendid inventions of mankind, if not the only brilliant one. I’ve gathered that the vegan generally accepts pets – even though they don’t live a fully natural life. But I continue the list with the bovine, horse, pig, sheep and chicken, without which human life would be unspeakably poorer at least here in the arid North – poorer than without, say, music, art or books. I don’t suppose even a vegan argues that domestic animals should be kept – with what resources? – without any compensation; meat, milk, eggs, wool, leather, work effort? A strict vegan does demand that these animals were not at all. Would cows, horses and sheep vote in the favor of this decision?
I’ll yet put an interjection here for vegans. Many of them do not even attempt to persuade the whole population behind their ideology; do not strive towards rooting the economy of domestic animals. But the vegan has chosen his own way to protest against the cruel forms of performance economy. And surely there is a tremendous difference whether it is protested against the gigantic McDonald’s- or beef cattles of the former virgin forests of Brazil, or against a Finnish small farm, which few cows are almost like family members and calves named after children – even though they will be slaughtered eventually, ending their rather comfortable life.
Vegetarians think that their strongest ecological argument is that when grain and such vegetable nutrition is changed to meat, man’s food reserves drop down to a tenth. One truly encounters hopeful thinking that a multiple population could be provided for on the globe with grain, resigning from meat production.
That line of thought is anyhow altogether unsustainable ecologically. First it must be noted that large areas on earth are suitable only for the growing of cattle fodder, and through it for producing meat and dairy products. Even in Finland approximately the area north from Jyväskylä-Vaasa would be marked off from notable production of human sustenance – when also game and fish would be boycotted by vegans. Ecologically that case would outstanding in itself, when it was held to the ecological basic principle that the population of every major region have to produce their own food. It would be admittedly brilliant if Central and Northern Finland would be left without human settlement, for binding carbon and producing oxygen. Though, I’ve understood that vegans do not want this.
That whole vegetarian plan begins from a completely wrong end and grounds certain destruction. All powers must be focused, not on increasing food reserves, but for the suppression of the population explosion and – according to the deep ecologic principles of Naess – decreasing the number of people. If the globe’s population is first grown with grain nutrition, we end up in a really wretched circle.
In the short run, hunger as such isn’t the worst bottleneck in the battle for the preservation of man, even with the current level of food production. At least for now there are the elements of other ecocatastrophes to deal with, brought by the large amount of people and their way of life; disruptions, collapses and depletions, pollutions and emissions, desolations and pavements at earth, water and air. Hunger is seemingly in control perhaps for some time. But the horrid strain of rebuking hunger is that there are huge badly not self-sufficient populations here and overly self-sustaining peoples there. And the massive transportation of food even to the other side of the world means a terrifying increase in transfer equipment, route networks, construction of storages, harbors and airports, and energy usage.
Then, that overt self-sufficiency is based on effective agriculture strung to its tightest, which will unavoidably lead – and not so slowly, either – to the depletion of soil, field erosion and crashing of production. Maintaining the production capability of fields comes evermore desperate if cattle manure is left out of the equation. The advantage of increased field acreage, which is given by releasing them from growing feedstuff for meat animals, will be transient.
The worst thing is that population growth along with its all emissive and deserting effects, caused first by moving to breadstuffs production, will quicken the climate change. It leaves vast areas of cultivation out of order – both when coastal plains submerge in sea and the earth’s drought zones move over the most lucrative of granaries, like climate prognoses tell.
Decimating or shrinking the huge masses of cattle would obviously help the ozone dissipation of the upper atmosphere in regards to methane gas. Destruction of the ozone layer is however the only grave problem of ecocatastrophe that is estimated to be surmountable anyway.
There are also other weaknesses in “the ecology of vegetarianism”. Many very unproductive and poorly nutritional vegetables demand immoderate acreages for cultivation. In fact, only few vegetables are sufficient (peas, beans, cabbages), and few fair (grains) as main nourishment.
Some of the most witting vegans have noticed the severe error in the ecological balance of vegetarianism, that food imported from faraway countries and continents is eaten. They strive to either fully, or as domestic food as possible, and call themselves fennovegans. I have a funny memory about this subject from the last summer. I was conversing with a young farmer, Antti Ilola, at my home village, who began talking about vegetarianism. He was quite knowledgeable about vegetarianism, but was wondering what was the meaning of the term “fennovegan” he had snatched from somewhere. I explained the origins of the word “fennia”, and the principle of nutrition’s ecological nativity. Antti thought for a while and thought then that it too will lead to expensive carriages; shouldn’t that food be wholly produced at one’s own farm. And instantly came up with a name for these truly orthodox people: hemmavegans! So, in honor of Antti Ilola, I would like to complement the aforementioned list by Leena Vilkka: 7) fennovegans, 8) hemmavegans.
We have yet to touch another pivotal principle in addition to ecological balance: cherishing the diversity of nature. Lets take an example from own country’s nature. A very large part of Finnish fauna and flora are part of a biocenose born during thousands of years, which prerequisite for life is the soil shaped and fertilized by domestic animals. Small-scale human settlement and agriculture based on home animals has hugely enriched nature at a time. Now all this falls into ruin as large domestic animals disappear.
A field of crops, a plain growing wheat or barley, even underdrained and doped with pesticides, is by far the poorest habitat of our plot of land. Its population is many times more indigent in regards to both species and quantity than even the centrum of a metropolis. A friend of nature is hardly ever a vegan, as fine and noble the principles of veganism are from one point of view.
And is anything else fitted into human life, other than eating? Is there room to consider man’s aesthetic world of experiences? If there is, I shall ask, is there a sight more dreadful than a torn open grey-black crop field of September-November or April-May? And is there a cultural landscape more delightful than a green grass lawn and meadow pastures, on which motley bovine cattle, horses and sheep walk about and frolic? Or is there a more lively yard than one where smart and inventive chickens potter freely? At last: if the pig (undeniably the worst fellow by its ecological balance) is removed, sheep is kept for wool, chicken for eggs, cow for dairy products and the horse perhaps as a steed, what shall be done with an aging animal and all bull calves and rooster chickens? A natural death by old age or an injection by veterinarian, and then into a hole? What ecological balance or nation’s economy could withstand such squander of nutrition? When all attempts to avert ecocatastrophes fall down, in the future, very soon in fact, we have to cancel the taboo of using human flesh – whether this destiny is arrived at by temporarily moving onto vegetable sustenance or through the traditional economy of mixed food, which prevails nowadays.
Under the following link you can find his only book translated into English called “Can Life Previal”
Click to access Pentti%20Linkola%20-%20Can%20Life%20Previal%20%282011%29.pdf
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Thank you, required, for sharing that essay. I can sense the author’s intention to take account of the bigger picture (or shall I say the whole platter) of a topic only we human need thinking and wondering about. Every other animal on this green earth knows what to eat and how to get it for themselves! Hope you’re going well and enjoying a good harvest season.
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Hi Rob, that was very well presented and I enjoyed digesting your thoughtful and balanced offering. I join you wholeheartedly at the table with thanksgiving for whatever sustenance is before us, and all the more blessed if it is our own choice which assumes we have an abundance to choose from. If only more could experience that comfort and assurance! As we have all worked so hard to un-deny, that cornucopia will only be more equally shared when there are less to go around, and expressly, less of those who already had more.
I am getting used to sore muscles, and the catch-22 is the more one works, the hungrier one gets, so the more one needs to work!
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Sounds like you reached more or less the same point as I did. After watching Robert Lustig’s talks, I realised I needed to eliminate sugar from my diet. We tried the Body Ecology Diet, for a while and that got me off sugar (as the refined combination of fructose and glucose, without fibre), almost completely. It was hard, as the Candida albicans died in me. But I came out the other end not really missing sugar at all and finding sugary foods far too sweet for my liking. So I don’t really cheat but I do have the odd sugary food, preferring the less sweet stuff (I make chocolate and jam without sugar). Anyway, I ended up more or less where you are but I do like to have some fermented food each day, also.
On the ethical question of vegetarianism, I note that it’s an arbitrary cut off point regarding which species to eat and which not to eat. Indeed, some vegetables are eaten still alive and seeds are a potential life being snuffed out. I think the arbitrary line is getting more and more blurry as we learn more about the life of plants.
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I need to work harder on sugar. I am good at avoiding the obvious baddies like soft drinks but still enjoy a chocolate chip cookie.
I love fermented sauerkraut and eat it most days.
I did a bunch of reading on fasting a while ago and concluded it was good for us. Did not have the will power to do regular long fasts so I now do a mini 16 hour fast every day by skipping breakfast.
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Yeah, I like sauerkraut too and often make it when we have a surplus of cabbage, but I need to eat more of it. My main fermented foods are coconut yoghurt, milk kefir and water kefir (a quite different COBY to the milk one), which I definitely do have every day.
Yeah, fasting is good. I found it eased the arthritis in my hands. I often do the same fast as you but want to try a multi-day one, though my BMI is quite low (maybe 19, last I checked), so I have to be a bit wary.
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If every new day is unprecedented is it still unprecedented, or is chaos now normal?
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This Dr. is influential and has flipped on mRNA now calling it “the greatest miscarriage of medical science we will witness in our lifetimes”.
Our leaders need to burn.
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Everyone else is speculating so I might as well add my guess.
Democrats will lose if they don’t get the price of oil down and Neocons don’t want Russia to have leverage in upcoming peace talks so blow up Nordstream to crash Europe and drop demand for oil.
Other ideas?
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Ilargi thinks it’s those nasty Polacks. Need to change my name.
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2022/09/smokin-a-pipeline/
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John Helmer at Dances with Bears states affirmatively that the Nord Stream sabotage was the Polish special forces’ doing, with outside help. Who knows, maybe Victoria Nuland piloted the submersible.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/09/the-bornholm-blow-up-repeats-the-bornholm-bash-poland-attacks-germany-and-blames-russia.html
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Very interesting, thanks. Got a feeling my ancestors may pay a painful price. Those goddamn Europeans sure like to fight amongst themselves.
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Thank god for Joe Rogan.
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Yeah, that was a good, concise piece that takes history from the fall of the USSR to February of this year in Ukraine. A longer dive would have followed the rise of Russia over the last 1000 years, the history of WWII and Russia’s winning the war over the Nazi’s (whose colaborators are now in control of Ukraine) and how Ukraine was a “put together” conglomeration of USSR politics. If the U.S./Western populace only understood what Joe has on this podcast maybe we could step back from nuclear Armageddon?
AJ
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Trend is very bad. Wondering how Russia will respond to NS sabotage?
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Sorry, could only watch a few minutes. I think that if you have a certain frame of mind on this, you’d love it but I don’t think Dave Smith was making much of a case. At least he did say that he was against the invasion, which is good.
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Good interview today with Nate Hagens. He’s really getting his great simplification (aka overshoot collapse) story smooth and polished. Nothing new here if you’re short of time.
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Can population growth proponents defend their position with logic. Check out this doozy copied from LinkedIn by a “sustainability consultant”.
“After two years of official narratives being inaccurate or completely wrong on most things, it’s clear that those narratives are to support an agenda, not to form good policy.
The UN says the Earth’s population will soon reach 8 billion people.
Here’s what 8 billion people standing 3 ft. apart in a grid (3 ft left to right, and 3 ft front to back) would look like. It’s a square only 81.75 km each side.
The global average birth rate is already unsustainably low and in decline. If food supply and scarcity of resources were the problem, we wouldn’t see such wastage, unsustainable production practices and the current push to centralise everything.
It’s very likely that what you read or see in the media is sponsored by people who stand to benefit from you believing their narrative, not factual or balanced information.”
To which I said:
“What a stupid thing to post. How about showing the actual footprint of each human: house, roads, mined area, farmed area, distribution, entertainment etc. etc.
Anyone that thinks a hockey stick can be sustainable has questionable judgement”
[I include a graph of world population over time]
And this is the diatribe I get back:
“That fails to take into account for the decline in fertility and drastic decline in birth rate in most countries which you won’t hear about in news or published media, hence the point about the mainstream narrative being inaccurate. Worth noting also that Michael E. Mann’s “hockey stick graph” upon which many other studies and even policy is based was found to be fraudulent. He couldn’t explain in court what the basis for his calculations was.
The push to reduce the population is exceptionally irresponsible and the solution is definitely not centralisation of everything using long and complex supply chains. The established narrative serves monopolists, not common sense.
An elderly, non producing global population with a productive population only a fraction in number is totally unsustainable.”
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Good on you Monk for trying.
That ignorant person will probably be among the first to say we need to go to war to secure the resources they are entitled to when the SHTF.
Don’t like a lot of my species.
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Wow, that was quick. A little scarcity and Europe’s right back to its default warring state.
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https://blogenkiops.wordpress.com/2022/02/25/twenty-years-on-a-tale-of-two-wars/
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It’s interesting to wonder why otherwise intelligent analysts, like the Duran, are struggling to explain why the US would destroy (or help destroy) the energy infrastructure of a loyal friend like Germany.
But if you then ask, “what don’t the analysts understand?”, and realize they are in denial of overshoot, the onset of a terminal decline in energy supplies, the end of economic growth, and a new world order based on a zero-sum game, then their confusion makes sense.
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You might all enjoy this interview; Gail is brilliant as ever. Special mention at the end where Gail touches on believing in life after death as the thing that gives her hope
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Thanks, I admire Gail’s honesty and humility.
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Steve Cutts today with a prescient new video on the uniquely clever but unwise reality denying fire ape whose main competitor is its own species.
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Here is the speech Putin gave today translated word for word in case you’d like to hear what he actually said, instead of what you’re told he said.
Our moron western leaders are going to be REALLY pissed.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465
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Read the speech. Logical, but maybe a little too nationalistic for my tastes but you can appreciate where historically Putin is coming from. Nothing I can see ever suggests that Putin is aware of overshoot/collapse issues but that doesn’t surprise me either, as no leader seems to understand or acknowledge that. The immediate future for the war doesn’t look good for the west. Too bad we are led by the stupid or brain dead. I’m not sure Biden could even READ this speech and understand it (whereas I’m sure his puppet masters can read it and NOT understand). Sad state of the world.
AJ
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I agree with you.
I’m worried about the escalation trend and the determination of both sides not to back down.
How will the loser respond when reality become clear?
Blowing up pipelines that could have kept friends functioning for a few more years suggests we have lost our minds.
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There were suggestions by Colonel Douglas Macgregor (whom I respect) that Zelenski has been hinting to Ukranian media (not reported in the west) that he is assembling a group of experts/technical people to put together a dirty bomb (nuclear). So, is this the next step? Zelenski must know he is losing and that the game is soon to be over. Desperation moves – Martyanov says, Bellum omnium contra omnes (Hobbes).
This is how we will end.
AJ
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Wow. NS destruction makes me believe anything is possible now.
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Read the whole speech. It was pretty good. He made some good points and it’s pretty ominous what he thinks the US’s next steps will be. I think he’s correct that the US is happy to throw Europe under the bus. It was interesting to see he didn’t call out Germany, which makes me wonder if he thinks the Germans will switch sides at some point.
There’s obviously propaganda in this speech as well. For example, Russians are not innocent when it comes to colonising. The way the state treats non-ethnic-Russians is questionable. And he’s a bit of a hypocrite pointing the finger at Western elites for stealing wealth from the common people, when he and his mates do a pretty good job stealing wealth from the actual Russian people they pretend to care about.
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Did not notice your Germany observation. One theory is that Germany was working behind the scenes to do a deal with Russia and the US responded by blowing up the pipelines to prevent a new alliance. Smells plausible to me.
I visited Germany once in the 00’s and toured some of their factories. What struck me was how proud they are of their expert industrial skills like high precision metal machining. All of that goes away without affordable natural gas and I don’t think German citizens will allow their industry to fade away peacefully.
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Nate Hagens today explains that climate change is not a problem.
Climate change is a symptom of human overshoot.
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Every leader needs an enemy to distract his tribe from his own limitations, and in recent years, limits to growth.
No leader is strong and wise enough to say there is nothing we can do expect be grateful for what we have and prepare to make do with less.
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Hi Rob and friends, what a mess but our own mess. Some days I can’t shake the feeling of overwhelm even with single-minded efforts at physically trying to do something, even anything, to counter in my own small way, the free-fall we’re undergoing. I am trying not to be despondent, but I feel weary and apprehensive of each day’s news which brings us ever closer to what we know is already here.
Today in our community here there is a huge rally/meeting protesting a proposed local windfarm, one of the largest to be built. I am not attending, it’s not my fight and there’s work to do on the property which will soothe my heart much more. I know it won’t happen anyway, with our energy and economic collapse happening all around us now. Of course no one wants their own backyard destroyed, but now we know a little of how people in other countries feel to have toxic waste dumps decided upon them. Did we ever stand for them? Is this our payback? That’s my main thought. What we have sowed, we are now reaping, is that written into the universal laws?
It doesn’t matter if world leaders can’t say what it is truth and own up to our responsibility for that. We can, and we can choose to live the remainder of our days by it. That’s always been our superpower, and if not now, when will we activate it? To amend your words, I am grateful for all the days of my life and am prepared to have less, and still be grateful.
I think that one of strategies left to save us from nuclear doom is for China to step up to the plate and cause the West to be fighting on two fronts, of course we must be ready for immediate, absolute and total economic collapse, but that is already happening. We shall see in the next months or maybe even weeks! Things are unfolding faster than a toilet paper roll nearing its end. Sorry for that analogy but it goes well with SHTF bigtime.
Thank you everyone for being here and part of this timeline. Thank you all for everything you’ve been and done to express your unique life, and for taking care of your families, friends, community, and our planet in whatever way you have given. I am honoured to have shared this time of awakening and reckoning with you, and hope we may walk a bit further down the road together.
Namaste.
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Lots of love back to you too Gaia.
I’ve been ill (nothing serious) and stuck indoors the last couple days and have spent too much time following world news. It’s all crazy making. Hope to get back to the farm tomorrow. Work there makes me feel better.
I do get a small amount of comfort knowing there are a few wise people with huge and growing followings, like for example, Joe Rogan. See next comment below for a wonderful episode.
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Thank you Rob for staying the course through these now even more desperate times. You and all friends here are a great inspiration and you should know how much it means to have that encouragement and strength which we share with one another. I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better, nothing like sleep and fasting to give the body a chance to re-boot. Hope it’s a sunny day tomorrow on the farm to boost the spirit, too. I would have added boosting Vit D but by now at your latitude you should be on a supplement, at least 2000U daily. But you already know that!
I look forward to listening to the whole Joe Rogan podcast. Your curating the best of the best helps deflect the worst of the worst. I found myself totally in sync with Putin’s address, how strange that I feel in somewhat camaraderie with the leader of Russia, but that is my truth now.
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I empathize with you Gaia. My family thinks I am crazy for agreeing with Putin. My wife is in deep denial about all overshoot issues. It is depressing as she constantly tries to reinforce the meme that I am misguided and selectively read/listen to only one view (doom, overshoot, war). The only true view is the MSM view and we have a bright future ahead of us (sarcasm). Denial is so enticing – you can live your life with the assurance of better times ahead.
AJ
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Hi there AJ, hope things are going all right in the Pacific Northwest. I am thinking of you still finding the gap left by Lulu difficult to bear, and send you strength to continue to bear it.
I can empathise with you on your household situation having two diametrically different views of the current world reality. Although I can understand your wife’s view and maybe even some of the reasons why, I know it must be difficult and some days draining to find common ground surrounding those topics that neither one of you has to tip toe around. And yet you do your best to understand where the other is coming from, and I commend you for trying whilst staying true to yourself. Sometimes it’s easier when you can step back from family in their roles and relationship to you and just see them as another human being on this planet with their own ideas and viewpoints. The emotional charge comes from the expectations and judgments we have of our nearest and dearest, but that can go down quite a bit if somehow you can see the other person as just another one of 8 billion trying to make their own sense and way in this crazy world given the background and experiences they had. When I come up with disagreements with anyone that causes me some distress, I like to play a little mind game and ask myself if I had that person’s exact upbringing and life situation, could I guarantee 100% that I wouldn’t see the world just as they do? The answer is of course, no, and that helps close the understanding gap and makes it easier for me to accept their view as theirs and not as an attack on mine. Even if their reaction comes out like an attack, I can still own that I may have given that same forceful reaction if I were totally in their shoes, so the understanding and compassion really puts things into perspective.
I’ve been working on this for some time and it really has changed the way I feel and respond to a lot of things, it’s like I’m becoming more of a witness to human drama than being caught up in it. Anyway, it brings me more peace and a feeling of connection with others which I honour and crave for my own life’s meaning.
I know that there are many life experiences that you and your wife share that really solidifies the meaning of partnership over the years–having raised a family together is no small feat of loving dedication and commitment despite sacrifice and compromise which I’m sure both of you respect in each other. In these strange and uncertain times, that longstanding trust is still both your truest anchor and source of strength to face and deal with whatever challenges will come.
Go well, AJ and all the best to your family, too. It’s been wonderful to meet you through Rob’s blog and I hope we may have many more opportunities to share with and encourage one another.
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Your tips Gaia are excellent for maintaining relationships and reducing personal stress, but I’m not able to adopt them.
My thoughts include:
– You know I love you and have your back.
– You know I’m bright, well educated, and have studied the issue much more deeply than you.
– You’re not interested in comparing evidence to determine which view is correct.
– You ask me no questions to understand why I believe what I believe.
– You pressure me to do something that may harm my health and does not benefit society.
– Why exactly should we remain friends?
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Everything you say about your thoughts run through my mind daily. I know why I stay (old and lethargy has taken over?).
This site is one of my few respites from the illogical, irrational world collapsing around me.
Thanks,
AJ
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A few comments above I posted a YouTube clip of Joe Rogan with Dave Smith discussing the Ukraine war. I went back and listened to the whole episode on Spotify. It is superb front to back. They touch on almost everything important (except of course overshoot).
We desperately need a wise person, like Joe Rogan, to step up and lead all of us, not just one tribe.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6XMzIxQAmsHeYpL5WlxlJM
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Interesting observation by Wolf Richter. “Our leaders grew up in a time when deficits and debt didn’t matter.”
Now they matter because we’ve hit limits to growth.
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Liz Truss: “I do acknowledge that next time I need to better lay the groundwork.”
Nope, you need to study the relationships between energy, growth, and debt.
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I’ve been to busy to comment the last couple of weeks but thought I’d share a couple of links. The second link does a good concise job of debunking the cholesterol con.
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Both excellent, thanks!
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My Canadian government is running an ad every hour on television telling citizens they are now enjoying normal lives because the vaccines succeeded and that they should protect themselves from severe illness by regularly getting boosted because vaccine effectiveness fades with time.
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Seriously what is going on in Canada with your central government?
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It’s a very good question. When I step back and look at everything going on in the world it seems our species is going crazy, by which I mean crazier than we’ve always been. Canada has one flavor of crazy, the US another, New Zealand another, etc.
My best guess is that our instincts are detecting ecological collapse and scarcity.
Anyone have a different opinion?
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I feel like we are similar to Canada here in NZ, but our Govt hasn’t gone to the same extremes as yours. We definitely have a culture of wanting our leaders to take care of things and do all the thinking for us. We might grumble about rules we don’t like, but we’re not as rebellious as Australians or Americans I think. NZ often gets jokingly called a nana-nation
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Actually I just had another idea, I think there may be a loose correlation between higher total % of population having tertiary education and countries that had stricter / harsher covid-19 control measures. What do you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment
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Not sure. The rich countries do seem to have lost their minds more than the poor countries.
Do you have an idea why more education correlates with more covid insanity?
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Somehow related to university culture and post-modernism? Maybe also class politics? JMG argues the managerial class need to clearly signal their class allegiance since affluence is shrinking. The educated classes are in a game of musical chairs for wealth so they are incentivized to support the person above them and not to think for themselves.
Canada is the highest with 54% of the population having a tertiary qualification
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Hi Rob and monk,
Just to add this titbit which seems to fit here in the current discussion about the higher education and Covid. Harvard, arguably the most prestigious education institution in the world, still demands that all students need to have the full course of inoculations (that would be 3 shots, if not 4 for this winter) before being able to enrol, despite all the evidence to the contrary for their safety and effectiveness, especially for this young cohort. The staff are recommended to have the full course, but not a requirement above the first 2 shots. Many other colleges in the States are no longer mandating the shots (but they had in the prior year) but it seems that the Ivy League ones still do, interesting, eh? These institutions are bastions of the privileged class, and you’d think being a university there would be some thinkers in the ranks who would be able to come to their own conclusions that this requirement is without merit and some would have the means to bring it to legal question, but I suppose the lure of being able to attend such a prestigious university overrides objection. I have a few other ideas why those in the wealthiest class might be targeted with the Covid fear and entitlement strategy to keep them lining up for more shots, perhaps a bit out there but fits in with the Great Reset agenda. Too late in the evening to get into it but if you’re interested in my musings, you only need ask!
Cheers, and good night!
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There’s some very strange stuff going on. In the US I suspect covid is tangled up with Trump. Many people and institutions went insane when Trump was elected.
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If you enjoy listening to brilliant biology minds like Nick Lane explain how life works then you will love this interview with Michael Levin.
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I finally finished listening to this podcast. I will agree that Michael Levin is interesting, but I think there is much he is wrong about. I think his perspective on biochemistry, evolution of life, and consciousness are completely wrong. It would be interesting to see him and Nick Lane discuss all those areas. I hate Lex Fridman and will not listen to another interview by him. Although he sometimes asks interesting questions I have the overwhelming feeling that I used to get being around people that are stoned (high on weed) when they ask questions they think are profound and to me appear stupid or come from left field. Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t stand him.
AJ
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I’m half-way through my second listen and still trying to form an opinion on Levin.
I also used to dislike Lex because he seemed to be a “I love everyone” phony, but I stuck with him and now think he’s weird but genuine. Also remember he’s much younger and therefore more naive than you and I. I do like the quality of his guests.
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I too like the quality of his guests. And you’re probably right about the age, he just doesn’t seem to have enough experience. Or be well read enough at times to be hosting this.
AJ
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Levin reinforced for me how complex and amazing life is, and how little we understand about how it works. Nothing jumped out at me as obviously wrong. What did you find objectionable?
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I thought the part where he discussed the basis of life outside of Earth as being possibly with other chemistries as naive. I agree with Nick Lane, that life probably has to arise in similar circumstances to what it did on earth and that life is probably not possible without carbon biochemistry. To suggest otherwise I think is naive and doesn’t understand how truly rare multicellular life is in the universe. Also his discussions about consciousness and awareness seemed to me to be giving too much credence to the “anything, can think or have some type of consciousness” idea. That’s why I thought a discussion between him and Nick Lane would be instructive.
AJ
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Got it. I agree. I was focused on other things he said.
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I wonder if youtube will pull it
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Excellent high-quality journalism.
Awareness seems to be spreading into the mainstream.
Our leaders need to go to prison.
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I read Illargi’s latest missive… they’re must be something about climate change or our response to it that he finds deeply unpleasant
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Haven’t read it but I think I get why so many otherwise intelligent people think climate change is overblown and/or some kind of WEF plot.
The problem is that almost all climate scientists destroy their credibility by calling for net zero by 2030 and other ludicrously impossible solutions. Almost none understand the unique characteristics of fossil energy and how it keeps 6+ billion people alive and generates all of the wealth most people want more of.
If climate scientists do not understand something so basic its perfectly reasonable to assume they don’t have a clue about anything else.
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Yeah but I still find it surprising that Illargi is a climate skeptic. He’s well read.
I think the science behind climate change is sound and it’s not hard to debunk many of the claims made by Illargi in his latest essay. I think Illargi is in denial of an unpleasant reality.
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Elon responded to angry critics:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/blue-checks-diplomats-bots-go-ballistic-over-elon-musks-proposed-russia-ukraine-peace
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US Col. Richard Black says motive, means, and a public statement of intent all point to the US.
Imagine if a close friend destroyed your means of survival because you were thinking about making a new friend.
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First Russell Brand I’ve watched in months. He puts together a pretty good case too. A warning that he’s a bit cringey at times.
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Thanks, I know Brand is popular but I can’t stand his style.
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Sadly his message is probably not getting wide enough coverage. I have the MSM on every night in the background and have to mute it because the nonsense/bull shit is too much to stand – “Ukraine is winning, Russia is on the retreat, etc.” Not one word of how Ukraine is a Nazi ruled country that started this war in 2014 and is pushing the West to the brink of nuclear conflict. The masses are in for a big surprise when Russia takes off the gloves. Hopefully we survive.
AJ
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Interesting thread by Erik Townsend.
He doesn’t say it, but it seems to me we are witnessing post-peak oil.
OPEC is producing less than existing quota due to depletion of low-cost reserves. By announcing a new quota closer to what they are actually producing they may cause the price to rise for a while making it easier to continuing producing at the new lower quota.
As a side benefit, they extract some revenge on the white house before an election for blowing up NS.
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I would add that I think western leaders being “energy blind” as Nate Hagens calls it, or stupid and/or in denial as I call it, grossly underestimate the effect of energy shortages on European economies and social unrest as winter approaches.
It is wise for Russia to remain calm and patient.
https://bigserge.substack.com/p/politics-by-other-means
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New 2-hour presentation and discussion by Jack Alpert to the Canadian Club of Rome.
Have not watched yet but will soon. Quick scan suggests it will be nice to see Jack’s face and voice in a two-way conversation.
Jack’s a very rare bird with a full understanding of our overshoot predicament and unlike others, has not given up and is still trying to find a technically feasible way out.
Who else on the planet can we name that’s in this group? Maybe Korowitcz and Hagens except they avoid discussing the second most important thing to focus on: population reduction.
Nobody discusses the most important thing: our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.
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Hello Rob, hope you’re feeling as bright-eyed and bushy tailed as your usual self, it certainly seems that your mojo and energy are back from the wave (and editorial content) of recent posts, nice to see!
I’ll try to set aside some time to listen/watch both Jack Alpert’s and the lovely Ms Harris’ offerings; I’m sure both will be stimulating in different ways.
I’ve been thinking about MORT more since we’re hopefully going to have a Nate and Dr. Varki discussion soon; I’ve found that it’s always good to be prepared for class to get the most out of it.
The thought that stands out for me is that if we are genetically evolved to deny unpleasant reality, then isn’t everything that has happened in the history of the human race the natural course of our species and we are facing our natural conclusion in total collapse? Just like the natural progression of a locust super swarm is total destruction of everything in its path and then eventual collapse of the swarm. We call that nature and have absolutely no power over it. It just happens that our species doesn’t just devour all plant matter in its wake but absolutely everything that we can use to further our superorganism, the human species is as parasite to the biosphere. But we are still a part of nature and there are natural laws that we cannot escape, even if we are blind to think so.
We are like fish living in water and don’t know it, overshoot and collapse is all around us but since we live in this predicament and have been for some long time now, it’s all we know and is as banal as the water. The plug has been pulled a long time ago but somehow the masses have just sunk lower and lower into the receding water believing it’s still a full tank. The very few who have somehow escaped this genetic tendency of denial of total endstage reality are the mutants–we’re the anomalies that prove the rule. For no matter how much we preach and teach, the true members of our choir remain infinitesimally small. And even if there are a few more recruits at this pumpkin hour (that’s midnight), effectively it’s far too late and the denial mechanism has already long served its purpose by promulgating ever more denial with succeeding generations of Homo sapiens, to the tune of 8 billion denial-crazed specimens of varying strengths and flavours depending on what we need to deny at the time for immediate survival.
But it’s not all bad, after all, it’s our denial gene (and fossil fuels) that has allowed us to spring forth like gods to hold total dominion over this planet, but once that spark has run out, so does our magic, the genie will return into the lamp, forevermore. We may still exist as a species but most likely scattered to the four winds and in much diminished fashion, not that it’s a bad thing except for the exceptional suffering it will take to get to our new balance point. It took denial to get us to our apex, and it is also our in-built doom. That appeals both logically and emotionally. The clock of our species’ brief but blazing sojourn truly has struck twelve; we are hearing the bells toll out now and inevitably there will be the final reverberation. Many species got less time from go to woe than we, and none conquered the biosphere (and we got Bach!), so why should we bemoan it an unfair trade?
And it has occurred to me that we who haven’t been totally blinded by denial have a critical role to play now that has nothing to do with stemming the tide of doom. Perhaps our role isn’t to fight to change what is occurring (and it looks totally futile in any case) but only stand as conscious (now I am trying to tie in your dream girl’s schtik) witness to all of our species, because without an opposite viewpoint as a foil, no reality really exists, for who can experience anything when there is no difference to experience? We are the ones who can see and understand both sides and all the nuances in between, those in denial don’t even realise what they know or believe because they are the fish in their water. By our acknowledgment of the denial of the masses, we are holding the reality that has been all our responsibility. We can make a space in our consciousness and thus the universal consciousness, for the fullness of being that is our unique offering as life. We can declare–This is Homo sapiens, warts and all–we have had our being here on Earth and it was good because it was so. If there is an ultimate consciousness, perhaps this is what would arise in awareness. Maybe a wise and compassionate thing to do now is akin to preparing for a dying beloved’s funeral, yes we should mourn what we have lost and to lose, but there’s more cause for honouring and celebrating all that was good and brilliant. We can accept our perceived foibles as opportunities for repentance whilst we still can hold these thoughts that elevate our collective humanity–it is never too late whilst we still have breath and beating heart to make reparation, starting with our own earnest desire to become our own highest and best and in relation to another, for their highest and best.
Am I making any sense? I have just re-read what I wrote and I don’t think I’m getting through what I’m trying to express but I thank all readers and friends for taking this time to share a while with me.
Now is probably a perfect time to tune into Jack Alpert’s latest contribution to the doomsphere, as reality check but also for any possible strategies to get us to our new homeostasis with more equanimity than what seems to be our current lot–famine, disease, war, all leading to traumatic societal collapse.
If all else fails to bestow meaning and peace, then we can always go along with the universal consciousness ideal, that all is consciousness and therefore physical reality is only one possible manifestation of such and we’re all going to be fine in the end because everything we thought was real is just consciousness potential.
I’m the subtype of mutant that sees both as equal contenders for my reality, what does everyone else think?
Go well and in a blaze of glory, you shining human beings.
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I think you hit many of the key nails on the head Gaia.
It’s a miracle that two brains evolved to have this conversation.
If there was not a single reader of this blog, I would keep writing just to bear witness to the universe. I guess we all have some form of reality denial. 🙂
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It’s lovely to be part of a miracle and since there are many brains connected here, it must be an even more supercalifragilisticexpialidocious miracle!
In fact, everything is just such a blooming miracle that I am overflowing with more than my share. I feel indulgent wishing to witness and be a part of more of it, for whatever may come, it’s still the only life we have and to finish.
I recall the first time I reached out to you with my musings using your Contact form as I was too reticent to launch into a public post–posting is something I never did before if you can all believe that! I had followed your blog for some time (another miracle to have found it) and like many others, felt this was closer to my tribe than any. Something shifted for me to want to make this connection; I was finally ready to join this band of un-denial earthlings in seeking, finding, and declaring our versions of truth. You encouraged me to spread my wings and gave me the space to fly. Being a member of this community has been a sort of homecoming, for home is where our hearts and minds feel most accepted and at ease. In my first communication to you, I likened our meeting in this sphere to two ships passing in the night, just to see one another’s light shine in the darkness gives hope and comfort that we are not wholly alone in this journey to a certain doom. That thought has only become more crystal in these past months, all of us here are generously giving of our goodwill to help one another navigate through these interesting times. We have created reference points for each other so we can know what we can know, so we may be what we may be. And that has made all the difference, these miracles that keep our lives afloat, piloted to calmer waters, and anchored to face the storms.
Thank you everyone for your courage in making it thus far, being a unique consciousness that ever bloomed this side of infinity. May you stay your self-charted course and always be guided by thousand points of light.
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Gaia,
I appreciate your views and comments. I’m not sure I always agree with them. I am far more depressed than able to have such equanimity as you in the face of our future collapsed state of affairs or extinction. I love how humankind has pushed the boundaries of understanding the true nature of the universe, it’s evolution, the nature of consciousness and the height of civilization. To see it all disappear in the blink of an eye is profoundly depressing to me. For humans to continue and become again the superstitious ignorant apes we were for all time before civilization is almost a fate worse than extinction. Admittedly that is probably better than extinction but not by much.
AJ
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AJ
I read a book once called Don’t sleep there are snakes by Daniel Everett. It made a lasting impression on me. Rob did a review of it as well a while back.
They live in ignorance but were/are very happy. We are well adapted to living a stone age existence and the piraha are evidence that we can live happy rewarding lives in the face of considerable suffering. They don’t eat vegetables either.
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https://un-denial.com/2020/07/07/dont-sleep-there-are-snakes-by-daniel-everett/
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Perran,
Thanks for the recommendation. I read Rob’s review of the book and about Everett. I’m sorry, sure I believe other cultures can raise happy, well-adjusted individuals, BUT that is no different than having a happy, well-adjusted pet. The Piraha are unaware of the universe, science, even the greater world in which they live. Ignorance is bliss? Maybe for them, not for me.
I aspire for understanding and awareness of how I (and this universe) came to be, why am I here?, what is the purpose of consciousness?? Where is the universe going? WHY? Happiness is somewhat ephemeral; the rational explanations of a self-correcting philosophy (science) is what I want.
We lack a true understanding of nature and probably don’t have the civilizational time left to find out the fundamental answers to WHY?
Like I said above, the Piraha existence is better than extinction, but not by much.
AJ
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I’m going to try to find time to watch this; thanks for the link. It’s good that some are still trying to find a technically feasible way out. I’ve been trying to come up with one for almost a couple of decades and have never come close. The only way out seems to be some form of collapse, the sooner the better. Some think that a resource based economy (aka the Venus Project) could work. I don’t. Some talk about degrowth to get to a supposedly sustainable sized economy. Seems far-fetched to me. Some put forward other ideas but even if one of them could hypothetically do the trick, I just don’t see governments and leaders world wide buying into anything that looks different from what we have today. Look at what world leaders have done for 30 years when confronted with just one problem, climate change. They’ve done nothing unless they see it as a benefit to growth (I notice the new UK leader just gave a speech confirming that growth is her top priority).
But I suppose there is a slim chance that there is an approach (I don’t like to refer to it as a “solution”) which most people and leaders can agree to.
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The people we’ve chosen to lead us can’t see reality and so everything they do is wrong.
The existence of high intelligence life (with an extended theory of mind) is so precious and rare in the universe that although the probability of avoiding its loss on this planet is vanishingly small, it’s still worth trying.
Most aware people disagree with me. I don’t care. I’m right.
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If you mean that delaying the extinction of our species is worth trying, then I agree but only in that it is worth trying to get back to a state of affairs where only natural mechanisms drive species to extinction.
I listened to the presentation, though not all of the questions. It’s an interesting exercise though, as one of the early questioners mentioned (and, I think, Jack agreed with), the chances of such a plan becoming reality are vanishingly small. Indeed, I think that chance is zero, partly because getting to 50 million people world wide may take longer than the lifetime of the hydro plants that are meant to power the new civilisation. If it happened much more quickly, then societal collapse would ensure that the plan could not be implemented.
You may have posted a link a while ago, Rob, but the presentation pointed me to another podcase of Nate Hagens, talking to Simon Michaux who will go into to minerals blindness, which is an important topic, so another one for me to listen to.
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I think I did post a link to the interview with Michaux and it’s superb.
I’m thinking about writing an open letter to Jack Alpert because I’ve been thinking there’s a better way to sell his plan that guarantees success even if we do not achieve the ultimate goal of retaining modern science and technology. If we reframe the objective as reducing suffering AND retaining as many of our good accomplishments as possible, then we succeed by reducing the population from 8 billion to 8 billion minus 1. Success reinforces success so maybe we can then build some momentum towards the ultimate goal. And we avoid our denial circuit kicking in to block any progress because our brain calculates Jack’s chance of success as zero. Maybe I don’t need to write an essay because I just said the whole thing in a couple sentences.
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Yes, Rob, that’s better. Much better. It’s the trying to retain a reasonably modern lifestyle that is the problem. Jack’s thinking that 600 million might be possible with a serfdom lifestyle is more realistic, except for the bit where we have to choose who are the serfs and who are the lords.
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In different phases of my life, I have been both a lord and a serf. Provided basic needs are met, I think I prefer serf. There’s less bullshit.
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Finished the Michaux podcast. Great conversation. Gosh, if he’s right (and I think he is) we should get a good idea of the failed green energy meme by the end of the decade.
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My eyes say the green agenda is failing now.
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I finished it. Don’t care for Jack’s presentation style, it sounded like he was reading from a dry text. I do like his conversation style. I thought he did a great job of respectfully debating and answering many tough questions. He has excellent command of a lot of complex information.
Pretty much everyone argued that his plan is impossible to implement. No one offered an alternative that wasn’t brain dead. Why did they bother watching the presentation? They should go to Maui for a vacation and not think about overshoot.
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Cool discussion on consciousness with Anaka Harris.
I read her book a while ago and didn’t buy into her idea that consciousness might be a fundamental property of the universe. But after watching the discussion with Michael Levin a few comments above I’m wondering if she’s just describing the idea in the wrong way. Levin makes a persuasive case that consciousness is an emergent property present in all levels of life including the single cell.
P.S. Anaka is my definition of a hot babe. Too bad she married that loser who thinks he’s brilliant and yet is blind to overshoot and won’t debate the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines.
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Rob,
I take back what I said about Lex. I sometimes hate his method of interview – it’s too conversational for me and appears almost stream of consciousness. But, if I overlook that, he is quite bright and if you remember that he is a AI researcher then his perspective makes sense.
Annaka is brilliant. I might (probably) disagree with her on many things dealing with neuroscience but without a doubt this is a “must listen” podcast. All the big questions: what is consciousness? what is perception? is there free will? is consciousness emergent or intrinsic in everything? If she ever does a podcast serries it will definitely be something to listen to.
As much as I disliked Donald Hoffman and his book maybe Annaka is right and they are talking about the same thing and she thinks his language is wrong/incorrect/??
I will probably read her book at some point. I will go back and listen to more of Lex’s podcasts.
Too bad that they are pushing the edges of scientific understanding of physics, the brain/mind, the nature of reality AND are unaware that we probably don’t have long till the collapse of civilization and science AND those questions/answers will be forever beyond us.
AJ
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Thanks AJ. I appreciate you letting me know I’m not totally crazy. 🙂
Send me a private message if you want help finding Annaka Harris’ audiobook or e-book.
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I love Ray McGovern.
Skip ahead to 1:25:46 for his brief presentation on Ukraine.
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Until recently I never thought about the influence US has over countries it conquered in WWII like Germany and Japan. The US extracted an unconditional surrender, forced them to create constitutions acceptable to the US, helped them rebuild their countries, and then retained a large on-site military presence to keep them in line.
This probably explains why Germany’s president remained silent while he listened to Biden state the US would destroy Germany’s pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine.
And why Germany remains silent after the US followed through on its threat.
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Merkel wasn’t silent when Trump imposed sanctions against Nord Stream 2. Maybe he got someone to follow through on his threat or maybe it’s just taken this long for his plan to come to fruition. We’ll probably never know. However, the pipeline was dead, anyway.
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Can you imagine China imposing sanctions on the US for building the keystone pipeline to Canada and then blowing it up when the sanctions failed?
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These days, I could imagine just about anything.
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Notice behind McGovern on the bookshelf a volume cover showing a man in a winter overcoat looking down at a river. That’s JFK and the Unspeakable by Douglass, 2009. Subtitled Why He Died and Why it Matters. It makes the case for US Intelligence State (CIA etc) being the architect of the assassination and other sovereign state gross and heinous crimes. And it hasn’t stopped! Today neocon war hawks run US foreign policy only this time there is no Kennedy stopping them. Read John Pilger, Ron Unz or Robert Scheer about who they are.
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How we’ll be smelting iron in 2050. I expect there’ll be a few supply chain problems for EV’s.
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Chuck Watkins has packed it in because he doesn’t like being attacked by angry strangers that are unwilling to civilly discuss the evidence and issues.
It really does seem like we are collectively losing our minds.
Today I was discussing our alarmingly warm and dry October weather with my neighbor, and we agreed the climate change trend is ominous. Then I said, unfortunately the risk of nuclear war seems higher. He replied, yes, we have to do something to stop Putin.
A couple days ago I ran into another neighbor when out walking. We got talking about climate change denial and then using it as an analogy he launched into a venomous attack on anti-vaxxers.
https://blog.enkiops.org/2022/10/08/why-im-shutting-things-down/
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Rob,
I noticed this too. It is truly sad that what he said has individuals threatening him and his family with physical violence. He was a rational voice about Russia. Not pro Putin but trying to understand the motivations of those on both side and trying to warn of the dangers of nuclear brinkmanship and how it doesn’t work – leads to escalation.
So sad.
AJ
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(it’s the last entry in his »sudelbuch«, 1935, befor commiting suicide)
a stairway: talking – writing – remain silent
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by Kurt Tucholsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Tucholsky
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Thank you for posting this, and you accompanying comment. I totally feel the same. Collective insanity. Probably another sign of collapse.
It’s a real pity to experience this: smart people with nuanced opinion are being shut down or must self-censor.
So, all we are left with are these binary rigid extreme cuts: vaxx/anti-vaxx, climate change solutionist/climate change denier, Putin hater/cheerleader, globalists/nationalists… (And I wanted to add libertarian/conservative. But this has become such a big ball of mud. Is it libertarian, liberal or woke? And has libertarian become authoritarian?)
All I’d love to do is speak my mind freely to confront world-views and either understand where I am wrong, or how the same reality can be seen/felt differently from different perspectives. But lately, all I get is epidermic emotional aggressive automatisms to some trigger words that prevent all possibility to lay bare hypotheses, information, beliefs and reasoning.
I have noticed that one of the hottest topic to address is probably the impact of modern mass-control systems on our collective actions. There is some kind of defense mechanism in place there.
At this point, I believe we should be shutting down the internet. Put a cap on innovation (nuclear, PFAS, mRNA and all). Plain and simple. But we are unable to do so ourselves (I wouldn’t be in this space otherwise :). So energy decline is a good thing, probably the only way out.
Once the distraction of material abundance is out of the way, local and horizontal communication will probably resume. Necessity is the mother of understanding.
In the short run, it is probably safer to shut up. But, as Mattias Desmet pointed it out, I fear there is a risk for collective insanity to run its full course, with horrifying consequences. I’d like to say: so be it. Only ash can fully stop fire. But this is both terrifying and saddening to me…
I apologize for the negative tone in this post. It is a good thing that life is both bigger and more resilient than we individuals… And so, even armageddon is not the end. So be it 🙂
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Well said Charles.
Something’s definitely in the air. I personally feel a lot of deep anger at our leaders for not making public health the top covid priority, and in the process destroying some relationships with friends and family. If I can extract some revenge on our leaders, I will.
Another sign of us losing our minds. I live in a small community on Vancouver Island. In the electoral district north of me one of the candidates running for municipal office has a campaign photo of him with a gun and a confederate flag. This is British Columbia, not Texas.
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Hey Charles and Rob – I wondered if the big outpouring of grief at Queen E’s death was partly to do with people subconsciously recognizing the end of an era. Monarch’s names are often used to define eras. QE2 “ruled” during a period of progress and growth. We are about to leave this period.
I thought people’s reactions to her passing were quite over the top. But maybe it was a normal reaction for our celebrity obsessed culture… people certainly lost their shit over Diana
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I don’t know. I do think she was a much better role model than most of our leaders today. Perhaps citizens long for someone they can respect.
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Geert Vanden Bosche today with a refined argument for why we are on a path to a self-inflicted health disaster in what he says will be his last video message because the stupidity of our “experts” is making him too crazy to continue issuing warnings for what should be obvious to any competent domain expert.
What I do I think? I don’t understand a lot of what Bosche is saying but I trust him more than my health authorities because he’s made a prediction in the past that came true, and he seems to actually care about public health. My leaders, on the other hand, have some unknown priority other than public health, and to date have got every single decision exactly opposite of correct.
https://rumble.com/v1n5274-it-is-5-past-12.html
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Perhaps he’s stopping because it’s really too late. Nearly 70% of the world population have had at least one dose, that’s 5 and a half billion people. I’d guess most of those have had at least 2 doses. So it does seem rather pointless railing against vaccinations at this point. Better to prepare for more than half the world’s population suffering severe eventual side-effects, including death. That will collapse civilisation just as surely as minerals shortage.
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Maybe, just like the great Paul Chefurka stopped talking about overshoot.
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/
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Stumbled on this idea which I am considering for reducing my energy consumption.
Use electricity to heat your home but can’t afford a heat pump?
Live in an area with humid winters?
You keep your house cool in the winter?
If yes to all then using a dehumidifier as space heater has a reasonable payback time.
http://www.iwilltry.org/b/heat-your-home-with-a-dehumidifier/
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Is this kinda like cooling your house in the summer by opening the fridge door? Seriously now, I’m not quite sold on this idea, having just gotten a small dehumidifier for the caravan, yes it does fan force some warm air but not too much and at 360W consumption, it would be a very weakly powered heater indeed, but still not insignificant in electricity usage. I suppose for a very small space (like the toilet/shower area of the caravan where the unit is) it would take the chill off the air and dry it out to 70% humidity well enough, but that’s not going to cut it for even a small room in the kind of winters in Tasmania and BC, I don’t think? Of course the bigger the dehumidifier, the greater the energy cost, but even so, the biggest freestanding units aren’t meant to dehumidify more than a few medium sized rooms. The greatest thing in a heat pump’s favour is that the units are hardwired so we get the lowest electricity tariff for it (at least in Tasmania), being a main form of heating, so that’s what makes it even more viable costwise. A dehumidifier doesn’t have that benefit. But when all is said and done, nothing beats small area heating like a woodheater, and there’s nothing even remotely as warming and just total sensorially pleasant as wood heat. I think if I had to live in a cold climate through winters I would first try to hibernate like a bear or hole myself up in a sauna, I see both options involve keeping still and quiet in a small space. Now if more humans did that on a regular basis, maybe we wouldn’t have some of our current troubles!
On another note, the bad cat was extra good today–alarm bells going off in Swedish birth rate data showing a consistent and significant decline in births since vaccine roll-out, and of course no-one in the health agencies is looking into it. El gato skirts the biggest elephant in the room by not quite coming out to say that this has to have been a deliberate agenda given what we know and can see so clearly now.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/worrying-news-on-swedish-birth-rates?utm_source=email
Rob, I know you would like a chance to tear limb from limb (like an angry bear awakened from the den) anyone who deliberately put us through this whole Covid nightmare, but still that doesn’t change the result that our population reduction manifesto is being furthered, just in a way none of us would want the responsibility for. I am still thinking that there might come a day when those of us left on the planet will look back at these years as the glory years, and sigh wistfully at the luck of those who died now being the luckier ones to have missed the years of firestorms and deluges, famine, war, rampant disease, societal collapse and aftermath. And then do we curse the ones who orchestrated this, or bless them for showing mercy?
It’s interesting also that several bigger profile activists in the Covid and geopolitical arena have recently decided the same course to stop publicly commenting, perhaps they are now focusing on preparations for this DEFCON ground zero time, and best to just slip away as quietly as possible into anonymity?
Hope all are going as best as can be, may the harvest days of Autumn stretch out kindly for those friends in the North, and those of us in the South may continue to hope for a gentle and eventually fruitful Spring. Our reversed seasons are each others’ hope for another turn around our Sun.
Namaste.
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The link I provided I think addresses most of your dehumidifier concerns. It’s not suitable for large areas, nor if you like things toasty. Under the right circumstances it delivers 50% more heat than the same amount of electricity from a resistive electric heater. I probably won’t try it because I don’t want the noise in my living area. I currently reduce my electricity use with a 17C setting (maybe 16C this winter) and a small propane heater and have a backup kerosene heater in storage. I may buy a heat pump next year.
If covid has a population reduction agenda I don’t think all the doctors and little health ministers that support covid policies are party to the plan. Which means they are stupid or corrupt or cowards and deserve our wrath.
I was thinking about what revenge might look like for me in practice. I think I would vote for Satan himself if he promised to put my prime minister and health ministers in prison for killing many people with their bad covid policies. It’s easy to understand how Hitler got into power after the middle class lost their life savings due to hyperinflation.
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You’re right, Rob, there is no excuse for everyone who was complicit in the debacle, whatever their level of understanding. The doctors and minor health officers could have and should have stood up for the truth, no matter what the cost to their livelihood and own personal and family suffering.
But, where does this spectre of guilt end? My husband took the first two shots as a measured response to the initial threat and then of course it became mandated to retain his University job. He teaches medical students, not clinically but in basic science but even so he is most definitely a cog in the medical system which has driven much of this narrative. He is not a stupid person, nor corrupt by any means, but yes, I suppose you can call him cowardly not to have resigned his job, firstly over the mandates, and secondly because he could have made that his statement that he no longer supports the medical establishment and his conscience will no longer allow him to benefit from it as his livelihood. He has remained silent, as with all his colleagues, whatever their views, because he is a human being who knows that without his job, we are nothing to this system and our family will be taken down by it. The most natural response is self-preservation, as uncharitable as it seems, because we know that no-one will come to our aid. I, too, am just as guilty and cowardly. As the partner of someone who is working to continue the current system, and I most certainly am receiving benefit. I should have made some kind of stand and declared my truth publicly, openly denouncing the medicos (from whom I broke ranks long before) and perhaps even pressuring my husband to quit his career. We may even have had to separate as a consequence of the unbearable stress over our shattered lives, leaving both of us (and my dependent mother) with even less power to maintain any kind of self-directed life. Should we all have gotten more serious than just attending weekend rallies and marches, endless posts on social media decrying the outrage, all in relative safety and comfort of our own anonymity and living rooms? Why didn’t we go into our communities health care centres and demand to have open debate with the doctors, chaining ourselves to the door until our concerns were heard and broadcast? Why did we not continue the stand-ins even to the point of arrest? Why did we not give up our ease and security to help protect the freedom and even lives of others? We have been furious at the injustice, but we cannot do more than rail from the sidelines. So, do we not share the same guilt as those who pulled the trigger? Of course, the quantity of blame is not commensurate, but law says we bear some responsibility once we know and do nothing.
How can I live with this? I cannot, so I turn to my opiate denial. I throw myself into my work and think that I am at least trying to leave this world a better place in the way I can, whilst I shirk that I do not want to confront because I decided I cannot. But I am guilty and now I know it and this I will take with me to the end of my life. But I cannot and do not blame my husband for what he has chosen to do, out of empathy for his own suffering and understanding that his choices include my own welfare. And thus, following onward from this thought, how can I blame any other for what they did or didn’t do?
Friends, if you can share any pearl of wisdom or comfort, I am most grateful. It is not easy to make a deal with the devil knowing that we all have the same shades of darkness and light. Maybe the whole point of being here is to become conscious of this.
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Thanks Gaia. I do not think less of your husband or anyone else that took the vaccine in the early days. There was reason to be optimistic because pharma hid the real data from us and there was reason to be a team player and to contribute to group health.
What really pisses me off about the medical “profession” is that they did not collect and analyze and act on public health data as we moved forward in time. Today here in Canada they are moving in the opposite direction and have stopped collecting data that shows their policies are wrong. That’s inexcusable and contrary to all medical ethics.
I hope I get a chance to vote for someone that will burn them all.
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From the el gato malo essay essay Gaia linked to above. I continue to respect the truth-seeking integrity of his work.
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Have you noticed that almost all of the truth-seeking overshoot aware commentators do not buy the official Ukraine narrative?
It seems a brain capable of seeing the reality and consequences of peak oil can also understand why Russia invaded Ukraine.
Kunstler, every once in a while, writes a good essay without (too much) partisan red/blue bullshit. I liked his essay today on Ukraine.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/you-can-always-dream/
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I beg to differ. Kunstler’s blog was not really an essay but an attempt to ridicule counter-narratives to his. Littered with attempts at dark humour. And the idea that Ukraine’s president called for pre-emptive nuclear strikes on Russia is surely nonsense – he’s actually said he’d rather not hear of talk of nuclear strikes as it can bring them closer.
Russia’s response to some damage to his pet bridge was way over the top and was always unlikely to deter Ukraine from defending itself or from trying to regain its territory, and likely to increase support from other countries. When it comes down to it, attempts to control the policies of another country which is democratic should always be condemned. 143 countries at the UN were right to condemn Russia’s attempted annexation of regions that weren’t even under its control (hopefully, all of them, and more, would regard the so-called referendums as a sham).
Taking Russia’s (Putin’s) side on everything is not truth seeking and nothing to do with overshoot. If you’ve noticed various blogs tending to support Russia, I think that’s more about wanting to disagree with any line that the MSM takes. This is particularly egregious with respect to current climate change and environmental damage.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what happens with Russia or any other country. The only issue that really matters is the predicament caused by overshoot of all sorts and that will affect every species on this planet including almost all people who are alive now.
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We disagree on Ukraine and covid.
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I think you mean COVID-19 vaccines, rather than the disease?
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I mean our leaders need to go to prison for harming and killing many people by:
– financing creation of the virus and then covering up their involvement;
– discarding 100 years of knowledge of how to respond to similar viruses;
– blocking safe & effective prevention methods;
– blocking safe & effective early treatment methods;
– pushing risk on young and/or healthy people that obtained no benefit from the vaccines;
– punishing people who refused a vaccine that was known to not prevent transmission;
– not adjusting policies as data on vaccine side effect harms emerged;
– hiding or not collecting public health data that threatened policies;
– implementing vaccine policies that encouraged emergence of virus variants;
– gaslighting and not supporting those harmed by the vaccines;
– destroying the reputations & careers of experts with opinions contrary to policy.
I’m done discussing covid with you. Take your opinions on covid elsewhere.
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I agree with a lot of that, Rob. And my opinions on the vaccine are shifting but I’m happy to avoid the subject here in future, if that’s what you wish.
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Good to see to see your opinions shifting on vaxs because you were a total twat about it on OFW. But end of the day Mike you have to live with the reality that you failed the intelligence test and took the vax. I don’t think there is a single person who refused the vax that regrets their decision. you have to live with yours and pray that it doesn’t end your life early.
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Thanks for your kind comment.
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Mike – Prez of ukraine has stated several times he wants to become part of NATO and stage Nukes there. He has also pushed the “global community” to consider first strike against the evil Russia.
Russia has repeatedly stated that it is in their constitution that they will only use nukes if they are directly attacked and their sovereign security is at stake. They also point out that the only country to use nukes did so without any threat to their country and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians unnecessarily. They would never do that, never have, never will.
Russia has not gone into Ukraine “unprovoked” nor is it an “invasion”. They have spent over 8 years going through all the legal channels to stop the genocide of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, tens of thousands killed, and moved into Ukraine in a fully legal policing effort to stop the killing and end the illegal invasion of NATO after the illegal Maidan coup by the west.
It is the US that has invaded to control the policies of another country which is democratic over 50 times in the last 50 years but I don’t hear you complaining about that.
Read; https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope. and get a clue.
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Thank you Jef for saying what I wanted to say, but better than I would have.
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Jeff, I’m not a fan of the US (which is not really a democratic country) and my opinions on the war in Ukraine have nothing to do with other countries. Any country is entitled to join in alliances that it chooses, regardless of whether I agree with such policies. Putin has certainly not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in the war, saying that they will use all means to “defend” their territory. I happen to agree that they won’t use nuclear weapons here but I wouldn’t say I’m certain about that.
I haven’t read about any genocide of ethnic Russians or any legal channels that Putin has tried to stop it. If that has happened then there may be cause for intervention, in certain ways. Can you point me at such information? Regarding what you call the Maidan coup, as I understand it, Moscow pressured Ukraine into not signing an accord with the EU and there were protests as a result, ending in the president’s ousting. I don’t know much else about it but it doesn’t seem a justification for Russia to invade Ukraine 9 years later.
Your final sentence is a kind of insult (that I don’t have a clue) but I’ll let that go. Which countries do you think should be allowed an independent line and which countries should be subordinate to some other country? Personally, I don’t like the notion of countries but that’s how the world has been split up. What should be the process for altering the boundaries of countries and how should that be policed?
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Sorry about the “you don’t have a clue” comment. I should have simply said that you lack the knowledge and information on that subject.
Ukraine has had its sovereign status taken away from them for sure but it is US/NATO who have taken over the country. Russia is not fighting Ukraine they are fighting US/NATO.
If you don’t know about the Maidan coup and the US interventions leading up to and continuing since, all of which has been totally exposed (“F#@K the EU” quoting Victoria Newland in 2014 when warned that their coup would blow back on Europe…and it has.). Newland bragged later how the 5 billion they spent really paid off setting up the coup.
Ukraine voted to remain neutral with a continuing strong relationship with Russia which is why US did the coup. Zelinskie played a very moderate president of Ukraine on a tele show then he ran for real prez on a promise to remain neutral and be the buffer between east and west, a peace keeper respecting Ukraines long history with Russia and ukraines Russian population. After election he totally flipped and became a Ukronazie ordering the bombing and killing of Russians in the east.
If you don’t know this by now it is because you do not want to know or are spreading misinfo.
Again the US has done this kind of illegal intervention and other much more violent ones for well over 70 years now on over 80 different times. You obviously do not have this information but it is readily available. Read from the link I gave for one. You say you believe that all countries deserve the right to make their own decisions but the US makes sure they don’t.
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Again, Jeff, I’m not a fan of the US and think they interfere too much in other countries for self-centred reasons. I don’t recall Zelenskiy campaigning to remain neutral and recall his desire to regain land lost to Russia and its proxies. I tried to find some info about his campaign and found that my recollections were reasonably accurate (e.g. this link).
I didn’t notice Putin intervening in other former Soviet nations before they joined NATO. Putin is possibly the richest man in the world so I doubt he’s doing anything for altruistic reasons and I’m sure he wouldn’t tolerate any region of Russia trying to break away. In the end, it’s a matter of opinion whether his foray is justified or not. I happen to think it wasn’t.
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The fact that you are willfully ignorant (not in denial because that is different) and deluded as to what happened over the last 8 to 10 years r.e. Ukraine leads me to believe you are trolling here.
US/Nato has been encircling Russia ever since the negotiated end to USSR. There are thousands of missle installments all around russia most of which are capable of being armed with nuke warheads contrary to agreements. Georgia was one of the latest countries to pull a Ukraine fully supported by US and that didn’t end well for them.
Ukraine is Russia’s line in the sand. Ukraine has been part of Russia for hundreds of years.
I will stop commenting to you now so if you truly have an interest do some research but don’t use scroogle because they only show the lies not the truth.
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Sorry Jeff, I didn’t realise that all I need to do is ask you your opinion and that will override everything I might learn from elsewhere. So the real story is that Ukraine is Putin’s “line in the sand” and all other justifications are just dross. By the way, I rarely use Google, but some kind of search engine is an essential tool and it did confirm my recollections of Zelinskyi’s campaign. But maybe that was an illusion. Sorry for the sarky comment but your style of reply really doesn’t engender a serious discussion.
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Brief insights to complicated issues impress me. I like this comment by Jef Jelten @ OFW.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/09/20/ramping-up-renewables-cant-provide-enough-heat-energy-in-winter/comment-page-16/#comment-392455
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Nice to know there is at least one doctor in a senior government position that has both intelligence and integrity.
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-calm-covid-truth-of-dr-joe-ladapo
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When it comes to denial it’s turtles all the way down.
Here we have brilliant Jeff Snider calling out a misguided Nobel prize being awarded to Ben Bernanke for diagnosing the 2008 “financial” crisis.
Jeff thinks the crisis was “monetary” and they are denying accountability of the central banks for creating the crisis.
I think our species’ genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities prevents Snider from seeing that it was an “overshoot” crisis resulting from a clever religious fire ape attempting infinite growth on a finite planet by using debt to mask depleted low-cost fossil energy.
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Martenson’s back talking about taking some cash out of the bank just in case.
Promoting subscriptions or the end is nigh?
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I would say based on track record, he’s normally right, but early. I have a paid subscription. He covers mostly the same stuff, but gives more data. He’s also more free about saying how bad the situation is. There is some illuminati conspiracy stuff creeping into his work
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Thanks, I’ve followed Martenson from his earliest days but never paid him anything. I mostly respect him but have never completely forgiven him for blocking climate change discussion on his site in the early days, and for occasionally dipping into click bait conspiracy stuff, both probably done to build subscriptions.
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Yes. I did pay for a subscription once, but only for a month or so. Just like everyone else, he doesn’t have a crystal ball. I once listened to him about gold and silver. I bought some when the dollar price was rocketing up. Sadly, I bought at the peak and the dollar price of both has been lower, ever since. It was supposed to be a way to protect one’s assets but that proved wrong. That was over a decade ago. As I say, he has no crystal ball and so is often wrong on financial matters. I did have respect for him in the early stages of the pandemic but he eventually started to abandon critical thinking when it seemed taking a different line would get him more subscribers (IMO). Examples of that were over-reliance on non-peer-reviewed literature and not checking facts on some apparently astounding numbers on deaths and vaccines. The latter was pure garbage but he never apologised.
I agree with you, Rob, about shutting down climate change discussion; I always got the impression he was a denier, though he was clever to usually not be explicit. I used to participate in the main climate change discussion but never got to call out a commenter called Stan who bet the starter of the thread, a scientist called Mark Cochrane, that global temperature would be lower over the following 10 year period, but it turned out to be significantly warmer, even when Mark agreed to use the flawed UAH data set. Now that a subscription is needed to even look at comments, I can’t see if Mark claimed his prize (of Guinness).
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On a climate change discussion, l said humans evolved to be good at solving short-term problems and discounting the seriousness of long-term problems. To which a ‘person’ responded:
“This is junk science. The claim that humans aren’t evolved to deal with climate change.”
There was more of the comment, but it was just big words that didn’t mean anything.
A lot of informed people are resistant to the idea that most people aren’t very bright…
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Never let it be said that American citizens do not have a leadership candidate with intelligence, wisdom, and integrity they can support. Angry at the system and without hope? Look in the mirror.
Skip ahead to 1:59:00 for a discussion on nuclear war.
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This video must have been taken at a town-hall meeting that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held in her home district recently. She is taking heat for voting to send arms to Ukraine. The views are going crazy – it’s gone from 2.9 to 3.1 million views in just the past 20 minutes.
I voted for Tulsi Gabbard in the 2020 Dem primaries – she was the only candidate with a sane foreign-policy stance.
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Excellent!
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I know the folks around here have some issues with JMG but his rather out there ” demonic influences on the covid hysteria” idea is making a prediction on the evolving narrative. He recently wrote this:
LOL
Let’s see what happens. (and yes, a bunch of woke witches really did try to summon demons to get rid of Trump. The world we live in appears to be very strange.)
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LOL, I agree there’s something VERY strange about the covid behavior of our “leaders” AND health “professionals” AND journalists AND most citizens.
There are so many things grossly wrong, any one of which should be enough to collapse the house of cards, like for example the damning book on Fauci that had no effect, that it does seem there may be demons in play.
My belief system however expects the demons will have 2 legs or may be hiding in our denial genes.
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If so many people can be so wrong about something so obvious as bad covid policies, then perhaps nuclear war is not so unlikely.
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In case you missed it, Nate Hagens recently did a good monologue on the evolutionary basis for spite and why spite is increasingly dangerous as growth stops and the economy contracts.
I feel spite in my desire to punish all who collaborated on covid policies.
Others want to punish me for rejecting the vaccine.
Many want to punish Russia for attacking Ukraine.
Ohers want to punish the west for breaking promises to Russia and meddling in Ukraine.
Etc.
Not good.
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Cool! Alberta, the province next to me, got a new premier 2 days ago, and she’s calling out some of the covid bullshit.
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Nice quote by Bret that sums up all covid policies:
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You just can’t make this shit up.
Two years after the fact it is disclosed that the Pfizer vaccine was not tested to determine if it stopped transmission.
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Benjamin the Donkey today…
http://benjaminthedonkey-limericksofdoom.blogspot.com/2022/10/law-we-were-unfettered-brutes-way-back.html
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Isn’t it odd that Nate Hagens never discusses covid policies.
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You converse with him. Maybe you should ask his opinion on all things covid. I’d be interested to know what Nate thinks.
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We don’t communicate often. Only touched on covid once briefly and (I think) Nate does not believe anything sinister is afoot. Given that Nate is working hard these days to calm tensions in society I find it surprising he hasn’t explained to those of us that think our leaders need to go to prison why we are wrong.
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I think it’s because of the same reason my academic husband doesn’t discuss Covid policies at his Uni. It’s a given that you just stay quiet on these controversial topics if you want to keep your job. We know freedom of speech is stone-cold dead in certain quarters, like academia, medicine, and the military. It pains me that everything we’ve built our lives on is balanced upon his retaining his job, but that’s the bitter truth. Maybe Nate still needs his day job to finish what goals he has for the Great Simplified future. We should be thankful enough that the vaccine mandate-sabre rattling has gone silent for now at my husband’s Uni, so holding at 2 shots (and if boosters are ever mandated, we’re out for good). Hope Nate is lucky there, too.
I really appreciated his piece on Spite, by the way. I was a bit disheartened that our little group tasted a morsel of this bitter pill just in some recent comments (in my opinion), but thankful and encouraged that we were able to spit it out quickly and continue the usual measured discourse. I cannot see how spite is a successful long-term evolutionary strategy for it would just end up eye for eye until the whole world is blind, we’re already well along that path. I can also see how Altruism can also work in pockets and until someone comes along to quash those too naively unselfish and that would be the end of those particular genes and memes. Altruism might be utopia if only we all adopted it, and by self-choice. Not a chance, you say? But it’s my dream to hope that there still might be some civilisation out in the cosmos that tried that and it stuck. But we definitely could use some help from one another, right here and now.
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You may be right about the university silencing Nate, although I suspect he mostly supports covid policies and so it is a shame he does not use his fine intellect to communicate why all of us who have studied the issue are wrong.
I could forgive a university for stifling free speech on issues like holocaust denial or racism, but not a science based medical issue like covid policies.
Medical professionals, academics, and journalists have destroyed their reputations and credibility. Perhaps it doesn’t matter since those “professions” will all be unwinding over the next 20 years.
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Trouble in the banking system.
Sometimes it seems like Jeff Snider is the only guy on the planet that understands how the banking system ACTUALLY works. Too bad he’s blind to energy and overshoot. Nevertheless, he seems to be the most intelligent source on health of the system.
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October 14 and still bone dry and very warm here. Very unusual.
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I know the feeling. Cool at night, unusually warm days. Only 1/2″ rain in two months when we should have had 5″+. Not normal at all in the PNW.
AJ
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Hmmmm. It seems that all the rain is down under at the moment. We’re reeling from flood after flood after flood in multiple states. It seems that records keep tumbling on a weekly basis. Homes and businesses inundated, crops underwater which will have significant follow-through effects in food prices. It looks like lettuce will be a luxury item for some time. People can only take so much before hope forever disappears, especially when there’s no insurance for any of this damage. Flood insurance, if even available, will be as high as the water levels, literally over most peoples’ heads. I think we’re about to see a tsunami of climate change refugees within our own countries, but it could be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire–most places not prone to floods are ripe for bushfire. This is our new reality but it’s not easy to get used to it.
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Hello all treehugger friends, I didn’t know where to slip this very unsettling piece of news in but it seemed this spot is as good as any.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/16/ash-tree-dieback-uk-woodlands
What a catastrophe to have only 5% of UK’s ash trees survive this latest blight, I mean, that’s terminal for the forest! Oaks are next and the pines are already decimated in the US. What of the tree situation in Canada? When we speak of population reduction, there is only one species that needs to be targeted, but so many others are taking the hit first. When the trees go, we will surely follow. I am thinking that Gail Z and others who have championed our arboreal guardians at least have been spared the actual final witnessing of what they knew was to come. We have that watch and it’s heart-wrenching.
Best to go out on a walk in the woods, hug and thank a tree whilst we still can.
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My recently deceased friend Gail Zawacki would say that the Ash trees in the UK are succumbing to the fungus because their health has been weakened by rising ground level ozone which is a byproduct of industrial combustion. It’s a worldwide trend. There has been a noticeable decline in tree health over the last 10 years on the farm I assist. I find the story particularly depressing because planting trees is a “solution” that might help reduce the impact of CO2 emissions. Gail would point out that all of the experts are in denial about the root cause as demonstrated by the Guardian article which does not mention ground level ozone.
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LOL!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/moderna-ceo-confirms-new-mrna-injection-to-repair-heart-muscles-after-heart-attack_4791464.html
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LOL indeed. FFS more like it. You really can’t make this shit up. Just like the Pfizer exec who stated that there was no testing for transmission (actually she inadvertently said “no testing for immunisation”, I listened to it 3 times to be sure, what a Freudian slip) and also another gobsmacking slip in the next sentence when she said they “had to move at the speed of science to understand what was taking place in the market ??? What the ? I guess she meant that Pfizer had do whatever means necessary to get their mRNA horse out there in time to compete with Moderna’s pride of the stable, long backed by Fauci and co.
Sometimes I just don’t know if I should laugh, cry, or just vomit.
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Where are the adults? It’s gotta be a bad dream.
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Let’s all really, really hope that the Spite gene is dormant in those who are unreasonably minded. Maybe if we all put on our Altruism hats and focussed positive thoughts their way to keep them sane for just one day longer at a time, maybe?
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The problem is Alzheimer’s. Biden has dementia and that makes him more prone to fits of anger/rage. And he is surrounded by neocon warmongers. What could go wrong?
AJ
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It seems all of the mainstream news (and therefore most citizens) believe Russia is losing. The people I trust say Russia will win decisively. It will be interesting to see how the west reacts.
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Three years ago I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching a video with a title like this. That’s because I “knew” that saturated fat was bad for me and if my cholesterol was high (which it is) I would be walking straight to a heart attack and early death. Thanks to you Rob (or maybe it was Bev Courtney) for introducing me to Dr Malcolm Kendrick I no longer believe this is true.
I also no longer think the Inuit were some oddity and I no longer think that it was the omega 3s that protected them against heart disease. That’s because saturated fat does not cause heart disease in the first place. Even today there are many ethnic groups that eat only meat or mainly meat.
I think the evidence is strong that homo sapiens are carnivores as were homo Neanderthal as were all upright bipedal monkeys for at least the last 2 million years.
Can the planet support 8 billion human carnivores? I think everyone that reads this blog knows the answer to that. But it can’t support 8 billion vegetarians for much longer either.
I personally believe that for optimal health an individual should eat mainly meat. I also believe that for the health of the planet humanity should be mostly vegetarian.
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Hi there Perran,
Hope things are going well for you and your family in the Huon Valley. I’m still up in QLD, having stayed here longer this year to accomplish a few projects, so I have missed all the Spring blossoms in Tassie. Hope things pollinated well and we’ll have a good fruit harvest this year.
It’s so interesting to me that people seem to be living in completely different realities around certain topics–overshoot is the most obvious and pressing, but it’s clear that diet is another. This presentation is 180 degrees diametrically opposed to what I have taken on board, no judgment here, just stating that there are near infinite gradations of viewpoints/adaptations on probably any topic, and that’s probably a good definition of life! I am humbled and amazed that humans can come to this understanding and in recent weeks since opening up this topic of the ideal human diet here (and really only to point out some home truths about the nature of denial) I have learned that there is still a long way for me to go in terms of acceptance and just being able to sit with all other views. I think the saying “Live and let live” sums up the attitude I am trying to reach, and I am really grateful for all the discussion that has highlighted this for me and given me the opportunity to put into a more skilful practice.
I am so pleased that you have made gains in your health journey with new information that suits your own physical and emotional self, and I assume with thanks that you feel the same for my own. It just happens that we have completely different takes, but the main thing is what works for our individual situation, everything is just theory until put to the test and I do realise that there are many ways in which humans can thrive nutritionally. Personally, for my physical constitution, I was a steaming wreck on animal foods, but seemingly very well suited to eating only plant matter, which I have been for 20 years. I do want to instate here a huge caveat that abstaining for the most part from processed food was critical as well for my bettered health. Also, in stark contrast to Dr. Chaffee’s opinion, I also believe that increasing my fibre intake, found only in plant matter, was instrumental to my gut health. My personal experimentation left me no doubt as to what is the best diet for me, physically and biopsychosocially, but for myself is all the authority I have to vouch for. I wish everyone who is interested in this topic a smooth and healthful journey discovering what is best for them, for that is our own joy and privilege to do so. But, as you say, in our current situation, we must admit that optimal physical health is only one consideration, as now our biosphere is groaning under 8 billion humans and our domestic food animals. For sustained survival, and hopefully using those larger brains fuelled by ready nutrition (whether through animal protein or plant carbohydrates), we will have to adapt yet again to re-create our existence in balance with the planet. I am thinking that plants will continue to feature greatly for our benefit–short, mid and long term.
One of my dearest friends is a confirmed paleo eater, being unable to process carbohydrates from fruits and grains, but eats meat, fat, and vegetables with abandon. Once we went on a holiday together and it worked perfectly, whatever I couldn’t eat, she did and vice versa. We both enjoyed heaps of veggies as our common food. So maybe that will be a good balance, for every concentrated meat eating human, there could be a greater number of herbivore-leaning ones. Really just like nature has already worked out, the carnivores are fewer in number and need to keep that balance lest they struggle to survive. Just an interested aside, you know when we watch those nature docos where a lion pride hunts down a prey–do you have any particular leaning to which side wins? It’s funny but I find that I am enthralled by the chase, it’s like a perfect choreographed dance between the two majestically evolved life forms, and whilst I know the lion has to eat and I do so appreciate their perfected skill in taking care of that need, I must admit I always get a bigger thrill when the gazelle bounds away to live another day.
Well, maybe my new motto should be Hakuna Matata instead!
Hope you and your boys are going well, Perran. One of these fine days when I’m back in the Valley, it would be lovely to meet seeing as we’re practically neighbours.
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It’s so nice that different opinions can be discussed with respect here. I apologize for my intolerant covid comment above to Mike.
I’m feeling a lot of anger about covid because the evidence is clear that more people are being harmed than helped. Covid truth should not be denied like the complex issue of overshoot that is so threatening because it has no “solution” and therefore triggers our denial circuit.
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Thanks for the apology, Rob. It is accepted appreciated but I will try to avoid COVID comments except to say that I got thinking about your comment on truth seekers seeming to support your line. Yes, I have noticed that many blogs and influencers I used to follow closely have taken the non-mainstream view on that subject and I’ve thought about that many times, resulting in a lot more research, though I always seek to try to verify what those contrarians are saying, with mixed results. However, my main point here is that many of those people also take a contrarian view on climate change and other environmental catastrophes. So truth seeking, is always biased, which is understandable given that humans aren’t really rational creatures, though they like to think they are. Myself included.
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If you find someone super smart with integrity like Dr. Bret Weinstein or Dr. Robert Malone that can talk for hours in detail without a script about why the 11 charges I listed above are not true, each of which on its own, if true, is sufficient to discredit our leaders, then please make me aware of him or her. I’m pretty certain all 11 charges are true.
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Our so-called leaders are already discredited by their inaction on environmental issues, climate change being the most prominent, though not the only one. I think almost any action or words from our leaders discredits them as they all think BAU will go on forever.
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WRT carnivores and cannibalism paraphrase an elitist a-hole’s comment about how to deal with over population ” we can always pay 4 billion people to eat the other 4 billion people”.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/i_can_hire_one_half_of_the_working_class_to_kill_the_other_half
Sorry…I’m in a mood.
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Gaia, we’re all well down here. I’ve been insanely busy the last couple of months. My inlaws bought a 100 acre ex- plantation block next door a few years ago. I’ve been busy trying to get the last 25 acres cleaned up and sown to pasture. It’s been a lot of work cleaning up all the logs and rocks. Nearly there though……
Please come round when your back down and yes the blossoms have been lovely
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Well done, Perran. All your hard work is a real credit to you and will be so instrumental to securing your family’s more self-sufficient life in the idyllic Huon Valley. Whatever the future holds, to have a chance at working on the land and reaping the bounty using your own efforts is a fulfilling and meaningful life. I would love to see what you’ve done and you are also most welcome to our place in Glen Huon (give me a few weeks after I get back in December to bash my way through the weeds first!) My thoughts are never far from Tasmania and the current flooding situation in the north is concerning for being a new normal for our state. I think you’re pretty safe from floods being in the hills, and let’s hope we can dodge another bullet this summer for bushfire…
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I’ve been watching a lot of material from the Schiller Institute lately because I’ve been impressed with their command of history and their calls for peace to avoid an imminent nuclear war.
I’ve also been trying to figure out their core beliefs and have concluded that ironically and sadly they may be contributing to the tension that threatens nuclear war.
The Schiller Institute believes that the push for green energy is a ploy to deprive the developing world of the fossil energy needed to improve their standard of living, and to preserve more fossil energy for the developed world.
There may be some truth to this, however they seem to be completely unaware of overshoot and the existential threats of peak oil and climate change.
It seems to me that arguing for a larger piece of the pie, without simultaneously understanding that the pie is shrinking, is a recipe for the scarcity death spiral that Jack Alpert and Jay Hanson warn of.
Where is the political movement arguing for peace through population reduction and managed degrowth?
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The UK government was just forced to change its spending and taxation policies by the bond market.
Wolf Richter confirms that this is a big deal and the start of a new global reality.
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The most important question for me is Why?
I’m trying to make sense of why so many people and institutions have lost their minds.
It’s not just covid and Ukraine. It’s every important issue. Common sense is gone. Wisdom is gone. Ability to weigh evidence is gone. Truth is irrelevant.
I think there must be a very powerful force in play that explains it all. What is it?
My best guess is that we collectively sense the end of growth and imminent scarcity.
This is causing us to tribe up in preparation for a fight over resources.
Each tribe is hardening its beliefs and making its beliefs more distinct from those of the other tribes, and each tribe is demanding a higher bar from members to demonstrate loyalty.
In this light, being injected with a substance is nothing more than a test to confirm which tribe you belong to. Ditto for supporting sex change operations in children. Ditto for risking a nuclear war.
Anyone have any other explanations for the insanity?
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I like your hypothesis, Rob. Yes, I agree that all the signs and symptoms concur with a terminal decline stage of our Western civilisation and this is what the final clutching at straws looks like. All descends into entropy even as we desperately try to re-organise ourselves into something that gives even a smidgen toehold for us to cling to. All logic and reason gone, just magical thinking that our particular tribe will be the ones to make it through. We’ve been through permutations of this before but never as globally apocalyptic so all bets are off on how we get to the end.
I know you don’t fancy poetry, but for some reason when I was reading your post, The Hollow Men by T S Elliot came to mind. I quote the first part and the last, you will know it.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
….
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Of course when he when wrote it in 1925, the possibility of nuclear annihilation was not yet fathomed, so it may now very well be a Bang first, and then the mewling from the rubble.
It is no small consolation that I feel very secure in this tribe that doesn’t demand anything other than an open mind to un-deny and bear witness to what is our collective doom.
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Gail Zawacki also tried to help me appreciate poetry. I would take the poem she sent me and rewrite it in the fewest possible words without loss of any information, and I would replace obtuse ideas with clarity. My compression ratio was often 10:1. In the stark light, without deliberate obtusity to dress them up with mystery, the ideas were usually not very profound. Gail would get very annoyed with me. 🙂
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Ha ha, Rob! That’s a great little game! No wonder you like haiku and limericks, cut and dry!
Well, I suppose I could sum up the above original 5 stanza poem in just 3 words, (and this is a feat for me!)
The world ends.
There, how did I do?
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Perfecto! Clear and crisp.
Think of the gazillions of hours people have wasted reading and trying to understand T S Elliot all the while assuming he was saying something profound.
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I don’t think critical thinking is taught in schools. Actually, it wasn’t taught when I was at school but, luckily, my first company did send me on such a course and I was able to build on that, though having a scientific bent certainly helped.
But the notion of “tribes” is certainly one that keeps cropping up when reading about this stuff. The need to belong somewhere.
I could comment on some specifics but I promised not to. Personally, I like to think that I don’t have any fixed opinions on any subject and am always willing to change them in light of new data. For subjects that have strong scientific data that I can understand, my opinions can be very strong (e.g. climate change and many environmental problems) and it would take some astounding new data to change them.
I often state that humans are a species, and each species has a characteristic behaviour. Whilst some members may exhibit different behaviours, unless they have an immediate evolutionary benefit, those behaviours won’t become widespread, so don’t expect people, generally, to change. This can be depressing to those with different behaviours but that will not affect reality.
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It is depressing. The majority denies unpleasant realities, doesn’t care about truth, and won’t change.
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Yes, but I often term it differently – the majority can’t change. Because they are human.
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Generally, I agree that there seems to be some collective mental phenomenon happening. Beyond what Jungian collective consciousness, or zeitgeist would describe, it may be that there is also a collective “intuition” or similar that is more forward looking than a tribal cohesion “in the moment” trait.
Further, I think our technology enabled communication means have slipped the leash and are causing a positive feedback loop beyond our control and wreaking havoc by subverting what might have been a useful survival trait.
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Yes, I’m glad you mentioned the amplification effect of social media on tribalism. The documentary “The Social Dilemma” did an excellent job of explaining the threat.
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Interesting discussion on fertilizers and potting soil.
Another possible reason in addition to glyphosate to buy organic food.
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Campbell River is 50km north of here and is my hometown.
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The Germans know who blew up their pipeline but won’t say who.
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Holy batshit, just after I compressed T S Elliot into a portend of certain doom, this came through to my attention.
https://viralimmunologist.substack.com/p/lab-in-boston-made-what-could-be?utm_source=email
Basically, researchers in the US made a chimera SARS-CoV2 virus combining Omicron and the original strain and it showed 80% lethality in the mice with lung involvement. Geert VB predicted this could have occurred through selective evolutionary pressure but now we’ve gone ahead and created son of Satan ourselves and it’s coming to a lab near you, maybe even ripe for another leak! Aaaaaahhhhh! What have we done?
And in publishing the paper (currently a pre-print but here it is fully accessible),
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full
the recipe, if you will, for this killer recombinant virus has been broadcast far and wide, so any lab in the world can reconstruct this to whatever end. This is clearly gain of function research, illegal but obviously allowed to proceed for what nefarious reason. Will the nightmare never end? What fresh hell is this that is about to be unleashed?
I am actually in a state of shock that the next stage of this many Act play is unfolding before our eyes. Now it is even more clear why China is keeping strict with the zero-Covid policy whilst the rest of the world has seemingly abandoned all care and concern over this pesky Omicron that causes no worse harm than a moderate cold (which is what it is for most). We’ve played cry wolf too many times and I am greatly afeared that when the real killer strain appears, the response will be draconianly totalitarian and there will be chaos as never before. And suffering and deaths will overwhelm.
Forgive my histrionics but I just cannot be rational about this, knowing what we do and seeing how things have developed to date. It’s coming on winter again for most of the world’s population, and Covid will ramp up again. Still no preventative or early treatment protocols, still only half-assed reminders to take the booster and the new Omicron shot. This is setting us up as sheep to the slaughter. We are so woefully unprepared that we won’t know what hit us, if and when it does. It appears that Apocalypse has its own timing, not the one we would predict or choose, and there is nothing for it but submission.
Maybe by morning I will recover from this frenzied response with a more measured outlook, in the meantime, please anyone tell me that I’ve over-reacted and you see nothing amiss here out of the ordinary.
whimper. (That’s my latest one word translation of the TS Elliot poem)
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While I share your despair at this further step toward collective seppuku, I don’t believe gain of function research is illegal.
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if these researchers can’t be arrested they should still be hounded as bio-weapon makers.
They need to be punished for what they are doing. And other biologist and virologist need to be scared that if they do anything even remotely similar their lives will be ruined.
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So many things make me crazy about covid. One of the biggies is that none of our leaders have made it a priority to understand the source. Nothing could be more important to understand. If it was a gain of function lab leak, then that science should be terminated worldwide. If it had a natural origin, then maybe we need more research to protect us.
Let’s discount the corrupt US leadership. Why aren’t the Canadian and Australian and UK prime ministers demanding their scientists collaborate to discover the source? Instead, they are silent. It’s unbelievable.
For the record, I think there’s a 99% probability that covid originated from the Wuhan lab with some US funding supporting the research.
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It’s the same reason why Sweden and Germany have turned a blind eye to the destruction of NS 1 and 2. Highly sensitive and for national security reasons. We are being played with by powers who believe they are the rule and law, even so-called sovereign countries need to kowtow before it without even a murmur.
It is another day but I don’t feel any less sick than last night over this. Well, back to the garden as my refuge, I’m grateful for the never-ending tasks which keeps me connected to the moment as an insignificant yet ultimately integral part of nature. Every day is our first and last, then by the grace of life, we may have another chance at it.
Go well and find some peace in this day, friends.
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Steve Kirsch commented on this research.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/bu-creates-new-sars-cov-2-strain
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Karl Denninger comments on the bioweapon implications of this research.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=247200
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