By paqnation (aka Chris): My Final Act

Today’s guest essay by paqnation (aka Chris) tackles a challenging topic with deep ties to Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory which inspires un-Denial.com.

Chris discusses yet another strange behavior that is unique to our species.

And how hard it is to do the right thing in our modern world.

I have been fixating on evil lately (on an individual level). And by evil I am just limiting it to anything that degrades ecological integrity. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that 100% of my everyday actions are steeped in evil. There is nothing I do that does not involve evil towards the planet. Just typing this essay on my internet computer in my house powered by electricity with the heater on. Everything in my home used up resources and fossil fuels to get to me. And I pay for it by working at a corporation that only creates more evil in the world. Jeez! Too much evil within evil within evil, to even comprehend. Driving my car is the same story. Ditto for eating my grocery store bought food. Every action a person takes in this civilization already has loads of evil baked into it. So what is the opposite of this. Planting trees, gardening, rewilding land, composting my toilet waste? Yes, but I’m sure there is lots of evil within that, just to get to the non-evil deed. Besides, I don’t do any of those things. And even if I did, ok fine, maybe I get my 100% evil actions down to 99%.

It’s obvious that there is a threshold for an acceptable amount of evil that Mother Earth can tolerate and would even expect. Heck, just picking up a piece of deadwood and using it to make a fire is evil. So there is no way to avoid it. The ecological overshoot graphs we’ve all seen time and time again explain what this “threshold” limit looks like. Just another thing that comes down to balance, harmony, and equilibrium. Which, of course, human civilization, by default, cannot achieve.

That got me focusing on my greatest act of evil. It feels like something related to my eating habits would be the winner. The wasting of all the food throughout my lifetime. Or just the day-by-day participation in this horrendous cycle of how we eat in today’s world. But this is more about the accumulation that makes it so evil. I’m looking for a single act that can be labeled “most evil thing I’ve ever done”. Flying on a plane maybe? Prior to my awakening to reality, I was guilty of some horrible acts. On multiple occasions I have dumped trash/junk out in the desert to avoid landfill fees. When I was a teenager, I once changed my car oil and dumped the old oil on the side of the road. At least I’ve never started a forest fire, which has to take the cake for the most evil one person can do (or maybe I’m not thinking hard enough). But I believe I have a clear-cut winner that most of us will be guilty of and does not happen until we are dead.

A lot of people write about nature’s contract or the social contract. Here is a great link on the topic by Tom Murphy: In Breach of Contract.

The core of these “contracts” seems to me is the create/sustain/end part. The “end” portion is where I think our biggest act of evil may rest. We are the only species in which the dead do not return naturally to the eco-system.

Long-life coffins, clothes & decor, deep burial and embalming (which contaminates the soil and groundwater) result in the dead remaining intact for a very long time. Overall, embalming for burial uses over 800,000 gallons of toxic chemicals every year. As well as the costs thru time of mowing around your grave and re-erecting your crumbling gravestone. Not knowing much about this topic, I found out that we put coffins (wooden and metal) inside bigger cement coffins. Our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane. This type of burial practice is just over a hundred years old, which makes perfect sense considering the insanity of modernity and being alive in the most abnormal moment in human history.

Cremation (which I have always preferred) is even worse and turns your body into air pollution and barren ash. Studies of emissions reveal that cremation turns people into at least 46 different pollutants. Some of these, like nitrous oxides and heavy metals, remain in the atmosphere for up to 100 years causing ozone depletion and acid rain. Cremation emits mercury, sulfur dioxide, and, in the US, about 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions into our air every year. Our bodies, on average, take three hours to burn in a crematorium, using up large quantities of fuels like electricity and natural gas. Once again, our fear of critters eating our corpse is laughably insane.

I was bouncing around the internet to get this info. And maybe my stats and figures can be debated, but I think everyone who is this far along into their collapse journey can easily understand how giving my 220 pounds of resources back to Mother Earth is much more beneficial than disintegrating my resources into ashes or keeping them preserved in a metal box inside of a concrete box. (and this is why it feels like my final act will be my most evil)

I can almost hear the absurd conversation with our “Creator/Sustainer/End” in my head. It goes something like:

Mother Earth: Ok, here’s the contract. I am going to create you using my resources, then sustain you with my resources, and when you die I will end you by consuming your resources so that I can keep creating and sustaining in this beautiful cycle of life. Deal?

Modern Humans: Ok, I’ll take you up on your offer for creating and sustaining me, but when it comes time for the end portion, I will renege on our deal and not allow you to use my resources for your benefit. In fact, I’m gonna go out with one last bang and continue harming you even though I’m dead. Deal?

Take, take, take. Never give. Just follows the normal human civilization theme of “everything we do and how we do it is wrong (evil)”.

Natural burials and green burials seem like a better way to go. A quick definition in case you’ve never heard of green burial: designed to have a minimal environmental impact and conserve natural resources. It emphasizes simplicity and sustainability. In a typical green burial, the body is not cremated, prepared with chemicals, or buried in a concrete vault. And some of the green burial sites sell it with options where you are buried with no casket and then a tree is planted on top of you. Having a tree sprout above my corpse is a beautiful idea that I would have mocked (or been grossed out by) prior to my “awakening”.

Unfortunately, the cost is high and availability is low. Average pricing (for my state) is $5,000. And for comparison, traditional burial is $8,000 and cremation is $1,500 (although, when my Dad passed away a few years ago, the cremation cost $2,500. No service or fancy urn. Just the bare minimum). And it looks like there is an even better way called human composting. Which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. But this is only available in a handful of states (mine is not one of them). And cost is $5,000 – $7,000.

I will definitely be looking into these alternatives more because I prefer my final act to not be evil if I can help it (and afford it). Might be my one and only good deed towards ecological integrity. There should be a legal, easy & inexpensive way to put our dead naked bodies into the soil for two obvious reasons. First and foremost, so that Mother Earth gets full maximum benefit. And second so that modern humans can at least honor a portion of our contract.

One last note. I came up with this topic by staring at the table below. Sounds weird, I know. I created this simple table a while back (which I’m sure can be nitpicked to death) for the sole purpose of keeping me on track. My bargaining phase gets me to waste time chasing magical solutions. Looking at this chart helps bring me back down to reality. Another positive outcome is that it gets me thinking about stuff I that I’ve never thought about.

Thanks for listening, Chris

Rob here, I can confirm Chris’ research because one of my university summer jobs was making precast concrete coffin liners.

Chris’ essay reminded me of a comedy skit on peak oil from the 2005 play by Robert Newman titled Apocalypso Now.

It’s a fun reminder of how many of us doomers thought 20 years ago.

If you’re in a hurry, skip ahead to the 6 minute mark for the relevant joke.

732 thoughts on “By paqnation (aka Chris): My Final Act”

  1. B today is excellent as always.

    He finds our denial of the second most unpleasant (and obvious) reality “disturbing”.

    Given our intelligence, “disturbing” is a wild understatement. It demands an explanation and MORT is the best explanation I have found.

    B concludes with his musings on “What would a wise society do?”.

    What would a wise society do?

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/the-net-zero-stragedy

    The Net Zero Stragedy

    Human CO2 emissions will reach net zero. However, not because the EU Commission calls for a 90% cut in emissions by 2040, but because it will slowly become physically impossible to maintain modernity — with or without fossil fuels. Something, which under current policies will end up in an unmitigated disaster; rather sooner than later. Why is this ever desperate push for hydrogen, wind and solar then? What useful could be done instead?

    Let me remind you: this was all known and proven a century earlier than the first climate conference was convened. Viewed from a physics standpoint this is all perfectly logical. In fact, it would have been extremely strange if we didn’t messed up the planet’s energy balance with all the entropy we had unleashed in the past couple of centuries, and during the many millennia before. Is it any wonder then that we have already blew past the 1.5°C limit…?

    So, why don’t we “just stop oil” and reduce our emissions right away? Well, that’s the beauty of the story, and the prime reason why people from the poorest farmer to the richest oligarch is reluctant to do so: because that would end this civilization. Sure, it is possible to run a civilization on the power of the sun and the wind alone, just not this one… Sorry to be so blunt, but its neither technically, nor physically possible to get rid of fossil fuels and continue with modernity. This is why the core tenet of the Net Zero belief system, namely that we can “decarbonize” the economy and survive it, is what it is: a myth.

    How much more ever scarcer non-renewable raw materials will have to be mined, manufactured into products, and delivered on site to achieve that..? Let’s face it: one cannot run an economy on intermittent electricity, heavy batteries, wasteful hydrogen production, and mining non-renewable resources to exhaustion. If that would be possible, the transition would be already in full swing, all powered by renewable electricity and hydrogen. The fact that we are still hopelessly reliant on fossil fuels and generous subsidies decades into the “green transition” tells it all.

    Given this context the EU Commission mandating a 90% cut in emissions by 2040 — while pretending that this will not mean an end to modernity — is somewhat disturbing. Fossil fuels are the economy. Wishing 90% of emissions to be gone, equals wishing 90% of the economy to disappear; all in a matter of fifteen years.

    The long descent requires a well informed, honest management of the issue, starting with an admission that our current way of consumerist lifestyle cannot continue for much too long. There is a world of difference though between making people believe that everything will be fine, and actively preparing them for a crash landing. In an era of a looming fossil fuel crisis, inevitably resulting in a fall in mining and industrial output later down the line, we would need more global cooperation, honest and open communication, not diatribes against anyone who dares to question current policies.

    Sure, there is absolutely no guarantee that we would survive the eventual loss of mechanized agriculture, fertilizers, mining, industry, civil infrastructure etc. towards the second half of this century in any greater numbers than a fraction of what we see today. However, if we were actively preparing for a downscale, we could at least lengthen the transition period long enough to soften the blow somewhat. Natural depopulation (a trend already underway) combined with increasing people’s ability to grow their own food, and looking for partnerships internationally (instead of antagonizing those who could help) could spare us from an unfolding stragedy stemming from blindly pursuing ideological goals without consulting reality first.

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  2. If you are interested in what is going on behind the scenes in power politics, then today’s essay by Endurance is very good. His discussion is global touching on the politics of all western countries.

    In summary, it’s getting ugly everywhere.

    Now if we could just find an equally inquisitive author with awareness of the overshoot forces in play.

    Fair warning, the essay is long, too long.

    https://endurancea71.substack.com/p/going-all-in

    Having lived through that past, some of us (I suspect) are struggling to get to grips with both the enormity of the deceptions that were practiced upon us and with what that tells us about the character of those doing the deceiving. We trusted institutions and systems that were supposed to exist for our benefit, but which have been corrupted and hollowed out and used to control us and harm us instead – the academy, the judiciary, health services and publicly-owned media to the fore.

    In particular, the struggle seems to be hardest around the issue of intent – wrapping one’s head around the only logical conclusion (which is that yes, they really do mean us harm) is, naturally, a difficult task.

    The reason for this awakening is, of course, the ‘pandemic’. But the further it recedes into history, the less it resembles a final play gone awry. The timing seems completely off – the companion pieces (all things digital, especially IDs and money) weren’t sufficiently developed at the outset of the engineered crisis and still aren’t deployed even now. Instead, it seems likely that its primary function was twofold; to kneecap Trump and to cull as many useless eaters as possible. The lock-downs normalized the concept of mail-in ballots, without which the Big Steal would have been logistically implausible, if not impossible and the ‘vaccine’ mandates (real or de facto) did the rest.

    The ‘pandemic’ also served as a societal plumb-line – a way of gauging how much we had either absorbed the gaslighting or were cowed into compliance. But there were other, less easily measured consequences too. As time passed, for many of us, the ever-widening gap between what we were being told and what we could see with own eyes became impossible to ignore.

    And so we have a citizenry that is slowly switching on and a ruling class which is still intent on implementing its master plan, no matter what. As the need to corral us before we become a serious problem gathers pace, the narrative becomes ever more shrill and divorced from reality. This is drawing a counter response, notably from farmers across Europe and from the great state of Texas, both of whom have put one over on the globalists within the past month. Neither are backing off; it’s simply that the legacy media are refusing to report ongoing events.

    At present, there seem to be five major threads; the destruction of political opposition wherever it presents itself, the silencing of dissent, the construction of the digital prison, an acceleration of the culture wars and the continuation of armed conflicts.

    But what if there was a sudden attack on, say, Poland? One that could be blamed on the enemy? It’s been done before; Hitler used the Gleiwitz incident, a German false flag attack on a German radio station just across the border from Poland, as a casus beli for an invasion.(161) The Russians and the Belarusians believe that provocations of a similar nature are on the cards and have been sounding the alarm since last June.(162) Lukashenko, the Belarusian President, said just last week:

    “Polish and U.S. intelligence are preparing a large-scale provocation against the Polish civilian population, which they will blame on Russia and Belarus.”(163)

    There are currently 32,000 NATO troops deployed near Belarus and Russia, ostensibly for a drill. There are another 60,000 or so training elsewhere in Europe.(164) Conditions would seem to be advantageous. And the blob does like to control as many variables as possible. Plus, Putin is very unlikely to bite. He has demonstrated considerable restraint in the face of repeated provocations, not simply limited to the US and EU funding of Ukraine’s military. There would seem to be little reason to lash out now, when knowledge he already possessed has simply been made public.

    But, again; why? Why embroil NATO in a war? I can think of any number of reasons why the elites would think it a good idea. In no particular order; it would make it politically impossible for conservatives in the House to block the Senate bill; it would allow the EU to issue war bonds, bypassing national governments and forcing the imposition of a direct EU tax (advancing the dream of federal integration considerably); “war and threats to national security are permanent states of exception that a regime can use to ram through all manner of draconian laws and limits to free expression”;(165) it would allow for the imposition of martial law and the suspension of federal elections, as Zelensky has just demonstrated once more;(166) and, I’m sure, much else besides. One might, therefore, see how attractive a war is to authoritarians who are attempting to accelerate their takeover while they still can.

    I suspect that this is where we are headed. It simplifies matters considerably, because a war allows the string-pullers to turbo-charge their agenda and not only drastically reduces the period of awakening for the normies, but also makes it near-impossible for existing critics to continue to make themselves heard. The coming digitization of life will not be subject to the scrutiny it would otherwise receive and all eyes will be on the war. If I were them, it’s what I would do. Putin will have no option but to respond.

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  3. Must watch. Yet another rabbit hole on mRNA dangers. I’ve been ignoring the DNA contamination threat because I’ve been operating on the belief that clots are a much bigger threat. Maybe DNA contamination is a big deal.

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      1. 1) I’m a Canadian who knows nothing about Sen. Ron Johnson but he appears to be a very intelligent and impressive leader.

        2) One of the more disturbing things about these presentations on mRNA risks is that they appear to be unaware of the String Theory clot threat. This could mean Dr. Joe Lee is wrong. Or it could mean reality is MUCH worse than these experts expect. See above interview with whistleblower for clot evidence.

        3) Interesting theory on why mRNA was pushed so hard. Bioweapons research operates within a loophole of a bioweapons treaty stating small quantities of offensive weapons can be produced for the development of defensive vaccines. The problem is they’ve never developed a successful vaccine. So when a leak occured from the bioweapons lab in Wuhan they had to produce a vaccine to show they were not in violation of the treaty and to protect the existence of the bioweapons industry. This also explains why early treatments were suppressed.

        4) Sitting here with tears in my eyes watching these 4 hours of presentations. It feels so good to know there are a few intelligent ethical people in this world. Godspeed. A lot of people need to go to prison.

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        1. Every thread I have start on String Theory either remains silent or immediately shifts to an irrelevant topic. That includes attempts I have made to educate people who are investigating unusual clots they see. It’s most troubling.

          The covid dissidents are more concerned about their pecking order among other dissidents than they are about winning and putting the criminals in prison.

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          1. LOL 🙂 🙂

            I gave Dr. Joe Lee some tough love advice.

            He has an important idea but he’s probably yelling into the vacuum of space because he’s so rude that everyone he needs to reach has probably muted him.

            I told him to stop yelling and to write a proper paper explaining his string theory without any all-cap rants, and to try to link the theory to the white fibrous clots that have been found since 2021.

            He blocked me.

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          1. Doesn’t surprise me given Varki’s MORT.

            In a way climate change denial does not matter anymore because it’s too late to do anything about climate change except proactively reduce our population to reduce suffering and to give the remaing people a better chance, and no one, not even the most concerned climate scientists, will sign up for population reduction, because they also deny the reality of our predicament.

            Contrast this with an issue we can do something about. Our leaders have corrupted the institutions meant to protect us and have murdered millions. Let’s help Sen. Ron Johnson put the covid criminals in prison and shut down the pharma cartel.

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            1. Technically, it’s never too late to do anything about climate change. The less GHGs we put into the atmosphere, the lower the final equilibrium temperature will be. But, you’re right in the sense that the changes now set in motion will result in what could be called climate catastrophe, no matter what we do from now.

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                1. To be honest, Rob, I think it’s better to stay silent because I’m not really informed about all of the ins and outs of the issue, in all of its aspects. It seems to me that some of the contrarians who were lauded early on have sunk back into the background with perhaps some of their bolder statements now seen to be false (e.g. the deaths of millions within a couple of years, from the vaccines) and others have even backtracked. Is it all a scam to control us? Is it not a scam but an opportunity to reduce populations covertly? Is it all a money making scheme? But isn’t everything in our capitalist system?

                  We have a population problem (which exacerbates other problems) so isn’t anything that can increase the death rate to be lauded? If so, sadly, in NZ, it doesn’t seem to be doing the job.

                  I don’t know why my silence on what you see as covid crimes should trouble you. Most of what I say on the issue seems to anger you so my silence should be less troubling than my uninformed comments.

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      2. One of the many impressive presentations at Sen. Ron Johnon’s roundtable.

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      3. Rumble is blocked in France, the video was removed from youtube.

        There is censorship. But is it partisan censorship or total censorship? In that I mean, are there two powers at war or only one building artificial division amongst minds? (Basically cosmopolitans/liberal aka woke/city/pro-progress/atheist/pro-climate-change/pro-renewables/vegan/exploitative/hierarchical… vs. nationalists/racists/country/traditionalists/religious/anti-climate-change/pro-oil/meat-eater/exploitative/hierarchical…, or just the machine vs. life?)
        Anyway, found it here:
        https://www.ntd.com/sen-ron-johnson-leads-roundtable-discussion-federal-health-agencies-and-the-covid-cartel-what-are-they-hiding_975015.html

        Is that the one?
        I would like to listen to it, but the current collapse info flux seems to constantly increase and is greater than my ability to assimilate it (and it’s 4 hours long)… Probably I will stick to overshoot being the first driver of current events.

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        1. I remember someone saying we should be extra-cautious of the saviours. Because the villains, we know they don’t want us good and they are easy to spot.

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        2. Yes that’s the one. Video quality is a little lower but content is the same.

          I downloaded the Rumble version and transcoded the video to a reasonable size just in case they delete it. I can put it on a server for you if you need it.

          It’s a collection of short presentations, each on a different but important topic. You can watch it in multiple short sessions.

          I thought every speaker did a very good job. No wasted words. Straight to the key points.

          Johnson said they would produce a short version. I have not seen it yet.

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        3. Your question on what are the forces is good. My opinion changes all the time depending on how I’m feeling. Which means I’m not sure what’s going on.

          Could be as simple as people with high paying jobs in the bureaucracy who accomplish very little of real value, worrying about keeping their jobs given unsustainble deficits.

          Or it could be a battle between overshoot aware people trying to prepare a global plan for collapse vs. overshoot blind BAU people.

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  4. “Every truth seeking institution is under attack.”

    “The CDC has become an excellent guide to protecting your health, but only for people who realize you should do the opposite of what it advises.”

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  6. Chris, you’re right that just about everything we do has a negative consequence on the environment. But then the same is true (to a lesser extent) of all other species. Even plants can run wild and smother other plants, in some circumstances. However, all other species seems to be able to eventually live in a kind of balance, in each ecosystem. That balance, though, may be found by some species being excluded through predation or food limitations. The balance itself will also always be temporary until something perturbs that ecosystem (e.g. tectonic movement, a one in a thousand year event, or asteroid strike), in which case a new balance is eventually found.

    But humans have overcome predation and food limits because we’re clever. We are now the perturbation that all ecosystems on the planet are experiencing. As you say, there is nothing we can do that doesn’t do harm in some way. I wouldn’t characterise it as evil but some may use that term in a subjective way. There is no way to live in this civilisation that can help restore a balance. Nature will have to eventually work its magic to restore a temporary balance, though it’s not clear how depleted such ecosystems will be. In some deep period of time there will likely be abundant biodiversity. How deep? I don’t know. Probably at least hundreds of thousands of years.

    I like the idea of being composted, though, after other species have had their fill. That will ultimately be the way humans are recycled and I wish it was easier to do that now. Why on earth does it cost money for my heirs to be able to dig a hole and bury me? I did exactly that for my dog, last year, and a Nikau Palm is growing on him. In fact most of our expired pets have plants growing on them.

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    1. Getting back to the original topic of this post- green burials will be another aspect of our changed lifestyles as descent progresses. I’m lucky enough to live in an area where simple interment is becoming an option.
      https://www.thresholdcarecircle.org

      I will be buried on our little farm when the time comes. Planning ahead is essential, or else the “system” will take over at a tough time for family to act independently.

      The movement overall is growing, perhaps there is an effort emerging near you?

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      2. Hey scarrow. So true that without pre-planning, the “system” ends up winning with a costly, environmental damaging, business as usual, burial/cremation. I was checking out that Threshold Care Circle site and they definitely seem to be one of the “good guys”.

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  7. French President Emmanuel Macron no longer rules out the deployment of ground troops in Ukraine by his country in order to prevent a Russian victory in Ukraine. Macron said this after the conclusion of a Ukraine aid conference in Paris on Monday evening. The meeting was attended by more than 20 heads of state and government.

    Talking about escalation, right?

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  8. Art Berman today discusses our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, as most people do, without realizing that’s what they are discussing.

    They think they are telling the truth and that’s the problem. True believers are willing to go to any length to convince us of their truth. They believe it so strongly that they cannot be objective.

    The sad truth is that a renewable energy transition is imaginary.

    https://www.artberman.com/blog/telling-the-truth-about-our-future/

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  9. Dr. Tom Murphy today takes another deep dive into what it means to be sustainable.

    Can We Get Back to Sustainable?

    I characterize previous modes of human lifestyles on the planet as follows, in reverse chronological order.
    – Present (modernity): UNSUSTAINABLE!
    – Post-Enlightenment: unsustainable
    – Antiquity: unsustainable
    – Agriculture: unsustainable
    – Hunter-Gatherer: sustainable?

    Snap Out of It!

    I am not calling for an immediate cessation of agriculture. I depend on it as well. What I am doing is calling into question baseline assumptions—uncomfortable as that might be. In laying the tracks for future generations, we might encourage exploration into different modes of living, with an eye toward long term sustainability.

    I can’t stop myself from returning to the metaphor of cutting off the branch we stand on. In light of this post, we started the project 10,000 years ago using a crude stone edge that later became an iron axe—beginning to make some slow progress. The enlightenment brought a toothed steel saw: much more effective. The fossil fuel revolution introduced the chainsaw. Luckily the branch is large and resilient, capable of much abuse. But just as we’re nearing completion of the cut, the fossil fuel inputs and outputs are becoming problematic (smelly fumes). Shall we then switch to a solar-charged electric chainsaw to finish the job? I’d rather we pause to ask what exactly it is we’re doing, using a broad lens in terms of time and ecology. Safety first!

    Meanwhile, can we please stop indulging fantasy engineering babble about a high tech future that either never will come or if it does just proves to be one more bad idea that prolongs (and worsens) the eventual fall? The ecological nosedive (sixth mass extinction) continues to steepen, making the chances of recovery slimmer year by year. I don’t want to hear about energy on Mars or grid-scale pumped storage that drowns every dam-able bowl on the terrain. It’s embarrassing. Enough destruction. The goals are all wrong. Let’s begin the healing, by first falling out of love with (abusive) modernity, and thinking about what matters most in life. Hint: don’t stop at humans, as that spells a dead end for humans as well.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/02/unsustainable-goose-chases/

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  10. Canada should be prepared for a large number of American refugees crossing the border in the event that Trump wins in November.
    https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/11/take-trump-seriously-when-he-vows-to-build-the-camps
    Consider the implications of seven thing we already know.

    1) Trump plans to build a giant network of “detention” camps and empower the federal government to round up millions of people without any due process

    2) Trump insists that Democrats and leftists imperil the foundations of civilization, and has promised to “root out” the “threats from within.”

    3) Trump is an aspiring dictator who would have simply defied the election result and remained in power if he had been able to.

    4) Trump is now angry and vengeful, and determined to punish those who forced him from office.

    5) Trump and the Republicans have a sweeping radical plan called Project 2025, part of which involves purging tens of thousands of civil servants from the federal government to eliminate potential opposition to his plans.

    6) Trump has no qualms about killing people without trial and openly encourages police brutality.

    7) Trump is beating Joe Biden in the polls, meaning he is currently on track to be the next president.

    These facts, taken together, should make us very worried that we are on the brink of a fascist nightmare. There is a tendency to assume Donald Trump is clownish, ineffectual, and not actually very committed to following through on his stated agenda. It’s true that Trump doesn’t have much ideological commitment to the Republican platform. But he is also deeply vengeful and hates being humiliated or seen as weak. I do not think we should be surprised if the second term is very different from the first.

    …

    To those skeptical that Trump would actually round up those he deems “internal threats” and put them in camps, I’d like you to consider how rapidly things can change in a situation of national emergency or panic. Of course, after 9/11, torturing and indefinitely detaining people was used as a tactic against perceived enemies. But remember, too, what happened after Pearl Harbor in 1941. The most liberal Democratic president we have ever had established internment camps and rounded up Japanese Americans for indefinite imprisonment.

    As Someone who lives in the U.S., I think that Biden should step down as the democratic nominee, solely to keep Trump out of the White House.

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    1. Good points. One of the most remarkable things to me is that it actually seems possible for a person (I use the term loosely) like Trump to be elected into office. I wonder if a more democratic election system (where every vote carried the same weight) would ever let Trump in (he lost his last two elections in the popular vote) but we’ll never know.

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    2. The US deep state needs to be burned to the ground but I’d much prefer RFK Jr. did it, however as a Canadian I don’t get a vote, and I’m embarrased to say my prime minister is as stupid as Biden and Trump, except he can’t blame dementia.

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      1. The current U.S. leadership is deeply flawed, but at least they aren’t threatening to round up millions of people and put them in camps. I also think Biden is slightly less bad from an overshoot/ecological perspective.

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        1. Correct, the current leadership just erased the southern border and invited in all the dispossessed (and criminals that might accompany them) to come. So is an invasion better that concentration camps? I don’t know. But it does seem like the “cream” of humanity rises to the top in politics (irony)? I remember a saying in law school that “A” students became law professors, “B” students became corporate attorneys and “C” students became politicians. (Not my perception though).
          Biden (dementia) and his handlers are Woke, racist, controlling thought police who love war & genocide. Trump is a populist, generally anti-war, racist, misogynist, vengeful narcissist. And the Deep State tries to control them both. Neither are better at being a leader than the other. Both are nightmares.
          Democracy that doesn’t reward humility, intelligence, and rationality is doomed to fail – and we are there.
          The road to collapse will not be pretty, but hopefully we could avoid nuclear winter.
          AJ

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          1. Given the other six things, I don’t trust Trump to stop at illegal/undocumented (whatever term you prefer) immigrants. I fear that if he gets elected, he will try to put his political opponents in those camps as well.

            It is quite sad that in November, Americans will basically have a choice between Biden, Trump and a wasted vote (due to our first-past-the-post voting system). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting

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            1. I’m not sure that Trump would put his political opponents in camps. I’m sure he will seek prosecution of Biden (and his crime family), Obama and probably both Clintons (who I think probably deserve it).
              And that will be fair in that they appear to be attempting to prevent him from regaining the presidency based on selective prosecution for “events” that probably were not illegal (Jan 6 (speech), document retention, property “crimes”). Idiots don’t understand that this prosecution just makes him more popular.
              I think Biden is probably on the hook for bribery (and some of his family), Obama for using the government to skew the 2016 election toward Hillary, Bill for his fun with Epstein, Hillary for her attempt to screw with the 2016 election.
              If Trump is guilty of anything it is for being a old stupid bellicose misogynistic narcissist.
              BUT, IMHO they are both abysmal choices and one might end up president with their finger on the nuclear trigger if the powers behind Biden don’t put us all in nuclear winter before then.
              RFK would be a better choice, but anyone who supports Israel is far from ideal.
              I can’t think of any U.S. politician who I would want as president. Maybe Tucker Carson, Tulsi Gabbard, Edward Snowden, JHK ?
              Ah, isn’t this collapse of U.S. politics just a foretaste of the future?
              AJ

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              1. I’m not sure that Trump wouldn’t put his political opponents in camps.
                Of the 4 people you mentioned, Tucker Carlson is too openly racist, and is also a climate change denier. I would probably vote for the 2005 JHK (based on the book the Long Emergency), but the 2024 JHK is too out there. (Many Trump supporters appear to believe that Trump was appointed by God, this suggest that his support may actually be a personality cult). I would actually like to see a debate between Biden and RFK Jr. In 2020, Bernie Sanders was my preferred candidate.

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                1. I’ve watched a lot of Tucker Carlson and have not seen evidence of racism, but let’s assume it’s true and he thinks less of some group of people. You’d be hard pressed to find any human that does not think less of some group. I know I think less of Israelis as a group because of first hand experience with their focus (and success) at strengthening their own team at the expense of every other team. So maybe that makes me a racist too.

                  One of the biggest threats to our society is the capture of mainstream journalism by the government. There is no integrity in mainstream journalism today which means it is very difficult to determine truth and to hold our leaders to account for bad policies. Millions were killed and harmed because journalists refused to question “safe and effective”.

                  Tucker is orders of magnitude better than every mainstream journalist. He has integrity and seeks the truth. He listens to and seeks to understand people he disagrees with. When he makes a mistake he admits it. We desparately need many more journalists like Tucker Carlson, with both left and right leanings.

                  It troubles me that you would try to destroy a rare and good person with single poisonous word like “racist”. Yes he denies climate change, but climate scientists also deny overshoot, thermodynamics, and resource depletion.

                  If we write off every person that thinks less of some group and that denies reality there will be no one left standing.

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                  1. I don’t use the term “racist” lightly. Tucker Carlson has said enough things both on and off air, to make me think he is racist. Here are some of them.
                    Here are a few:

                    “Iraq is crappy place filled with semiliterate primitive monkeys” at 0:01

                    Here is a side by side comparison with quotes from Tucker Carlson and quotes from prominent racists.

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                    1. Thanks, not good. Those clips were dated 16-20 years ago. I’ve seen no hint of that racism recently. I wonder if he has matured or if he is just hiding those feelings? Has anyone seen any racism in recent years?

                      I can’t find any evidence that he has ever apologized for those comments.

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              2. I guess the courts will decide whether Trump’s actions were illegal though I’m pretty sure that retention and mishandling of classified documents is illegal in the US. Also, it is surely stretching it to think that Trump didn’t try everything he could to reverse the result of the last election. Some of what he did could certainly have been illegal. I also note that he lied to his supporters when he said he’d be there with them, marching to the Capitol.

                Yes, it could well be a foretaste of the future.

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                1. Not sure if anything he did with respect to the election is illegal in the U.S. We do have a first amendment that protects all political speech. Actions are another thing and arguably he avoided those. The document retention is a gray area of the law, since he was president he could have declassified everything before he took them. His actions pale before Biden’s retention of documents (he was only a V.P. and Senator and had no ability to declassify or Hillary’s illegal actions with respect to her home server while Sec of State). This is just Lawfare against Trump.
                  I really can’t believe I’m defending Trump because I detest him, but not as much as I detest having my vote stolen by warmonger Obama and genocide Joe (both of whom I voted for) and who both are trying their best to subvert democracy in favor of the Deep State.
                  AJ

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                  1. I may be totally wrong but, from things said by some I respect, Biden cooperated fully in returning documents once they were found. Trump prevaricated and tried to conceal documents, it taking several attempts to get the documents back and they weren’t exactly kept in secure locations. Biden also held some kind of official public office after leaving the White House so he may have still had security clearance. There is no indication that Trump declassified those documents and I don’t think he’s actually claimed that. Also, the number of documents was far greater, in Trump’s case.

                    Trump’s attempts to claim that the President is above the law is worrying. If the SCOTUS agrees with him then, if he gets in in November, he’ll have carte blanche to do whatever he likes.

                    Personally, I don’t place as much emphasis on supposedly secret documents as the US government does but the law is the law, as well as being an ass.

                    I’m with you on your attitude towards your last 3 presidents. I would extend it to at least the last 4, though. If I’d been able to vote, it would always have gone to a third candidate or spoiled.

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    3. I don’t understand the reasoning of either party thinking either of these 2 candidates would make an intelligent president. It most likely means there is a lot I don’t understand about American politics, then I think about my own dealings with high up levels….

      Going back over 40 years I knew a minister of the state government here in Victoria Australia. He was a very simple, humble man. People often had to repeat an idea or concept to him several times before he understood (or pretended to). He definitely had a good heart and was a genuinely nice person. Over the course of 5-6 years the incumbent government had crises after crises with lots of different ministers being caught out in conflicts of interest or just straight out corruption.

      None involved the person I knew, if fact he ended up being a minister for a number of portfolios at the same time including treasury. A bit of last man standing.. That party lost big at the next election.

      It did occur to me at the time; how on earth could this person be in charge of so much, with so little understanding of most of it!! It was only later that I watched the UK Yes Minister TV series, and 2 decades later was dealing with ministers and the top level of public service. The public servants wanted all the ministers to be really dumb, so they could manipulate them easily..

      Perhaps what we are seeing with US politics is what those who really want to be in charge, from more minor positions, to make sure the public only has these 2 options to choose from, most likely both easily persuaded to any particular action by those high up in the food chains from business to public servants.. In US case Wall street/Treasury, Pharma/FDA. It’s all revolving doors so those from the top of both groups (and other similar ones) probably want dumb presidents and don’t care which of the 2 get in….

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      2. There has been a couple of scandals recently in New Zealand of public servants publicly undermining our elected representatives.

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  11. Good one today by el gato malo on how US cities may be the first victims of a financial correction.

    My take away: public service unions are as big a problem as state dependent corporations.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-ponzi-bomb-under-the-city-walls

    last year, 53 of the 75 most populous US cities (70%) did not have enough money to pay their bills. they held $307bn in assets and $595bn in debt, a coverage ratio of only 52% and this is probably much too optimistic as future labilities look to be being systematically reduced and future income projections look implausibly rosy, especially given how trends are going.

    why is is so easy to stress a city like new york or chicago to the breaking point with a few thousand immigrants demanding housing and funding? this is why. many of these cities are teetering on the brink.

    and this is going to be a huge demographic deal because when cities start to fail, people vote with their feet, the rich often voting first and hardest and that badly unbalances systems because the top 1% of taxpayers generally pay about 50% of income taxes as well as an awful lot of transaction tax and property tax. property taxes underpin a lot of city revenue so property values matter a ton. so too do business taxes, hotel taxes, etc. and if you start to erode that base meaningfully, you can suddenly find yourself with large, structural, self-reinforcing revenue holes and companies (and especially workers) have become more mobile than ever and if they do not like what’s going on in your city

    more than any other issue, pensions and retirement health plans to blame. they have become at once the most sacred of cows and the most abject horrors of short-sighted can kicking.

    public sector unions that outright bribe and intimidate the very people with whom they will then have their contract negotiations are the primary culprit here. if you turn on them, your election coffers run dry and they lavish cash upon someone to unseat you and get the gravy train running on time again.

    local, state, and even national elections continue to be dominated by public sector unions who protect their pensions and retirement health benefits like momma bears protect their cubs. they will not give an inch on this issue and they are the ones funding elections and politicians.

    the simple fact is that many cities, states, and likely the US as whole are past the point of fiscal irresponsibility where there is any path back that is not truly horrible for someone.

    cities will be the canary in the coal mine.

    then states.

    and then…

    we’ve become fixated on political issues like the border and student loans and DEI and which of the panoply of soap opera villain level politicos did what and for whom and to what tawdry personal gain, but the reality is that little of it matters a decade from now unless we get our fiscal house in order at every level of government.

    until we do, it’s just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.

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  13. Very good interview today by Nate Hagens of Sandra Faber.

    I’ve never heard of Faber but she’s very aware and she discussed all of the big issues including a few of my favorites:
    – our planet is probably very rare in the universe
    – a long-term sustainable human population is probably about 100 million
    – our best chance for a better direction is a new religion

    On this episode, astrophysicist Sandra Faber joins Nate for a wideview cosmological conversation on the development of the known-universe and the moral implications for humanity’s role within it. We are the first generation with the ability to truly understand the history of the universe and the extreme bottlenecks that Earth and life as we know it had to endure over the last billions of years. This understanding of where we come from gives us insight into who we are – and could perhaps give purpose to those searching for meaning in the vast universe. From the Big Bang on, how did the necessary conditions come together to create the environment so many of us take for granted today? How do the laws of physics restrict everything that has ever happened in the universe – and everything that ever will? Could a deeper understanding of the cosmos shift our culture towards one that values human’s survival into deep time – and incentivize biophysically and ecologically aligned systems?

    About Sandra Faber:

    Sandra Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii. At UCSC she focuses her research on the evolution of structure in the universe and the evolution and formation of galaxies. In addition to this, she led the development of the DEIMOS instrument on the Keck telescopes to obtain spectra of cosmologically distant galaxies. On August 1, 2012 she became the Interim Director of the University of California Observatories.

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    1. I would argue that there is no long-term sustainable human population. Humans are too clever for their own good. 100m would be a good start but it would never stay that low (unless there are long-term environmental limits to how high it could rise, then it would probably crash).

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    2. So far, I have watched about 2/3 of the interview. So far, I think the interview is quite interesting. I was into astronomy when I was younger (maybe you could tell by my screen name). Speaking of astronomy, there will be a solar eclipse visible in North America in April.

      For most of human history, our population was below 100 million. 55:25 I think that sometime in the next few decades we will see a wet bulb event in a densely populated region. Such an event will put an enormous strain on the electric grid and rolling black outs will happen. Unfortunately, I fear that it will take a tragedy of unprecedented scale to break through the denial and delusions.

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    3. One of the interesting aspects of these interviews, is that every now and then you get a glimpse of what Nate really thinks of the future. At one point he stated he’s more worried about where his potatoes would come from in 5-7 years, when they were starting to talk ‘long term’.

      Overall, here is another professor that ‘gets it’, with regards the polycrisis, but still has the denial gene to the extent of hoping or looking for a positive outcome and survival of some form of modernity.

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      1. Yeh I notice that too. Thanks to MORT we may have to give up on the quest for the perfect intellectual and settle for good enough. She was very good compared to most.

        There was a small thing that irritated me in the interview. Faber asked Nate if he was aware of any work on what a sustainable population would look like. He said no rather than pointing her to the work of Jack Alpert. Nate prefers political correctness over correctness.

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          1. I know what you are saying is true, but I think it is ridiculous.

            We are out of time. Nothing else will help, and even our most aware and wise people can’t talk about it.

            This planet is special and we need to protect it blah, blah, blah… but let’s not talk about what actually needs to be done.

            It’s worse than ridiculous, it’s tragic.

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          1. There is a real probability of that Mike, however I doubt he would ever say it out loud. Jack Alpert’s plan does involve continued modernity, which is it’s only selling point, however he misses the point that the complexity of modernity only comes with 8 billion people including billions of poor that can still afford a mobile phone.

            It’s a combination of large population and huge energy and resource use that gives us the modern complexity. Take away any one and the system simplifies, rapidly. A much smaller population means we can’t have the modern conveniences we all currently enjoy, even if there were enough resources and energy. As it’s the energy and resources that go first, then complexity unwinds taking the population down with it. That assumes it’s not a catastrophic climate event that gets us first.

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            1. Retaining modernity is not the only attractive aspect of Alpert’s plan. I also like:
              – rewilding most of the planet
              – 3 city states far apart enough to prevent wars
              – reliance on hydro electricity (least of evils)

              Clearly it would not be possible to retain all aspects of modernity. Planes, cars, advanced cell phones, advanced medical procedures, etc. would be abandoned.

              I expect a few 10’s of millions of people could maintain the most valuable sewage and water treatment, medical, dentistry, and eyecare technology, an internet with simple PCs and old style cell phones, electric lighting, etc.

              I wish Jack would participate here in these discussions. I know he has good answers to these criticisms. Jack prefers to speak one on one and rarely participates in public forums.

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              1. I don’t find the continuance of modernity attractive. I like the idea of rewilding though. Hydroelectric plants are ecocidal and temporary; they are completely unsustainable, as are all aspects of modernity. If medical science and application continued, population would start to increase again then sometime down the line we’d be in almost exactly the same position as now.

                I agree with Hideaway that the level of population envisaged (and the much lower energy availability) would not support the complexity needed to maintain modernity.

                You can’t take the species out of humans.

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              2. You are correct. When I was writing that it was from the point of view of a techno-cornucopian.
                I fully agree with the re-wilding of great areas of agricultural land.

                The part of Jack’s plan that wont work is the modernity based on just hydro electricity. That implies all machinery is electric, including everything industrial, agricultural and for mining. While the 3 cities may work for a couple of thousand years, it’s not really ‘long term’.

                I did a calculation for a response to a recycling question on another forum about copper. If we assume 95% recyclability over a 50 yeartime frame, and in the next 20 years we get to 2 billion tonnes in existence (not going to happen), then after 100 generations or 5,000 years, ‘we’ are down to less than 10 million tonnes of useful copper left.

                My question for Jack is how do we mine copper in really low grades, in isolated places around the world, based on limited hydro power in 5000 years time? Likewise for every other metal and mineral. That’s before we get to not so minor issues of how do we recycle metals that are ‘composites’ without high level heat from fossil fuels?

                The more I think of it, even writing this post, the more impossible any type of modernity with just 3 cities of about 33m people each becomes, of for that matter a city of 33m people. How much hydro electricity would be needed for each of these cities in the manufacture of everything needed. How would all the materials be moved? How much land without fertilizer needs to be used? Suddenly we are talking a couple of hundred kilometers to move ‘stuff’ all based on nearby hydro power? How big are the hydro electric dams? Dam the Amazon to produce the power for one city??

                On the surface it sounds like a great plan to maintain some modernity, but the nitty gritty details totally kills it.

                I’ve come to the conclusion that modernity, that requires cities, is impossible in the long term because of energy use that needs to grow exponentially on a finite planet due to entropy and dissipation of all the metals needed for modernity.

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                2. I wish Jack was here to defend his plan because I’m not fluent in all the details. I think he would agree with most of your points including some you missed like the fact that hydro dams silt in.

                  Here are a few points of his plan that I recall:
                  – city state sites are located next to existing hydro power and good agricultural land
                  – some oil will be required for critical activities like mining
                  – recycling is understood to require an injection of new materials to replace losses
                  – the long term depends on a miracle like fusion being discovered

                  For me, the key point is that even if everything you say is true and Alpert’s plan is impossible, even in the short term, getting our population down quickly should still be our highest priority goal because it will reduce suffering and improve the chances for the people that remain, and other species, regardless of the destination lifestyle.

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                  1. I’ve acquainted myself with Jack’s plan several times, and every time I think about the nitty gritty, it doesn’t work. Also fantasy stuff like fusion will not be possible in a very limited world, hell, we can’t do fusion with an entire world’s resources and efforts from millions of scientists now, what hope with only 1.5% of the scientists of today (from all 3 cities)?

                    Fusion is another energy sink, even if ITER was to work. What most, and certainly Jack doesn’t understand, is that complexity has it’s own high energy cost. It’s the same misunderstanding most people have in the energy cost of building something like a nuclear reactor.

                    You don’t just take 1000 people from a H&G village in PNG to build and operate the nuclear plant. The people needed must be highly trained. But we don’t just take 1,000 people from H&G societies and highly train them either.

                    We send ALL our young to schools, hundreds of millions (billions?) of them. From these millions, not all make it to senior levels of high school. Of those that do, only 10% choose to do physics or high level math. Of those only a small percentage go on to study physics at University. From this paper….

                    Click to access Physics-Students-in-UK-Universities-HESA-Data-Brief.pdf

                    … only 1% of university students study physics. Of that low percentage only a very small number go on to do a Phd.. How many go on to do their Phd’s in nuclear physics? very very few….Overall the pool of those expert enough to design, build and operate a nuclear power plant are few, yet we started by educating millions.

                    It’s exactly the same for every high end aspect of the modernity we have, there is a huge energy and people cost of getting the expertise needed and this energy cost is ignored by everyone including Jack Alpert…

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                    1. I don’t remember Jack’s exact position on fusion but I think he knows it has super low probability of success and is at least 100+ years out.

                      Fusion is not central to the plan. Population reduction is central to the plan.

                      Population reduction benefits all outcomes regardless what you believe is possible in the long term.

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                    2. I can’t agree more that population reduction is essential to any plan. But the plan needs to be realistic to have any chance of success. What does sustainability mean? That is the key question. For me, it’s simple. No non-renewable resources (of course, existing non-renewable materials could be used for a very long time, with low population, but the plan would need to eventually move to having no new such materials). Renewable resources only utilised at or, preferably, below their renewal rates. Minimal environmental damage. To me, these basic requirements mean that only a hunter-gatherer society is possible, as a sustainable society. But humans being a clever species will never stay that way.

                      No humans is probably the only sustainable plan. But assuming there was some way to stop humans acting like a species, I wish all plans for future living arrangements could be realistic.

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                    3. Mike, I agree with this, the only chance of sustainability is for hunter gatherer type lifestyles, but humans are humans and now that knowledge of ‘something more’ exists, then humans will always strive for more, meaning that humans are not part of the long term sustainability of life on this planet.

                      Because anything like Jack Alpert’s plan will be rejected out of hand by the majority of people, then where we actually go is further into overshoot until eventual collapse, most likely taking every form of macro fauna with us, leading to our own extinction, from lack of the hunter bit of hunter gathering. Also modern human’s brain size is about 10% smaller than humans from before the agricultural period. Are we smart enough to survive as hunter gatherers??

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  14. This interview by Thomas Carrigan of Dr. Robert Malone 9 days ago is excellent. They discuss DoD and CIA involvement in the Wuhan lab and the aggressive propaganda and censorship campaign of the US government since WWII.

    They also step back and consider the big picture that would be seen by an unaligned alien and conclude that the US is systematically moving war material closer to Russia and China in preparation for a big conflict.

    Malone discloses that his view of the world has done a 180 since the start of covid from “we are the good guys” to “we are the bad guys”.

    As a side note I have been trying to figure out something swirling around Malone. The covid dissident community is a hot mess with deep divisions that fight (or ignore) the other while not unifying to attack the real enemy, the pharma cartel. There is a significant group that believes Malone is an evil double agent working for pharma. I see no evidence of this. I did see Malone swallow the CIA/DoD narrative in the early days of covid but he now admits he was duped like everyone else and I respect someone who admits an error.

    So what’s the real reason for attacking Malone? I’m thinking there are two possibilities:
    1) they hate he’s politically aligned with the right
    2) his critics are employed by the pharma cartel to undermine a well connected previous insider who is a big threat

    I’d guess 1) is the correct answer but I’m not sure.

    https://rumble.com/v4e7xn5-who-was-pulling-the-strings-in-wuhan-dr.-robert-malone-tpc-1421.html

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  17. One of New Zealand’s media outlets (Newshub) is being closed down by their American owners (Warner Bros).
    Newshub received public funding to spout covid propaganda under the Ardern leadership. It must have backfired for them as their viewership no longer can support the 300-strong organisation. While there is some sympathy for people losing jobs, many of us can’t help but feel Newshub deserves to be closed down. They were brutal in publicly shaming and witch-hunting anyone who dared to even suggest a different point of view.
    This change will leave New Zealand with only one TV news broadcaster (state-owned).

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  18. A student wishing to attend many universities today, including Harvard, must agree to wave their Nuremburg code rights and inject themselves with an inadequately tested novel transfection technology with many known serious side effects and zero benefits to the young person or those nearby.

    What are people with PhD’s teaching our children?

    Can a PhD be revoked for unethical ignorant behavior?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Code

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  20. I like Rintrah’s essay today. He slams climate change denial and e/acc morons. I had to look up e/acc:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_accelerationism

    We old timers call it techno-utopianism.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/e-acc-another-delusion/

    e/acc, another delusion

    When you meet a schizophrenic on the side of the street, who starts arguing to you that the sun is following him around, you generally don’t bother arguing against him. There’s just no point.

    I kind of feel like that about the climate change “skeptics” too. I include among those ranks essentially all idiots, including the idiots who think we can just adapt to the changes. We know that every previous major episode of warming induced by the Milankovitch cycles triggered various positive feedbacks, that were responsible for most of the warming. In our case fossil fuels caused the initial warming, but it will continue with these positive feedback loops that are now starting to reveal themselves.

    The planet can adjust to global warming, sure. It preserves life, by covering its surface in trees that absorb excess moisture, create shade for animals, fixate the soils, sequester carbon and reduce temperatures beneath their canopy, through evapotranspiration. But since our civilization depends on a handful of cereal grains fed to humans and to the animals we eat, rather than on mature trees in biodiverse forests, that means one of us has to go.

    This is essentially true for the e/acctards too. These are the most delusional human beings you will encounter. They imagine that developing superhuman level artificial intelligence will somehow solve our problems. This is insanity. To start with, you could not have true freedom, in a world that is being rearranged by a computer that is smarter than us human beings. It would subject us all to a kind of totalitarian technological determinism, where we are left making no meaningful choices of our own. It would be the end of human dignity.

    Artists are already running into that problem. In a world where any moron can make an algorithm rearrange combinations of other people’s photographs and drawings, people who actually have the talent to use their own brain to produce new art, are left with lives stripped of meaning and dignity. There is exactly nobody out there whose life has been improved by the endless streams of junk now produced by these algorithms, which is just sophisticated plagiarism. But there are plenty, who had their purpose and calling taken away from them.

    But more importantly, the e/acctards don’t want to recognize the limits to growth. They imagine there must be some sort of global conspiracy to suppress nuclear energy, rather than our society discovering the simple problem that safe reactors are expensive. If you have had seventy years to demonstrate your nuclear utopia, but nuclear capacity is being phased out around the world, the reality is that your fantasies are just indistinguishable from those of people peddling cars that run on water and cold fusion.

    There are other aspects where you can recognize the laws of physics are fine-tuned for biological intelligence too. DNA is capable of storing information at least eight orders of magnitude denser than our own best technologies. Your brain can store more memories than a Facebook data center. And your brain is able to use energy more efficiently. The most powerful supercomputers consume a million times more energy to perform the same tasks as a human brain.

    So the jig was up, before it started. You can rearrange art and images made by human beings with an algorithm. You could even try spreading brain-damaging viruses to make people dumber, in hopes of making computers appear smarter than them. But you can not change the simple fact that the laws of physics favor biological intelligence over the inventions of ugly men with bald heads.

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  21. Indrajit Samarajiva today takes a different spin on the border “crisis”.

    https://indi.ca/americas-border-crisis-is-made-up/

    America’s Border Crisis Is Made-Up

    People coming to your declining country to pick your food and take care of your grandparents is not a ‘crisis’. Migrants are just the most regular victims trotted out into the Cable-TV Colosseum, so American citizens can give a pious thumbs up or thumbs down, then get back to not paying attention. America’s a colony, constant migration is required to keep the scam going, but those migrants must be constantly dehumanized, to keep them as exploitable as possible. America is a ladder, constantly kicking down. American coverage of the migration crisis never once looks at the cause. It’s not cause America is so fucking awesome, it’s because America is so awful to everyone down south. People wouldn’t go to America if America wasn’t fucking up their countries in the first place! This is the crisis and America is the cause.

    The crisis is what America does to every country south of them. America is assassinating, couping, corrupting, and exploiting in every country south of the border, and they wonder why people come up. Maybe stop fucking up their homes and they’d stay there? Maybe stop overthrowing their governments and just leave them alone?

    The second point is that borders are themselves colonial bullshit. Human beings have been walking up and down the Americas for thousands of years. Just because Napoleon sold some Jefferson an NFTs two hundred years ago doesn’t mean shit. This land was never theirs to divvy up. America has no right to draw a line in the sand and drown everyone south of it. They’re the illegal immigrants. They’re the invasive species, bringing drugs, guns, and destroying communities. From colonizers, it’s important to remember, every accusation is a confession. It’s frankly hilarious watching Americans and Australian complain about migrants. Bitch, where did you come from?

    The people crossing the border are not the problem. The problem is the border, and everything America does on either side of it. America’s border crisis is made-up and it won’t end until the febrile mind making up the problem is put out of its misery. Americans are already doing it to themselves, through deaths of despair, but the border crisis won’t be solved until the nation itself collapses, inshallah.

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  22. I’d forgotten how good Alan Urban’s site Collapse Musings is. His essay today is excellent.

    https://www.collapsemusings.com/the-collapse-will-be-normalized/

    The Collapse Will Be Normalized

    As civilization collapses, the media will attempt to normalize things like war, famine, and genocide. Don’t let them.

    The reason I’m writing today is because Aaron Bushnell said something that really stood out to me. Referring to the genocide in Gaza, he said, “This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

    I often wonder how people will react as the collapse of civilization unfolds. What will they do when countries start fighting over basic resources such as water? What will they say when power grids fail and tens of thousands die in heat waves? Will they finally wake up and demand an end to the system that is destroying our planet and making it uninhabitable for billions?

    Maybe, but probably not. Why? Because war, famine, and mass casualty events will be normalized. In fact, they already have been. Just think about all the crazy things happening in the world that are now considered normal.

    The national debt is going up by over a trillion dollars a year, something that is obviously unsustainable and will end in disaster. I remember how worried everyone was when the national debt crossed the $10 trillion mark back in 2008. But now, it’s normal.

    2023 was by far the hottest year in recorded history. Thousands of high-temperature records were broken all around the world, and records continue to be broken every day. When we first learned that July was the hottest month ever, people were shocked. But now, it’s normal.

    2023 also had multiple record-breaking wildfires. Canada’s wildfire season was particularly bad, burning nearly 50 million acres. This was a huge story last summer, especially when New York City was shrouded in smoke. Canada is still burning. But now, it’s normal.

    Ocean temperatures have been off the charts for over a year, a clear sign that climate change is accelerating. When ocean temperatures first skyrocketed last year, climate scientists struggled to find the words to explain how unusual it was, resorting to terms like gobsmackingly bananas. But now, it’s normal.

    The Covid-19 virus has killed at least 3 million people and is still killing hundreds of people every day. I remember when then pandemic began and how horrified everyone was to learn that hundreds of people were dying daily. But now, it’s normal.

    The U.S. and Russia are pouring billions of dollars into a war over country that just happens to be rich in resources like natural gas and good farmland. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people have died. When the war in Ukraine began, everyone was terrified it would lead to nuclear armageddon. But now, it’s normal.

    And of course, the IDF—using bombs from the US—continues to kill children whose only crime was being born on a piece of land that Israel wants for itself. When Israel first started indiscriminately bombing the Gaza strip, most people were surprised. But now, it’s normal.

    I used to think that once the collapse became obvious, society would wake up and change. But right now, the fact that our civilization is in the early stages of collapse is pretty goddamn obvious, yet most people look at the world today and consider it perfectly normal. Even when a flood wipes out half a country’s breadbasket and displaces millions of people, government officials still say things like, “It’s called weather.”

    They know their policies are destroying the planet and causing untold suffering, but they don’t care. As long as those policies keep making them richer, they’ll never stop, and they’ll do everything in their power to convince you that this is the way of the world, and that you should shut up and get back to work.

    Don’t let them. Never forget that this is not normal. This is not how things should be.

    While it’s too late to prevent climate breakdown and the collapse of civilization, it’s not too late to prevent more violence and brutality like what we’re witnessing in Gaza and many other places around the world.

    Keep protesting. Keep resisting. Keep standing up for what’s right, no matter how much it hurts. That’s what Aaron Bushnell did, and that’s why he’ll never be forgotten.

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    1. I have to take back what I said above. Alpert does participate on public forums, just not at un-Denial, despite me being his biggest supporter over the years.

      Jack Alpert left the following comment on Urban’s essay. I agree with Alpert, except he missed that we must first confront our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

      Alan you have many things correct but assigning the atrocities to “….our ruling class …” is incorrect. Getting Rid of Atrocities requires a different view.

      Today’s Israel Gaza atrocities are the latest examples of human history.

      1. Each atrocity follows from a conflict.

      2. Each conflict follows from a scarcity.

      3. Each scarcity follows from “too many people” dividing earth’s services.

      There are a dozen other causes of scarcity. However, if these other causes were resolved “too many people” would cause scarcity without them.

      The “too many people condition” is determined by billions of personal birth choices. Births are rewarded by immediate easily understood personal benefits. Atrocities, being temporally distant, and non personal have little influence.

      —- the atrocities will not stop until perception of the injuries caused by birth choices diminish population enough to eliminate scarcity.

      Jack Alpert http://www.skil.org

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      1. I understand it but the tendency to focus on birth rate as the way to lower population seems to be a blinkered approach. If the planet gets down to 100 million through dropping birth rates, the three cities will be populated primarily by a very old population with few young people. Nothing that Alpert envisages has any chance of success with most people being over 60, say.

        Just as very few even mention the population problem, even fewer seem to want to entertain the idea that increasing life expectancy is not a good thing for any society, ultimately.

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        1. I don’t think you understand Alpert’s plan. Old people stay where they are. No one is permitted to have any children except the few young lottery winners that are relocated to one of the 3 city states.

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          1. Oh. So there is a limit to how old humans can be? Is there a service to allow a peaceful, painless death for them? What does he want medical services for, since that tends to increase life expectancy?

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            2. There’s already a limit to how old people can be and it will be reducing a lot in the not too distant future when resource depletion kicks in. There will be lots of young people who do not win the lottery and because they are not permitted to have children will have nothing better to do than look after the old people. When that runs out a steam due to a lack of food or some other critical resource I assume we would provide some means for people to choose a peaceful painless death.

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              1. Alpert’s plan isn’t in motion, so there is no “already.” My point is that a functioning society will need a good proportion of young people. If he’s got that sorted then good, though it will still not be sustainable.

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          2. What are these new city states built with? Do we use fossil fuels to build them? How do they ‘gather’ metals to be recycled from other places that still have lots of old people in them? How big and how many factories need to be built in these new city states to produce the ‘stuff’ of modernity for the selected people?
            What’s the economic system of the new cities based upon if not current economics? Who builds or supplies what bits of the new cities?

            I’m afraid the plan, being broad without thinking of the detail is doomed to failure before getting to first base. I’m with Mike on this, it’s just not possible with the way humans are wired. Cities are what they are because of the way humans are ‘wired’ into the growth and profit motive (ie MPP). Take away growth and profit and why would anyone do anything for anyone else in these new cities??

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            1. Full awareness of reality makes Alpert’s plan, or something like it, an obvious optimal path, if the goal is to retain some of our best scientific and technology accomplishments.

              If you think it is hopeless to retain any of our accomplishments, and believe we must return to hunter gatherer lifestyles, then the core of Alpert’s plan, rapid population reduction, is still a worthy top priority.

              Which is why I have tried, without success, to get Alpert to add finding a way to acknowledge and override MORT in his plan.

              Without awareness of reality we will stay on our current path resulting in the loss of most other species and ecosystems required for what remains of our species, with unimaginable and unnecessary suffering along the way.

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              1. As I put in the other thread we have going about Jack Alpert’s plan (could you combine the 2 if possible, please), the only way to keep modernity of any type is with the complexity we have. Maintaining the level of complexity using things like computers, mobile phones, TV’s etc will not be possible with much lower populations and energy use. We take thousands of factories from around the world to make all the small specialist parts in bulk quantities for the system to work.

                None of these factories could survive on small runs of anything. The raw materials needed by all these separate factories come from mines from all over the planet. Most minute quantity metals cannot be recycled, they get discarded in the slag from recovery of main metals like copper and silver, and it’s still done with fossil fuels. Even the hydrometallurgical route using acids, we find the source of the materials come from fossil fuels..

                Even with a much smaller population, we’d need mines all over the world and still need oil to do the mining and transporting, plus ‘settlements’ all over the globe at these locations. What happens when the mines and oil fields run out? you need geologists to scour the planet for more..

                If we think ‘long term’ in terms of a million years plus, which is still short term on geologic time scales, then Jack’s plan falls to pieces. At best we get a few generations of salvaging as much as possible from other areas, but that’s it. Perhaps with collapse we get something like Jack’s plan happening anyway with a few strong city states taking from everyone else, until they also collapse when there is nothing left to salvage.

                The part of Jack’s plan I agree with is getting the population down as much as possible as quickly as possible and I suppose there has to be the ‘carrot’ of having modernity continuing for some to make it seem plausible. Realistically though, there is nothing that can save modernity, once the resources are used, they are gone and so is modernity. I suspect all hopes of ‘saving’ something, even the good bits of modernity (and likely civilization itself) are just the denial gene kicking in…

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                1. I looked at merging your comments but my brain broke trying to decide what goes where. If you really want it cleaned up, please send me the edits and what you want deleted. I think it’s ok the way it is.

                  You make a very strong argument about the impossibility of retaining any advanced technology.

                  I suppose a blacksmithed saw can be considered advanced compared to a stone axe so maybe we can retain some technology.

                  Glad we agree on the most important population reduction point. Everything improves for all species with fewer people.

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                  1. This guy has 11 million subscribers and regularly demonstrates technologies that are possible without fossil energy.

                    Primitive Technology: One-Way Blower Iron Smelt & Forging Experiment

                    About This Video:
                    I tested the one-way spinning blower in an iron smelt and it is more effective than the previous both way spinning blower. Using the same amount of ore and charcoal, the original blower yielded 30 g of iron where as the new blower yielded 51 g. The previous all time record was 41 g from several years ago but the new blower it beat that by 10 g on its first run. The energy saved by having the fan spin constantly in one direction no doubt contributes to the better performance of the blower. As with the old blower, the new one produces high carbon iron prills (cast iron blobs) in slag. The brittle slag crushes easily while the iron prills remain intact to be picked out by hand or gravity separated with panning. The iron prills were also quite large and more numerous than smelts done with the old blower.

                    Also in this video is a forging experiment. Using iron from previous smelts, a crude bar of iron was melted together into in a mold. The iron prills were placed in a clay mold, put into a forge and heated with charcoal using a flat nozzle tuyere. The process produced a 8cm long, 2.5cm wide bar. This bar was then heated to a red heat with wood for a while to anneal it, making it malleable in theory. However, when I tried to forge it, it crumbled apart. The waste iron was set aside in a pot for re-smelting so as not to lose it.

                    About Primitive Technology:
                    Primitive technology is a hobby where you build things in the wild completely from scratch using no modern tools or materials. These are the strict rules: If you want a fire, use a fire stick – An axe, pick up a stone and shape it – A hut, build one from trees, mud, rocks etc. The challenge is seeing how far you can go without utilizing modern technology. I do not live in the wild, but enjoy building shelter, tools, and more, only utilizing natural materials. To find specific videos, visit my playlist tab for building videos focused on pyrotechnology, shelter, weapons, food & agriculture, tools & machines, and weaving & fiber.

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                    1. I love those videos and have the book, though I’m not sure I’d ever use those techniques. Stuff like the above is extremely time consuming and not all areas might have appropriate resources for the various technologies but I hope that kind of knowledge can hang around. It will remain primitive technology, though.

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                  2. This bit from Alice Friedmann’s latest post, pretty much kills off Jack Alpert’s plan for any type of modernity, which includes today’s phones, computers, etc, which is what most people would mean by maintaining modernity…

                    “A 1960s telephone, complete with a rotary dial, at most would have required around 10 raw materials, such as aluminum and zinc. A 1990s mobile phone contained another 19 raw materials, including copper, cobalt, and lead. Today’s smartphones have more than 50 raw materials in the smartphone’s battery, casing, screen, and electronic. All of these have to be mined, creating tremendous pollution from tailings left behind and processing the ore: Aluminum, Americum, Antimony, Barium, Beryllium, Bismuth, Bromine, Calcium, Carbon, Chlorine, Chromium, Cobalt, Copper, Erbium, Iron, Fluorine, Gadolinium, Gallium, Germanium, Gold, Hafnium, Indium, Iodine, Iridium, Oead, Lithium, Magnesium, Manganese, Neodymium (what makes your phone vibrate), Neon, Nickel, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Palladium, Phosphorus, Platinum, Potassium, Rubidium, Scandium, Silicon, Silver, Sodium, Strontium, Sulphur, Tellurium, Thallium, Titanium, Tungsten, Vanadium, Yttrium, Zinc, Zirconium. The touchscreen is thanks to traces of ITO — indium tin oxide.”

                    There are only a few of those minerals recovered by recycling, most end up dumped because we have no way of recovering them, being minute quantities in each device. We’d need the mines from around the world continuing for the 3 cities, which means settlements and populations everywhere, plus food gathering from local environment etc..

                    Without modernity, having 3 large cities is impossible anyway, as we couldn’t get enough food into those cities, unless the populations were in the thousands not millions. Could anyone ‘sell’ just 3 medieval type cities to the world’s population as a whole? Or would people prefer to believe in the fairytales of ongoing modernity and all it’s conveniences?

                    How far ‘back’ (as in what type of era), would we have to go to retain ‘something’ of modernity for the long term? I’m afraid that whenever I look at the nitty gritty details of anything we do, it turns out to be unsustainable in the long term.

                    We have arrived at our modern civilization by always going forward, using more resources in the process, by growing and giving every individual the chance or possibility of being better off by ‘working hard’. (or at least selling the delusion that they could be better off).

                    The complexity we have only works for a large population, that can perform every task required in modern civilization. We can’t just cut out 50-70% or maybe more of the existing system and expect it to continue functioning. Take away cruise ships, fancy cars and holidays from those that can afford them and what incentive do top nuclear physicists, or surgeons, or statistics professors have to work long hours to keep on top of their fields? People work as hard as they do and/or become educated over a decades to get to the top of their fields to ‘get ahead’ for themselves and their families.

                    Jack Alpert’s plan is also one of denial of reality. It’s an entire system we have, not just ‘parts’ that can be saved. Humans have had civilizations for thousands of years, with one commonality, they all failed. Now we expect a much larger version, that encompasses the entire world to have a different result, which we all know on this website is not going to work or happen.

                    However believing we can save a small percentage of modern civilization in a couple of small areas so we don’t have a damaging effect on the ecosphere, is just another form of denial of the reality, that it took an entire world’s worth of resources to get to modern civilization and would need the entire world’s worth of resources (people included) to maintain it. Perhaps trying to promote that type of plan is just part of the bargaining phase of the grief of knowing how far we are into overshoot.

                    Don’t worry about the combining threads, I was only asking if it was easily possible.

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                    1. I see your point. I’d vote to stockpile enough minerals to last a couple hundred years to maintain rotary phones, electric lights, eyeglasses, and dentist drills, but eventually we’d have to give them up.

                      It’s not much different than the food we preppers have put away. It won’t save us in the long run. It will only buy some time for us to come up with sustainable solution, like working on a farm, or to expire at a time and in a manner of our choosing.

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                    2. I guess that’s a reasonable strategy. Sell a solution that the masses could accept, but one which has measurably less impact on the plant. Implement it. When it becomes clear that it is no solution, with the planet’s life support systems, and life itself, deteriorating further, then another approach can be tried. Again, this lessens the impact and retains some aspects of modernity. Until that doesn’t work. Rinse and repeat. The only problem with this (other than humans are a species) is that the environment worsens at every stage, even if there are small wins along the way. But it may be the only way to get people on board to a lower standard of living.

                      Having said that, I don’t suppose enough people would get on board until the damage is so severe that it would really take a complete collapse to start convincing the majority that something must be done. Even then, I wouldn’t be optimistic.

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                    3. Exactly Rob!! We are clearly in a predicament, with no-one wanting to realize it. I’m just as bad, making sure we have enough supplies of all types for a period of time. But that’s all it is, a period of time, certainly not ‘long term’.

                      Basically, our predicament fully explains the Fermi Paradox of why we haven’t been able to contact aliens. Given physics, chemistry and biology are probably the same throughout the universe, then any life on other planets that reached our level of civilization, inevitably collapsed just like we will, for exactly the same reasons.

                      Therefore if they did send out radio signals, it was only for a short time of a couple of hundred years at best.

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                    4. I agree but would add one point.

                      I don’t think we could have developed the advanced unsustainable technology we have without that rare double mutation for an extended theory of mind with denial of mortality. And of course also be blessed with the rare geologic/biologic circumstances that created 2×10**12 barrels of buried oil.

                      Point being that that our predicament will be very rare in the universe, and the aliens won’t be any more rational than we are.

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      1. I assumed Alan Urban was talking about deaths from mRNA side effects which will probably continue because some of the side-effects like heart tissue scarring, clots, and cancer from immune system damage are permanent.

        The covid disease threat is over for now but there’s still a lot of mutating virus in circulation because we vaccinated billions in the middle of a pandemic with a non-sterilizing vaccine, which for a hundred years we knew was a no-no but did it anyway, and some see signs of a mutation trend to increased virulence, so there is some non-zero probability it will come back with a vengeance.

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      2. As Alan Urban said, hundreds of deaths per day from COVID-19 is now normal.

        (Not sure why the cases graph is shown; that’s largely an irrelevant number with so little testing going on)

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    3. Maybe I’m a big meany or I’m just getting old, but I’m pretty confident you could write the same essay in any of the recent decades. Apart from some recent climatic changes, there’s nothing new in any of this.

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  23. I believe the recent Sen. Ron Johnson roundtable (also discussed above) is the single best encapsulation to date of the wide range of covid crimes that were committed by the pharma cartel.

    https://rumble.com/v4fpw4c-federal-health-agencies-and-the-covid-cartel-what-are-they-hiding.html

    Here is a transcript of the entire proceedings:

    https://amidwestdoctor.substack.com/p/transcript-of-senator-ron-johnsons

    If you do not have time to watch the 4 hour video this collection of presentation summaries published today is excellent:

    https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/this-senate-panel-on-the-vaccines

    Ron Johnson has gradually become one of my favorite senators in American history. In 2020, he repeatedly advocated for early COVID-19 treatments to be made available to Americans (which had they been made available would have ended the pandemic).

    Throughout 2021, he spoke out against the vaccine mandates and in November hosted a panel at the Senate which scrutinized the federal vaccine mandates and exposed how poorly those who experienced severe COVID-19 vaccine injuries were being treated. In January 2022, he hosted a panel which scrutinized the entire COVID-19 response, and in December of 2022, he hosted a panel focusing on everything we now know about the vaccines.

    Being one of the most outspoken critics of the vaccination program in American history got him a lot of pushback, and in 2022, he decided to postpone his retirement to go through a grueling re-election campaign so there would be someone in the government who could advocate for everyone whose lives had been ruined by the COVID vaccines.

    Despite being public enemy number one of the pharmaceutical industry, Johnson narrowly won, becoming the first politician in America’s history to run on the vaccine safety issue and win. Since then Johnson has kept his promise and fought for the vaccine injured (along with taking a variety of other difficult but important positions such as giving one of the most poignant speeches I’ve heard on the Ukraine War when he tried to block the Senate from continuing to fund it).

    A lot of work has gone into producing each of the vaccine panels he’s hosted. On Monday, he hosted “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” When it was all said and done, I believe this panel was the most effective presentation I have seen for explaining what happened throughout COVID-19 and waking people up to how much they have been lied to. Because of this I strongly encourage you to watch or share his presentation with people who you think might be open to understanding exactly what was done to all of us.

    Since the entire panel was 4 hours long, I recognize that many of you will not be able to watch all of it. For that reason, I tried to highlight what I felt were it’s most important parts.

    Since Johnson packed this presentation with so many impactful points, it was quite hard to decide which was the best one to conclude it with. Eventually however, I settled on this one, which while brief, I believe is the critically important message all Americans can agree with:

    https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/i/142113942/conclusion

    It is remarkable how much each successive panel Johnson has hosted has improved upon the one which preceded it. I consider this to be both a product of how dedicated each participant has been to fixing this mess and how much the alternative media has facilitated the production of high quality information that has rapidly unravelled the immensely complex web we were trapped within.

    Without each of your supporting the wonderful community of dissident authors on Substack, much of this would likely have never happened, and I thank each of you from the bottom of my heart for giving me the opportunity to be part of it.

    Lastly, if you have anyone close to you who is on the fence about the vaccines, please consider sharing this article or a video of Johnson’s panel with them; it’s something than can persuade people who are at last beginning to become open to hearing the truth and we have reached the moment where it is critical for the truth to reach as many people as possible.

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    2. The midwesterndoctor.com’s summaries were published on Zerohedge today. Hopefully that means they get much wider play. I agree that Senator Johnson is an exemplary leader, even if he is a Republican.
      AJ

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    1. I try to keep left/right partisan politics out of un-Denial because it reduces the quality of discussions on our overshoot polycrisis which for the most part has nothing to do with left/right beliefs.

      Please avoid posting political opinions that will upset those who vote differently than you. Ditto for others who might post something political that will upset you.

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  25. https://www.collapsemusings.com/you-think-the-holocaust-was-bad-just-wait/
    I was reading this hair-raising article by Alan Urban about climate refugees.

    As I already pointed out, there are going to be upwards of a billion climate refugees over the next couple decades as the planet heats up faster and faster. Water shortages will lead to widespread disease and crop failures. Meanwhile, heatwaves will cause so much demand for air conditioning that power grids fail and millions die from heatstroke.

    Naturally, people living in places where the heat, disease, and food shortages are worst will try to escape to somewhere cooler and more stable. And can you blame them? If you feared that your children were going to starve or die in a heatwave, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to get them somewhere safer?
    …
    As Michael said, “Our societies will become brutal.” The challenge will be to hold onto our humanity no matter what happens. To stand up for the oppressed no matter how difficult or dangerous it gets. Not because it will save society or even because it’s the right thing to do.

    There will be billion climate refugees by 2050. I am in my mid 20’s, so I was born about a quarter of a century ago, 2050 is basically quarter of a century away. How will governments respond to such a situation? Do they have any plan for that? They are already struggling to handle current refugee flows.

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    1. How governments will respond is a good question. Here is one way to view what is going on in geopolitics that might provide some hope.

      Let’s assume our leaders do understand our overshoot predicament, and let’s assume they are good people trying to make the future as good as possible given their political constraints, and the polarized science-ignorant citizens they lead.

      A = action
      I = interpretation

      A: impressive global agreements to reduce CO2 emissions in the future but not today
      I: of course we can’t reduce CO2 emissions without crashing the economy, but it’s going to happen soon anyway due to energy depletion, which will improve the forecasts of climate models, so let’s use what time we have before the system crashes to build as soft a landing zone as possible

      A: green energy transition
      I: of course we can’t run modernity on solar panels but some electricity is better than no electricity

      A: good news! peak demand due to the green revolution is lowering oil consumption
      I: we must hide supply shortages caused by geologic depletion to avoid panic

      A: ban gasoline cars and promote EVs
      I: both emit roughly the same CO2 but let’s ban vehicles that will expose our energy shortages, and replace them with vehicles most people can’t afford

      A: ban diesel cars to reduce air pollution
      I: we need to conserve diesel for tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships

      A: decrease meat/dairy production and consumption
      I: it doesn’t matter if meat/dairy is healthy or not, or causes climate change or not, because for a given amount of fossil energy, industrial agriculture can produce more carbohydrate calories than meat/dairy calories, and we can’t feed 8 billion with non-industrial farming

      A: ignore health problems created by sugar
      I: we need to lower the average life expectancy

      A: you will own nothing and be happy
      I: the financial system will soon collapse without growth so governments will be forced to nationalize everything including home ownership, plus resource scarcity will make sharing of expensive assets a good policy for social cohesion

      A: insane and growing deficits
      I: we collapse without growth, and the only way to achieve growth is to force it with debt, plus inflation is much better than a global depression

      A: digital currency
      I: we need a mechanism to force fair rationing of energy and food, and we need a means to have negative interest rates without causing everyone to withdraw their money from banks

      A: covid panic
      I: let’s get rid of some useless expensive eaters in a humane way by putting them on ventilators and sedating them with narcotics

      A: force mRNA injections into everyone whether they need it or not
      I: let’s design a gene therapy transfection drug that reduces fertility in young people and kills old people, oops, so sorry, we tried but there were some unexpected side effects

      A: Ukraine war
      I: our friends the Europeans will die without Russian energy at cost

      A: Gaza war
      I: there isn’t enough land and water for both Israelis and Palestinians, and we need our military base called Israel to retain control of the last good reserves of fossil energy for ourselves and our friends

      A: WHO treaty
      I: we need a global mechanism for forcing lockdowns and controlling the movement of people to hide energy shortages

      A: open borders
      I: climate change will kill many poor people who did not cause the problem so the fair thing to do is to help them to migrate to the rich countries that created the problem, plus we might be able to squeeze a few more years of growth by adding low wage workers

      A: media censorship
      I: citizens do not understand our overshoot predicament, and won’t believe us if we tell them, so we have to control the narrative to maintain social order and avoid destructive revolutions

      A: undermining democracy with lawfare against populist leaders
      I: populist leaders deny overshoot and do not support the above plan so we must block them anyway we can

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      1. Sorry, I don’t buy your interpretation. Here is mine 🙂

        There wouldn’t be a call for more children by many governments otherwise.
        We have recently seen the largest power and riches grab in the western world.
        Yes, at this point, the elite/ruling/owner class is aware of the impending crisis. They are using it as an opportunity and hope to shield themselves (their objective is not to lose an ounce of power: they are OK going back to feudalism, slavery, extermination…)
        There is no humanism in this. This is just the continuation of the war against life, the continuation of the same beliefs brought to the extreme: social darwinism, growth paradigm, exploitation of the weak (nature and then human), trust in human ingenuity (aka Science) and manipulations (the machiavellian prince) to achieve its goals, a hierarchical world view, an organisation of society based on ownership and legal documents…
        In France, I can definitely tell you there is no will to stabilize things from the government, only power grab. And the population is not all unaware. The current power is fighting to the last bit to keep growth going on (latest example: highway A69 https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Controversial-new-A69-motorway-in-southern-France-What-do-you-think)

        However, I trust the “higher force” (this is just a word for that which is more powerful than any human rule, I don’t necessarily mean a bearded old and wise guy), that these shenanigans will be put to good use (In other words, it may turn out as you describe in your interpretation, even though these are not the primary objective).
        The current people in power are dinosaurs and they are slowly cornering themselves. (As soon as they succeed to grab all the property rights, it will be rendered meaningless. Entropy will ensure this)

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        1. Hi Charles, you make good points.

          I was trying to give young Stallarwind72, who sounded depressed, a way of interpreting world affairs in a hopeful way.

          I didn’t say I believed everything in my story, although some things are for sure true.

          My beliefs frequently change.

          Today I think nobody is driving the bus and it’s filled with emotional status seeking monkeys having a food fight because there’s no grown-up bus driver to discipline them.

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          1. Yes 🙂 Sorry. I should have known better.

            As my comment just below shows, I am also oscillating between a few interpretations. I am like you: it may well be possible that even the people in position of power are simply afraid, just trying to control their little part of the world according to their small will (except they seem to have more impact. This may well just be an illusion)

            This is funny how our latest exchanges repeatedly lead to the same point.
            I seem to be stumbling before the wall of acceptance. That there are things I can’t know. That there may well be no driving forces (the notion of driving force may well be just a mental illusion, an interpretation, as invalid as the hierarchy of being). It is diffuse. Some would maybe say: God is everywhere and so is the devil 🙂

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        2. Just after publishing this previous comment, I had an after-thought.

          Truth be told, I have a less partisan and even simpler interpretation.

          I believe they fear collapse like everybody else. Their greatest fear revolves around that which they invest all their energy: riches and power. They know about the increasing difficulties of mineral/fossil fuels extraction. Maybe some are already losing money (in absolute terms, not relatively to the rest of the population). They are just focused on the dashboard and steering wheel available to them and like many of us, do not want to let go.

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      2. Wow Rob, that was awesome, you just about deciphered everything there is to deny on this blue-green planet. Of course this un-denial club is so cool that we would have our own decoder chart to which we can refer anytime we want to confirm the opposite side’s true agenda!

        A few comments back about the joys of re-wilding, yes that was what we thought we were achieving with letting a corner of our property go and allowing the blackberry to completely take over (it was actually because we didn’t have enough time to get on top of it, and then a season or two later it was really too late) but since getting the block ready for sale (and it has finally just been listed, hooray!) we had to hire in days of machinery and human labour to rip all of it out to bare ground, and had even more machinery cart truckloads of green “waste” away to the local tip so the place can look tidy and marketable. We refused to poison the ground for 25 years but who knows what the new owners will do? So disheartening, and yet that is what is expected in this sterile-making society, except that we seem to sterilise every other living thing except ourselves. Babies keep popping out in my circle of friends (the children of friends), it feels more and more disingenuous whenever I offer the expected congratulatory platitudes, on one hand I totally understand and am happy for the parents’ happiness but I also feel very sorry for the most difficult of times ahead for the young families.

        On the other end of the life scale, I am in great favour of being home-composted if that is at all possible. We have three huge compost bins that process our kitchen scraps and deposits from our humanure toilet. It reaches a temperature of 65-70C when activated so that should cook my bones just fine along with turning everything else into humus after about a year or so. We pop in dead wallaby found on the property and they completely disappear, so I don’t see why a human corpse wouldn’t do the same after some time. But in reality, at the height of the collapse catastrophe I think there will just be bodies piled up wherever they lie and most likely they will be burned in piles, and not buried in mass graves for the extra physical effort that would require. If one really wants to delve into gruesome history of the worst famines, there is a very obvious option for a recently deceased body.

        Oh dear, how did I end on such a salubrious note when it was all fun and games in the beginning?

        Namaste, everyone.

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        2. Congratulations on your progress Gaia. Very sad to let go of something you worked so hard on. Does this mean you are settling in one location for the full year?

          Perhaps if you threaten to compost your mother she might smarten up?

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          1. Hi Rob,

            Thank you for your kind appreciation of the ordeal (and that is truly the best descriptor even though we have now nearly reached a fulfilling conclusion), it means so much to have your encouragement and support through these past couple months just knowing you were all here whenever I needed to just decompress stress.

            You are very insightful, yes this means our family is moving closer to our goal of being all together in one climate zone full time, but it will still take a few years as my husband is not quite retirement ready but if need be and we are out of prep time, we can still confidently move to the subtropical location and hopefully make the best of our lives there.

            My mother is doing her best to cope, moods still swinging like a pendulum but I suppose that’s to be expected given the scope of the upheaval. Funnily enough she is quite aware of the up-coming collapse and doom and fear (lifelong) has been fuelling her neediness and dependency upon us, a constant energy sucking vortex. She has the usual denial that the effects aren’t going to happen to her, though. It’s interesting but both of our remaining parents (one each) seem desperate to keep living as they can whilst my husband and I, younger by a generation, don’t have anywhere near the will to live as they do. Perhaps it is because they are older that they feel their time is limited and even more precious, but really now all of us face that ticking time bomb with collapse hanging like Damocles’ sword. Both parents are religious, so that adds evidence that belief in an afterlife does nothing to mitigate fear of death, whereas we agnostics both seem very comfortable with (and even anticipatorily curious) the idea of completing our life cycle. Go figure.

            If you’re interested, I’ll send you a link to the property listing when it becomes live sometime next week.

            Hope you’re going well and getting through what you want to.

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            1. It will be good someday to not have to relocate long distances every year.

              Is your mother helping in the garden? A meaningful purpose and physical work might increase her happiness and reduce the time she spends annoying you.

              I would be interested in seeing you property listing.

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      3. This actually explains a lot about the last several years. If they really believe why not try to tell at least the more scientifically literate citizens about our situation. I think there are some citizens who would believe them, but unfortunately, there are many who would not.

        I suspect that some, (but not all) of our leaders are at least partially aware, but just don’t speak about it publicly. If a politician were to speak openly about overshoot, they would win my vote pretty quickly.

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    2. I would like to discuss this part

      The challenge will be to hold onto our humanity no matter what happens.

      Why? I would argue that the remaining individual is much better off as sooner as we throw this so called humanity out of the window. Or to use a quote from Georg Henrik von Wright:

      “What to do when a ship carrying a hundred passengers has suddenly capsized, and only one lifeboat is available for ten people in the water? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to pull more people onto it, thus drowning everyone. Those who love and respect life will instead grab an axe and sever the hands clinging to the gunwales.”

      Unpleasant, right?

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      1. My mistake, the quote is from Pentti Linkola (which is much more obvious) and not from Georg Henrik von Wright. Mea culpa. Actually Georg Henrik von Wright wrote the following reply. After that is an excerpt of Linkolas Book (Can Life Prevail?).

        “[…] As to what practical conclusions to draw from realising the truth, this is a different matter. Perhaps I too would strike at the hands that are clinging to the boat, but hardly for the love of life: rather, out of fear, in an attempt to save my own skin. Perhaps, it would be a better solution for all of us to drown, a final proof of the human species’ inability to survive.”

        The above letter proves how difficult it is for a great humanist to let go of the overemphasis on the value of human life. I think I can sense some fear between the lines, something I have previously encountered when discussing the issue of overpopulation. I call it the fear of breaking loose and of disgrace. People fear that if any actions are taken to limit the world population, the situation will spiral out of control and human life will somehow lose its value forever. It is also thought that after similar actions mankind will forever lose its sense of self worth by sullying its ethical values, and will be unable to restore any norms and conventions. This fear endures, regardless of how elegantly the reduction of the population might take place, were it even to occur more artlessly and discreetly than with the German gas chambers during World War II — possibly by limited nuclear strikes or through bacteriological and chemical attacks against the great inhabited centres of the globe (attacks carried out either by some trans-national body like the UN or by some small group equipped with sophisticated technology and bearing responsibility for the whole world).

        In the light of human history, I find this fear to derive from an obvious misconception. Whenever wars and mutual slaughter have ceased, societies have returned to their ordinary routine after only a brief period of transition. The massive depopulation operations of Stalin and Hitler, even the most gruesome tortures perpetrated by secret police forces, when described to the world audience in detail, have not overturned our ethical norms. It is often the case, in these scenarios, that in the block next to the secret police people are writing poetry, philosophising or helping their elderly neighbour.

        Our age has witnessed the gas chambers and many other atrocities. On a global scale, the main problem is not the inflation of human life, but its ever-increasing, mindless overvaluation. Emphasis on the inalienable right to life of foetuses, premature infants and the brain-dead has become a kind of collective mental illness. The same phenomenon can be observed in the absurd history of capital punishment: when there were five million people on Earth, it was a self-evident fact that the death sentence might be enforced upon the most twisted members of the human community. Now that there are five billion people, one society after another is shirking away from the execution of even the most diabolical criminals. Amnesty International bitterly complains about the few countries that still endorse capital punishment. Unrelentingly, new means of rescue are being developed, so that helicopters might be able to fish out every raving mad fisherman who has ventured into a storm with a boat made of bark, thus salvaging another unique and irreplaceable individual from the embrace of the waves. The mind boggles.

        In themselves, legalising euthanasia, re-instating capital punishment and abol- ishing overzealous rescue services would not have any significant impact on the population growth. Yet, as a matter of principle, these actions would be ex- tremely important. As long as distorted practices prevail, an insane respect towards human life will reign: thus, even the possibility of a solution to the population explosion will be lost, and all lifeboats will sink into the depths of the sea.

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        1. Very good, thanks.

          It makes me sad/crazy to see the attacks on my government for providing medically assisted death services for people who wish to end their life painlessly.

          Ditto on trying to buy blue juice used by veterinarians to euthanize animals. It’s much harder to get than crack or heroin.

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          1. Pentti Linkola is quite blunt here, but he does have some serious point. I also think we undervalue animal life and natural ecosystems.

            Emphasis on the inalienable right to life of foetuses, premature infants and the brain-dead has become a kind of collective mental illness.

            That ideology is called the sanctity of life. It is premised on a delusion of human exceptionalism. Other than that, it is hard to justify such positions scientifically or philosophically.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctity_of_life.

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        2. I don’t understand Linkola’s argument.

          This society will go a long way to extend the life of brain-dead patients. That is true.
          But, at the same time there is contempt for human life in many other realms: the tobacco industry, proxy wars, drug side-effects, toxic food…

          To me, something more subtle and simpler is at play. It can’t be generalized that way.

          Both humanists and idealists like Linkola (what would be his ideology called: deep ecologism ? Naturalism ? Ecofascism) seem to consider only one aspect of reality.

          If we are simply not in control, it doesn’t really matter what ideology we believe in. So rather, maybe, it is the case that we adhere to the ideology which lets us think we are in control. We are fooling ourselves. Or rather we have stories to guide us, which explain in an uplifting way that which cannot be avoided, which frame our behaviour (we don’t even notice the discrepancy between the story and reality while it works).

          So humanism was good on the way up, deep naturalism (or some other really nice name which will pop up along the way) will be good on the way down.

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      2. Hi there Florian,

        Thank you for sharing that vignette that asks us to use our moral compass for direction. These never-to-happen-in-real-life thought scenarios are a safe way for us to explore choices that we might surprise ourselves with. I would argue that those who love and respect life would instead voluntarily launch themselves overboard so as to give another a chance to save themselves. One of my most fervent desires in hanging onto my own sense of humanity is that I hope may be able to serve humanity in a final offering by doing something akin to this. I have had an absolutely amazing run in my 53 years, with fate placing me in the most prosperous and secure time and places in all of human history. Countless generations of members of my own species never had, nor will have, the chance to experience the freedoms, abundance, and opportunities I’ve enjoyed, many at their expense. Every night before falling asleep, my husband and I say to each other how lucky we’ve been and how we cannot ask for more, come what may, so that each nightly ‘death’ becomes a declaration of gratitude and acceptance of the times we have been given.

        Namaste, friends.

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        1. Gaia,
          Thank you for this post. it really resonated with me. I am despondent most of the time because I realize we are at the height of technological civilization and I despair that the knowledge we have obtained about the universe and how everything is ordered (while being imperfect) will probably be lost in time and extinction.
          I go to sleep every night thinking that I may not awake again (being significantly older than you) but I am comforted by the fact that I will cease to exist and will not be aware as I was not aware of the 14 billion years that preceded my existence.
          Thanks again for this post.
          AJ

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          1. Hi there AJ,

            We do see one another here and that is a rare comfort I know we all cherish. I am so glad to have found Rob’s site and add to my blessings that if I do wake again each day, I can count on spending some time in refuge and solace here. At least for the time being which is all we have anyway. From what I’ve learned of your life over these past few years, I am in respectful awe of your sincerity, sensitivity and sense of justice, coupled with patience, perseverance, tolerance, and acceptance of that you cannot change, especially in the family circle, but steadfast effort and not shirking often uncomfortable physical and emotional work to amend that which you can. I have learned much from your example and it has buoyed me to make a better effort with my own circumstances. Thank you.

            So glad we both woke up again this morning to share this conversation, and hey, isn’t it soon your birthday again, and you are turning 71 if I’m not mistaken? All good innings and hopefully more to come.

            All the best to you and your family.

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            1. Thanks Gaia,
              I empathize with the difficulty of dealing with your mother. Hopefully you can find some value in the time you have left with her.
              Yes, I will soon be 71. Time still here is getting shorter. With collapse and the Damocles’ Sword of Alzheimer’s hanging over my head I don’t want to be here too many more years. I try to enjoy every day (but after weeks of no sun and endless rain it gets hard;)).
              You have been an inspiration and I just wish I had moved away from the U.S. years ago (but then I was young, stupid and collapse unaware).
              Enjoy the summer, winter is coming.
              AJ

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              1. Enjoy the summer, winter is coming.

                Soon the phrase “winter is coming” will be replaced by “summer is coming”, due to wet bulb temperatures.

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  26. That’s interesting. Unless my memory is failing it looks like the impressive Alice Friedemann has renamed her site to “Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse”. Good title for what she writes about.

    https://energyskeptic.com/2024/the-tremendous-material-and-energy-toll-of-the-digital-economy/

    The tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy

    This is a book review of Pitron’s “The Dark Cloud”. He also wrote the excellent book “The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies”.

    Of note is the huge amount of electricity and rare earth and other critical elements this technology uses – which batteries, utility scale energy storage, wind, solar, electric vehicles and other renewables need as well (and they are dependent on computers and the electric grid, the interdependencies abundant).

    Here’s one of many interesting tidbits from this book. When you Like (thumbs up) a photo or post on Facebook, here’s what happens:

    – travel through the seven layers of the internet, the seventh layer being your smartphone, laptop computer, or other connected device.
    – Your notification then sinks into the intermediary levels of the net (data link, network, transport, etc) until it reaches the first physical layer of the internet — the application — comprising undersea cables.
    – From sender to receiver, the notification uses the 4G antenna of a mobile operator or a cable modem, and runs the length of the building’s shared telecoms infrastructure to reach the copper cables buried 80 centimeters (32 inches) under the pavement.
    – It then travels along the cables running the length of major communication routes (such as highways, rivers, canals, and railroads) to join other ‘likes’ in the operator’s technical rooms.
    – From there, it crosses the oceans via a data center.
    – From the inmost depths of the net, your ‘like’ finally takes the reverse journey back to the seventh layer where your like will now be seen. Although your Facebook friend may be sitting next to you, your signal travelled thousands of kilometers.

    By the time you finish reading the book, it will make sense that Greenpeace considers this infrastructure as “likely the largest single thing we build as a species” while we’re on earth.

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  27. The trends are global. Germany is no longer a democratic country that respects freedom of speech because populists must be stopped from derailing the globalist overshoot harm reduction agenda. I’m so glad our wise leaders are trying to protect us.

    https://www.eugyppius.com/p/oh-how-wonderful-it-is-to-live-in

    Oh, how wonderful it is to live in an extremely democratic state like Germany, where the police will never harass you or fine you or raid your house for criticizing the government

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  28. That settles the big mystery. We now know Nate Hagens never discusses pharma cartel crimes because he transfected himself with mRNA. Today he disclosed he just recovered from 2 weeks of covid and no one gets covid today except those that are transfected.

    The pharma cartel crimes are not a small thing. Twice as many people have already been killed by mRNA as were killed in the holocaust.

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    1. no one gets covid today except those that are transfected

      New Zealand still publish the vaccination details of those who test positive for COVID-19. The number is low because the number of unvaccinated is low but about 180 per week of reported cases are unvaccinated. The per-capita rate of hospitalisations is about the same for the unvaccinated and the boosted, and those having the primary course (two doses for most) have the lowest hospitalisation rate (hospitalised because of COVID-19).

      Only self-reported self-tests are now reported as cases.

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      1. 1) One of the big reasons doctors were misled into recommending mRNA is that the classification of unvaccinated was deliberately dishonest.

        2) A common trick hospitals used to inflate their revenues and the panic was to re-classify other illnesses as covid. You go to the hospital with pneumonia, test positive for covid with a bullshit jacked up PCR test, and they classify you are being sick with covid. Ditto on distorting death certificates.

        The damage they have done to trust is hard to overstate. You could present any data you want to make your case I will not believe a word of it because the medical authorities are not ethical or trustworthy.

        The fact they are still injecting children who have zero risk from the disease, and causing some percentage to have permanent heart damage, and god knows what other permanent harms with clots, cancer, etc. is all that needs to be said.

        They are evil people.

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        1. NZ also had deceptive figures on hospitalisations but the definitions were changed a long time ago and, since then, only those hospitalised because of COVID-19 were reported. I believe I said this in my comment.

          Of course, the data may be made up but then no-one can claim anything about the numbers. You say no unvaccinated people contract covid but how do you know? You made a claim and I reported on the only data I have that the claim wasn’t true of NZ.

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          1. Well, I am not sure of what I am going to say here, because I am not a statistician.

            But I believe that if you know these 3 things, you can make up your mind:
            * how many people you directly know
            * among them, how many have had some kind a serious illness after the vaccination started
            * among them, how many are vaccinated
            (You probably could do the same estimate using your 2 degree connections, the people known by the people you know. But do not mix direct connections with 2 degree connections when doing the ratio, that would skew the results)
            Note that, big companies/state agencies, by using data from social networks (facebook, linkedin…) crossed with vaccination status could establish in which region of the world people are starting to have doubts. This could help them to shape their manipulative agenda and stop encouraging vaccination before popular push-back. Are they doing this? Why not? The means are easy and I am sure there are sophisticated data-scientists making this possible. It would go well with the censorship.

            So anecdoticaly, to me, it looks like mild to extreme side-effects of vaccines are in the order of more than 1 per cent. Which is very high.

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            1. Well, I don’t know of enough people who’ve been vaccinated to give a confident figure (though most of the people I know the vaccine status of have had the vaccine and some have even had multiple boosters). I know of only one person who had a serious side effect, though they are fine now. I wouldn’t expect companies making money out of the vaccines to care whether some people are having doubts in any region and must already know that all regions have such people. And I certainly wouldn’t expect any government which introduced vaccination to change their public stance on it.

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    1. I thought his warning that the US would start a nuclear war was the most ominous thing he has said. He is certain that the US/ NATO will lose to Russia and we have no method of backing down and will go nuclear. Indeed is appraisal of Biden and crew was that they are fools who know nothing. Other than that it was an illuminating discussion.
      AJ

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      1. He also said recent signals by France, Canada, etc. to send troops may be a posturing tactic to improve NATO’s negotiation position with Russia, although Wilkerson thinks the probability of this is low because our leaders are so stupid.

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  31. Here is an interview with one of the authors of the first peer reviewed paper to be published that reviewed the safety data and concluded there are sound reasons for a moratorium on covid mRNA transfections, and for them to be withdrawn from the childhood vaccine schedule, which would eliminate prosecution immunity for pharma.

    Despite a rigorous process with 8 peer reviewers and that resulted in the paper being published, it was subsequently withdrawn with no scientifically sound reasons provided as an explanation.

    The paper will probably be republished in another journal.

    The author explains what happened and some of the key results of the paper.

    This one will make your blood boil. A lot of people need to go to prison.

    https://rumble.com/v4gdz7r-mrna-paper-retraction-nathaniel-mead-tpc-1425.html

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    1. I do agree with this. The fact that detailed data from the trials was not made available for independent analysis tells me that the trials didn’t prove safety and we know efficacy is minimal.

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  32. Hello everyone. Back early from vacation. Forgot how much I enjoy un-denial. You guys were busy while I was gone. Some great conversations (the Jack Alpert stuff especially).

    I think it was Hideaway who said a while back how its not about being smarter and that he learns something new from almost every commentor. So damn true for this website. Everyone on here “gets it”. Cant be said about any other site that I know of. Even the arguments are totally informative and never veer into wasteland material.

    Now maybe Rob does a good job of deleting worthless comments and shielding us from the bullshit. Makes me curious how many people visit this site on an average day. Of course its depressingly low, but at the same time be careful what you wish for, because if it went mainstream overnight it would be ruined by the ignorant masses.

    While I was gone, I was toying around with a “MORT for dummies” type sales pitch. I’ll post it up here after I make it legible.

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    1. Welcome back. Hope your nature adventaure was refreshing.

      I’m very pleased to say it’s been a long time, maybe 2+ years, since I deleted a comment. And even then very few.

      The people here are great.

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  33. Interesting analysis by Simplicius the Thinker today.

    We are entering a dangerous period where the west needs to stand down or escalate.

    Imagine the Mexicans, with weapons and financial support from the Russians, were losing a war with the US on the Mexican border. Then imagine what would happen if Russia decided to escalate by destroying key US infrastructure.

    We know our leaders lack intelligence, let’s hope they have imagination.

    https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/bundeswehr-wiretap-bombshell-german

    The key summarizing takeaways are the following:
    – The West is absolutely desperate to staunch Ukraine’s impending collapse and have doubled down on taking out the Kerch Bridge as their final ‘holy grail’ of salvation
    – The West is in disarray, with secret infighting, backbiting, double-crossing, or outright revolt amongst the ranks due to terminal fear of uncontrollable escalation
    – The combination of the above is a decisive confirmation that the Ukrainian military is getting down to its dregs and could be on its final legs

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  34. Here’s that “MORT for dummies” sales pitch. I made it for family and friends. Please let me know if my logic & comprehension is in the right ballpark. And is it too dumbed down or not enough?

    Think of the brain as a big hotel with thousands of rooms. Each room has its own unique function. But only 2 of these rooms are locked and have never been opened. Theory of Mind (ToM) is the function of the first locked room. Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) is the function of the second locked room (don’t get hung up on the purpose/definitions of these two functions, just be aware that they exist). And by design of the hotel, it’s impossible for MORT to open prior to ToM opening.

    Most species will never be able to open ToM (and by default never open MORT). But when a species does figure out how to crack open ToM’s door, this new room gives them the ability to understand things that were unknown and unthought of prior. Like self-awareness. Being able to comprehend that you have thoughts, emotions, feelings and so does everyone else. And if ToM’s door has been opened wide enough it eventually leads to the heavier themes of being able to understand mortality and that everything dies. And that when you die, it’s game over.

    For this species that now understands mortality, if MORT’s room is still locked at this point, they will be so fearful of death that they will soon go extinct from lack of taking risk (in other words, living life). Let’s use this analogy: think of a hard-core agoraphobic. One that is so terrified to leave his house that he will eventually die from starvation, thirst or isolation. This person’s MORT door is closed and not in use. If the doctors and drugs can get his MORT door to open all the way (like yours and mine), he will no longer have the agoraphobia, and everything will be “ok”. If they can only get his MORT door to open just a little bit, then he’ll still have a better chance of being able to go outside and hence continue living. But he is not “ok” and will continue having issues because that door is not open wide enough.

    We can simplify MORT as the ability to deny (to a certain degree) scary things. We humans are so afraid of death that every religion has a life after death story. The senior care living industry exists solely because of our fear of being directly involved in the death process. And this is with a wide-open MORT door! Now imagine if our MORT room was suddenly closed and locked. We’d all become similar to our agoraphobic friend and would soon go extinct.

    Now what is the point of all this? On a global scale, if enough people, say 20%, become aware of and understand this process, we would begin to see the world differently because our collective worldviews would be shifting (by closing our MORT door just a little bit). Eventually we would stop denying our guaranteed upcoming collapse and start accepting and embracing it. Which would make us stop doing insane things (business as usual) that only guarantees a faster and harder nosedive off the cliff. No more wasting precious time & energy on hopium solutions to save civilization (which is not even possible). Instead, we would begin doing what makes sense to minimize the damage, soften the blow, a gradual step down from the cliff.

    Also, because our species has hit the incredibly ultra-rare trifecta lottery (wide open ToM door / wide open MORT door / and fossil hydrocarbons), we could begin to grasp the extremely monumental notion that we are witnessing the end of what is most likely the pinnacle of what is possible in the entire universe.

    I assume most of you will understand everything I’ve written above. I also assume most of you will not believe a word of it (once again, because your MORT door is too wide open). I suspect you have to have some knowledge of certain things before you will be able to truly believe (and accept) our current predicament. I don’t know the correct starting point (for closing your MORT door just a little bit), but these three topics will get you headed in the right direction: ecological overshoot, EROEI (energy), human supremacy.

    Chris

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    1. Interesting. You present a way of thinking about MORT that is new for me. I’m going to let it cook a bit before saying too much.

      You also I think are suggesting there may be a way for MORT awareness to help with our predicament. That was a dream I once had and have since lost. It would be wonderful if you have fresh ideas for a path forward.

      One immediate thought comes to mind. I was not always aware. There were 45 years ending as a successful executive that I did not care about anything except making more money. Zero awareness of limits. Zero concern about the environment. Then I went through a personal crisis and changed completely in a very short time.

      It would be interesting to self-analyze this change more thoroughly. Perhaps others here also went through an awareness change. Are there any similarities in what happened to us? Could this provide clues on how to change others? Do we want to change others? Would each of us actually prefer not to be aware?

      Could be an excellent topic for a collaborative essay in which we each write a section with our awareness story and then try to find some common points.

      Let’s hear what others think about your MORT for Dummies story.

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      1. I vote yes on finding common points. I’ll make a prediction right now that the popular answer will be “… a personal crisis and changed completely in a very short time”. Its exactly me and I have had a fear that the only way to start the awaking process (in a reasonably quick timeframe) is thru crisis, trauma, etc. Thats a depressing thought. Dowd made it sound good, “the pathway to happiness is thru hardship” (or something). And I totally agree, on the individual level. But 8 billion? No chance. (but hopium tells me we just need a small percentage of 20%)

        So ya, I’d want to hear the details about others.

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        1. I second you Chris on a tell-all reveal on how we all made our way onto this doomsphere, by whatever means and routes. What a very fitting bonding experience, Rob, for our little band of un-denialists here at the end (or beginning) of everything. It will take some more soul-searching and hopefully I will be able to offer my contribution in a more condensed form than you would have come to expect from me!

          I like your secret unlocked room analogy, enticingly described–but the trick is even knowing that we have such a hidden possibility and then trickiest of all, what is the key that would open it? I guess that’s the Holy Grail that we’re trying to find, and although our stories will confirm that whilst there are many ways to reach the goal, the actual likelihood of even a fraction minority achieving it given the state of the collective worldview is vanishingly small. 20% would be a fantastical hope, and if it ever did come to pass, I am afraid catastrophic end-time collapse would have befallen all of us and then it will all be just a postscript of our human history. It’s impossible to explain to a fish what living out of water is like, just as for those who live in a world of denial, it is their normality, the only thing they have ever known. When the ultimate scene arrives, they can only gasp in the air still believing that water will come to save them. Perhaps it is better to let the majority of fish keep this lone, however vain hope, rather than obliterate their universe as we here have done for ourselves, slowly dying a million deaths with every realisation of our impending and already actuated doom. We are the fish that jumped out of the sea and somehow lived, the exception mutants that prove the rule. Perhaps we must learn to trust that evolution is the wiser to keep this door firmly shut, locked, and with key thrown away in respect to MORT. If everything is eventually unsustainable in the cosmic sense (as even our universe has a use-by date, if there is such thing in dimensions that stretch time and space, this totally does my head in) then all is just unfolding as it will and our blue-green planet is one iteration of possibility out of infinite possibility, no more and no less.

          See you soon here again and looking forward to it. All the best to you and your family.

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      2. Well that was a big swing and a miss. I have nine people in my inner circle that I send stuff like this to. I usually get no reply’s, but this time I got two. Both were along the lines of “Chris, if you are so sure that civilization is ending, then why don’t you try doing something about it?”

        Jeez, silly me. Thought that was exactly what I was trying to do with this stupid “MORT for dummies” breakdown. Uggghhh. I don’t know why I’m surprised. If the carbon pulse diagram generated no interest, then why would this. (I should have never cut my vacation short. I already need another one. lol)

        I’ve seen some of you talk about how you were born without the denial mutation (or something similar). I don’t believe that and think it’s more about “us” kind of suppressing our MORTness, by gaining knowledge. But maybe you guys are correct.

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        1. I don’t swing any more with normies.

          My guess is you are right. I’ve never been quite normal. Always felt like I was an observer on the other side of a one way mirror trying to understand my part in a stupid play.

          My somewhat successful career as an executive in high tech product development was soul crushing.

          As a child watching Mary Poppins in the movie theater I focused on trying to figure out how they did the magic tricks.

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          1. Ya, probably smart to not preach to normies. At this point they must think I’m insane.

            Soul crushing…. If I ever did have a soul, it has long since been crushed. 20 years in sales (call center environments) of lying my ass off so that I could get some poor schmuck to buy something they dont even want. Ex convicts (by far) always did the best in telemarketing gigs. The reward incentive is disgusting. I’ve seen many sweet innocent grandmother types turn into relentless bullshit con artists after they realized the golden rule of sales: the better liar they become, the more money on their paycheck.

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  35. Greetings everyone.

    A). It would be interesting to learn how the active ones here underwent their transformation and became aware.

    B.) All biological entities face stress.
    Thus they must react, adapt and survive.

    Without doing so, they perish.

    For h.sapiens, the problem is cognitive.

    Biologically all entities are hardwired to face physical stress.
    To give up resources is evolutionary counter productive. (MPP)
    Thus h.sapiens experiences denial as it is the opposite of its biological function to do the “wise” thing.

    Why do many religions and philosophies embrace the concept of asceticism as they seek to find “the way” by having a clear and rational frame of mind by being aware of themselves and everything around them.

    Buddhists destroy the art they create with coloured sand.

    Quotes such as:

    “Know thyself”

    “He who conquers others is strong, he who conquers himself is mighty”

    Kind regards,

    ABC

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    1. I had to look up the definition.

      Asceticism is a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from sensual pleasures, often for the purpose of pursuing spiritual goals. Practitioners of asceticism may withdraw from the world to engage in their practices, or they may continue to be part of society while adopting a frugal lifestyle. This lifestyle involves renouncing material possessions and physical pleasures, as well as spending time fasting and focusing on religious or spiritual matters. Some believe that ascetic practices allow the practitioner’s core consciousness to expand and connect with the infinite universal consciousness.

      I think of our behaviors as being added in layers over evolutionary time. We began as a single cell replicator governed by the MPP. Then with multicellularity we evolved behaviors like fear, anger, and happiness. Finally, with high intelligence and an extended theory of mind we became capable of understanding that for long-term survival we should override MPP, however denial of unpleasant realities, like our own overshoot, prevents us from overriding MPP.

      Varki’s MORT theory says denial of unpleasant realities is a side effect of how evolution chose to implement mortality denial, which is a requirement for an extended theory of mind.

      Is our inability to override MPP a roll of the evolutionary dice or a requirement for high intelligence?

      Is it possible for evolution to denial mortality and not deny other unpleasant realities?

      Are there advanced aliens with gods living sustainably?

      Given Hideaway’s fossil energy + mineral + complexity constraints, do advanced civilizations only exist for brief periods?

      If advanced civilizations must be brief, does any of this matter?

      Yes if you care about unnecessary suffering and damage to life on a rare planet.

      I should discuss with Varki.

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    2. Ah ah ah.
      Love your questions and quotes.
      There is much beauty in this world.
      None of it it all can be cast in any mental framework.

      If you are interested in the details of my personal journey, as you may already know, there is much described in the guest post Rob was kind enough to welcome on this site:

      By Charles: Doomers’ Visions of the Future

      I’d just like to point out that becoming collapse-aware, in my case, took time. It was a relatively slow process. Roughly 10 years to get to the conclusion of brutal, rapid, unescapable collapse, followed by a very dark period of 10 years.
      But I don’t think becoming aware of collapse, is truly becoming aware. It’s only a necessary phase in the destruction of the illusion of knowledge. This process was necessary for me to break free of the mental prison.

      In the same way that there is no spoon, there is no “biological entity”.
      This is just a particular way to frame reality, a map.
      What is is. And it is not even a what.
      What I am saying is not denial of death. There is death and there is no death. It depends on the map (the lenses) you use to orientate yourself. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Once you get there, you will see (if there is a you)
      If you want to live in despair suits yourself.
      If not, break free of the thought system you are currently prisoner of and see for yourself. Live.
      “Know thyself” might just be a trick question. Similar to Ramana Maharshi “What am I?”. If I give you the answer to the question, the question loses its value. It would be a shame to waste a bullet.
      There is a good joke in non-duality: nobody ever reached enlightenment. This is a hint as to what the answer might be.
      But don’t forget: there is a mountain, there is no mountain, there is a mountain.
      The boat to cross the river (of death?) is destroyed once on the other side: it is not useful any more. And it is fun to switch glasses from time to time.
      As long as everything is cast within a particular system of thoughts, there can be no peace. Self can’t get out of self.

      Many will say I am just crazy, suit themselves. The true question might be: who is not? In any case, none of what I said previously is random.
      It all has value only if you experience it. Then see.

      Anyway, there is no recipe. It’s outside the realm of understanding, the realm of control. You won’t get it, it will get you.

      I am laughing so much, just before pressing the reply button. Because I know how much this comment will not be appreciated by some of the readers here. Ah ah ah…

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      1. Just read your essay Charles. Wow! and enough hyperlinks to keep me busy for a year. I’ve now read about 7 or so of these guest essays and have been impressed with all. Maybe I need to suck it up and try to read every single one.

        For me, the comments are just as important. And the comment from Charles essay that stood out the most was strangely from Monk talking about oxalates. I learned I eat way too much nuts. Thought I was doing a good thing by eating large quantities. What a bummer!

        And you made me laugh with the reply button bit. I so relate. I’m doing a better job of putting my ego aside and just saying “fu*k it, I dont care how crazy I sound”. (I think this site is good for that because a lot of us are in the same boat)

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  36. It’s super duper effective if you boost 9 times.

    Oh, but those side effects…

    If there is a 1 in 10 chance of a serious side effect with each transfection then 9 shots seems guaranteed to cause harm.

    They can’t have missed this which means they don’t care or harm is deliberate.

    After all, sick people are good for business.

    As confirmed by their silence on vitamin D and sugar.

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  37. The financial markets have been crazy for a long time. Now they are super crazy as explained by Doug Nolan today.

    https://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2024/03/weekly-commentary-speak-truth-to-crazy.html

    Speak Truth to Crazy

    Before quickly moving on to March and beyond, posterity beckons for some documentation of an extraordinary February. For the month, Bitcoin surged $18,972 (45%), surpassing October 2021’s previous monthly record gain ($17,540). Nvidia surged 29%, Meta 29%, Lattice Semiconductor 26%, Coherent Corp 25%, and Applied Materials 23%. The Semiconductors (SOX) returned 11.1%.

    March 1 – Bloomberg (Simon Kennedy): “The US national debt is rising $1 trillion every 100 days, helping to explain why assets such as gold and Bitcoin are trading at around all-time highs, according to strategists at Bank of America Corp. The pace of the debt swelling is also accelerating, the strategists led by Michael Hartnett said in a report… They estimate it will take just 95 days for the burden to climb to $35 trillion from $34 trillion, compared to the 92 days it took to grow to $33 trillion from $32 trillion.”

    The Truth is there will be a huge price to pay for all the craziness. Powell and Fed officials repeatedly assured us that they had learned from history. They understood the risk of resurgent inflation in the event of premature loosening of monetary policy. But that’s exactly what they’ve done. Sure, they can contend that they have held firm with a “restrictive” policy rate. But the Truth is they orchestrated a dovish pivot and attendant dramatic loosening of conditions. Plain and simple: they stoked a historic super-cycle market speculative blowoff. And they apparently cannot refrain from more stoking.

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  38. The soft landing zone our leaders have chosen to build is bigger and better roads.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/29/biden-spending-highways-public-transport-climate-crisis

    Since the passage of the enormous $1.2tn bipartisan infrastructure law in 2021, hailed by Biden as a generational effort to upgrade the US’s crumbling bridges, roads, ports and public transit, money has overwhelmingly poured into the maintenance and widening of roads rather than improving the threadbare network of bus, rail and cycling options available to Americans, a new analysis has found.

    Of reported funds dispersed to states, more than half – around $70bn – have been spent on the resurfacing and expansion of highways, a process that researchers have consistently found only spurs greater use of cars and therefore more congestion.

    h/t Panopticon

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    1. Some encouraging news for justice today from Steve Kirsch.

      https://substack.com/inbox/post/142247609

      Epic news today! I have been waiting 3 years for this to happen and it finally did!

      Did you know that there are at least 7 Members of Parliament who are honest and want to know the truth? There will be more later for sure after the finger pointing starts, but 7 is a good start until then.

      The seven Members of Parliament have sent a letter to the head of the UK ONS requesting that they publish a comprehensive time-series cohort analysis of the UK data (weekly buckets for 152 weeks starting in Jan 2021).

      If the ONS refuses the request, then the MPs will be able to shift the blame for this crisis squarely on the ONS. And all MPs will then pile on later I predict since nobody wants not to have a chair when the music stops.

      If the ONS complies with the request, then we will have the evidence needed to go after other agencies. It will end the debate as to whether the shots were safe, and begin the debate on who is to blame and how to hold them accountable.

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  40. Radagast may be quitting after 4 years of explaining the pharma cartel crimes.

    He argues we should turn off our screens and just be in nature.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/box-with-miracles/

    “Science is magic that actually works.” The Reddit midwit likes to say. “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.” Is another one he regularly ejaculates, before he goes back to watching Doctor Who episodes or reading the Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy.

    But as Ioan Culianu and others have noted, magic, psychotherapy, marketing, religion and science all operate in an overlapping area, that of bringing about changes in the world, by influencing human beings at a subconscious level.And the trick of science, is that it is a branch of magic, that elevated its art by denying this element. It points at atoms, molecules, hormones, DNA, p values and odds ratios and claims that it has given us a glimpse at an objectively existing reality. But one might say they practice a sufficiently advanced art of changing human consciousness: “This new therapy that we have developed to treat your anxiety disorder is so potent, it even survives a meta-analysis! Every scientist in the world has no choice but to agree to our conclusion!” “Wow, thank you doctor for this truly advanced work of magic, pardon me, science! I can already feel myself getting better!”

    I’m pondering this, because at some level I can’t help but feel as if I have spent the past four years of my life on this blog, like an apprentice mage, deflecting some kind of black magic by a demonic army that invaded our realm overnight. Here we are, the world is shut down and we are locked in our homes, over a virus you need to test yourself for to know that you have it. And it can even damage your brain we are told, the symptom of which is that you feel more anxious!

    Doesn’t this remind you, of a medium or astrologer who is engaged in cold reading? “Do you feel tired a lot? Depressed? Anxious? Why, it is the fault of this new virus!” Or consider the Biden administration, wishing its unvaccinated citizens a “winter of severe disease and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm”. Doesn’t this remind you of a gypsy woman whispering “a cancer” under her breath, when you do not give her your spare change?

    Here we have armies of wizards, casting spells in each other’s direction: “KAWASAKI SYNDROME!” The blue mage shouts. “MYOCARDITIS!” The red mage yells back. On and on its goes, a cacophony of latin terms and biological gobblydygook, abbreviations comprehensible only to the wizards themselves.

    And where do they fight this fight? Not in the streets, at least I hope not. No, they fight it out through black mirrors, powered by black mirrors on their roofs, or powered by magical black rocks beneath the Earth. Magicians here exchange malevolent streams of energy. One wonders whether there is any room at all for white magic, in this domain.

    There are billions of ants throughout this world, simple creatures, with limited awareness of their environment that have lived for generations. For all practical purposes, you can say that an ant exists in multiple places at once. Perhaps the ant with an injured left hindpaw carrying a tiny speck of mildew is the same ant as the one doing this 50,000 years ago fifteen kilometers to the North, because for all practical purposes their knowledge about their external environment was identical, so there was no genuine difference between them from their own perspective.

    Pretty cool huh? Now try this for a primate typing away on a keyboard, in a galaxy with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. How consistent is your reality really? Do you ever just wake up and think to yourself: “Wait, were the Baltic states always as big as Germany? Foxes are more closely related to dogs than to cats?” Can you really trust your memories?

    If you consider this possibility, then maybe the solution to a better reality is to know less. Give your soul more options to choose the best of all possible worlds, by reducing the number of criteria it has to meet. Maybe, gazing into the black mirror you are gazing into now, fills your mind with anchors to which reality must conform.

    But who disenchanted this world? Do I go to the box with miracles because the world is disenchanted, or is the world disenchanted because of the box with miracles sucking them up like a vacuum cleaner?

    How do you reenchant the world?

    Well, I think this box of miracles is not going to help us much. It wants to be the source of all miracles in the world. It generates paintings in seconds now, soon it will generate music and video too, eventually entire PS1 style horror video games may just appear on the fly.

    But plants can be magical, as can mushrooms. Flowers become eyes, trees show you their faces, angels start talking to you when you close your eyes. It’s frightening. What if you lose your mind? You put on music from the miracle box to calm yourself down. But the black miracle box is greedy. IT wants to be your source of joy and wonder. You see a bunny in the grass? I, the miracle box, can show you a thousand bunnies, RIGHT NOW!

    So turn it off. Be alone with the plants. Be alone with your own thoughts, yes, even your fears.

    Whatever you feed grows, so put down the black mirror and go out there my wizards. Re-enchant the world.

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    1. This was good. I’ve had similar thoughts. I like to think that I am above the average person because I’ve pretty much eliminated the TV from my life. And my cell phone has no internet. But its totally delusional thinking as my computer gets about 90% of my free time.

      Off-topic, I’ve seen “prep tips” scattered around here. I should’ve been jotting em down. Rob, since your organizational skills seems to be OCD like, just wondering if you have compiled a list. If not, no big deal.

      And the “finding common points” essay idea has me excited. But lets not forget about “what would a wise community do?” I’m looking forward to reading that one.

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      1. I prefaced all prepping tips with “Preptip:” hoping this would make them easily accessable. Unfortunatly Google and WordPress search do not work well searching un-Denial comments.

        I am able to search comments as an administrator but you don’t have access to those tools.

        My plan failed. Maybe you will have better luck with a different search engine.

        Someday I may collect them up into a single page.

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  41. My late friend Gail Zawacki would have liked this discussion on the evolutionary biology of the holocaust. She was horrified about what are species will do when faced with scarcity and collapse.

    The key point argued here is that Germany’s core objective was to capture land and resources to grow their own tribe by displacing, killing, and enslaving other tribes. Racism was used to motivate the German people but was not the driver. This is consistent with what biology predicts.

    They don’t say it but the holocaust driver was the Maximum Power Principle (MPP). Behavior driven by MPP can be peaceful when increasing quantities of land, fossil energy, minerals, and Haber-Bosch food are available. Behavior will not be peaceful in times of scarcity or limits. This is at the core of the Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert messages.

    It is also at the core of my “we need to break through our genetic denial of overshoot and reduce our population” message. Even though we won’t do it, it’s still a good message.

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    1. Tribes that overshoot win. This a strategic problem for any wise society. I’m not sure if there’s any way to solve this. For example, it is estimated that Britian has invaded 90% of all countries. Those overshooting islanders were a threat to just about everyone and their genetics are now scattered across the globe

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      1. Yes, and one of the key drivers for Germany’s holocaust was envy of Britain’s empire. Germany wanted similar access to land and resources.

        Perhaps the secret globalists pushing for a one world government, if they exist, understand what you are saying and are in fact the good guys?

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        1. I have to admit I’m a globalist for the very fact that tribes will fight each other for resources. Initially ‘we’ as in humanity were in small tribes of a few dozen, that eventually became tribes of up to the Dunbar’s number of around 150, which IMHO only became much larger tribes with the invention of writing. Now our ‘tribes’ can be up to and over a billion people because of fast communication and common language between these people.

          If we can be a tribe of a billion (Chinese, Indian, or English speakers), then there is no reason why we can’t be a tribe of 8 billion, which, again IMHO is the only way we could seriously tackle overpopulation in a short period.

          Take away the deep psychological reason or need to ‘grow’, being protection from other large tribes, and one world government could immediately tackle overpopulation. How this one world government could or should work, I do have some ideas on, and even a method to get there, that most would laugh off as unacceptable, but is possibly the only existing, relatively easy legal way, to get to a one world government.

          It seems to me that most of overshoot is because tribes are scared of other tribes taking ‘their’ resources and way of life away. The ‘way of life’ though is now capitalism of some type all over the world. We all vote in some type of dodgy rigged elections for our ‘leaders’, so are all pretty similar anyway.

          If we take away the need for military forces (still have police forces) and the need for ‘growth’ in the protection sense, then it’s possible for the leaders to concentrate on overpopulation, ecocide, pollution and general overshoot.

          Without one world government we will end up in WW3 during a mad grab for the last useful resources as economies everywhere head into collapse, if history is any guide at all, which I believe it is…

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          1. Hideaway, you’ve just volunteered to write another guest essay on a very important topic that I’ve never seen anyone in the overshoot space address.

            Everywhere I go on the internet I see people worrying about the evil globalists.

            I never see anyone explaining why we need a global government.

            It feels like supporters of WEF et. al. don’t understand the real reason we need a global government. It’s not to promote a woke agenda, or to stop “tyrants” like Putin. It’s to prevent WWIII and a descent into hell.

            I’m curious to see how you think we can reverse the trend to simplify and localize given declining net energy.

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            1. I suspected you would say something like that when I mentioned it. It would be ‘out there’ in terms of different type of thinking. But without one world government nuclear war is virtually guaranteed as one side runs out of resources to ‘fight’ any type of enemy, once we are well past maximum fossil fuel use. Sure it will be the last option used of any war, but what does it matter if we all go to nuclear winter anyway?

              It would take the size of a full post to explain it all, plus the potential roadblocks. Will it ‘save’ civilization in the longer term? Most likely not, but that is not how I’d sell the argument. Perhaps if my other findings about the future were incorrect, then civilization could last for a long term on a much smaller basis. We can all be wrong in whatever we have worked out because we missed a piece of information out in our calculations, that we didn’t know about, none of us know everything…

              Any hope of reduction of human overshoot on all other life forms on this planet, is likely dependent on us becoming a single tribe that’s wiser. Being one tribe is certainly smarter than fighting over diminishing resources with nuclear war…

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                1. This would disqualify most current office holders (which wouldn’t be such a bad thing). I suspect that there are some politicians who are overshoot aware, but don’t speak about it publicly.

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                1. I agree, I was more likely to use something like a snowballs chance in hell as the odds of anything positive happening.. My idea is nowhere near the WEFs concepts..

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  43. A wise species:
    – would force every new MWh of “renewable energy” to shutdown a MWh of fossil energy – this policy would expose the lie of renewable energy and would force us to shift to conservation and simpler lifestyles
    – establish policies to encourage known fossil energy reserves to be left in the ground for future use

    An unwise species:
    – Tells itself growth will continue with renewable energy and threatens to block fossil energy extraction causing owners of fossil reserves to panic and extract their fossils in a sub-optimum manner that damages the reserve and lowers the price causing a glut of that which we should be conserving

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/short-term-energy-outlook-and-tight-oil-update-february-2024/#comment-771359

    It’s hard to understand, especially by this group, but with leaders all over the globe clamoring for renewable energy and the death of hydrocarbons, there seems no time to preserve minerals for the future, because there may be no future. A lot of people simply don’t want to think of having their minerals stranded by an edict for a solar panel or a wind turbine. So there has been this enormous rush to get what is there out of the ground and to market. This has wasted what we will surely need in the future, and has resulted in less-than-ideal produced water transport, destruction of the natural gas market, and a lot of other things that can be railed against but in context aren’t that crazy or inconsiderate. That said, we’re headed for Armageddon with tens of thousands of wells hitting the bubble point, a glut of NG, SWD wells brimming full, and the new wells coming on with higher water and methane cuts than we’ve traditionally had. It’s going to be a mess. If the water can be cleaned up for reuse, and if enough produced water pipelines can be laid, perhaps a disaster can be averted. I hope this helps understand the challenges that are being faced. These issues are the very reason Exxon, Chevron, Occidental and others are laying down rigs, allowing some degree of reason and equilibrium to come back into the shale field. To make this work, hundred-dollar oil is needed. But even that won’t work without at least three-dollar NG.

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    1. I’d modify that first point to: a wise species would gradually decrease electricity generation and energy use. It would not develop any new energy sources.

      A wise species would understand the unsustainable nature of the civilisation it has developed and seek to avoid worsening the situation as it sets its cleverest minds to the question of how global societies should be organised and how to best reduce population sizes without overloading communities with older people (i.e. seeking a good balance).

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      1. Mike, I’d modify that yet again to a wise species would never go down the path of any development beyond their natural world in the first place. Sort of like Whales, Dolphins and Elephants that all have larger brains than humans.

        Perhaps the question should be more like… what would a species that suddenly gained wisdom about overshoot do? (or something similar)

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        1. I think I disagree with the further modification. Firstly, because I believe we’re referring to wise moves given the current situation. Secondly, because wisdom comes with knowledge. Humans just didn’t know the full impact of certain behaviours, for hundreds of thousands of years. Even if they did, they would have to somehow override the drives of a species and the maximum power principle. That would take more than wisdom, I think. Some kind of super will power, except that no species has free will!

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  44. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chip-4-why-prices-rise-long-term-%E3%82%AD%E3%83%A7%E3%82%A6%E3%83%9B%E3%82%A6-%E5%91%A8-4zjfc
    Why (semiconductor) chip prices are rising.

    In the future, chip prices will continue to rise over the long term, even showing a trend contrary to Moore’s Law, gradually becoming more expensive. In a few years, chips produced using top technology and processes may no longer be affordable for the average person.

    …

    The same applies to chip manufacturing processes. In 2012, when the manufacturing process was still 28 nm, the production of a processor had about 450 steps; by 2021, with the 5 nm process, the production steps had increased to 1200.

    This increase in process cost directly destroyed the second part of Moore’s Law, which is “the price of a new product with the same performance is halved every 18-24 months.” That was under the assumption that the production steps remained basically the same, but now with a 200% increase in steps, there’s no reason for prices not to increase.

    …

    Therefore, to achieve 3 nm and 2 nm processes, no matter how expensive the equipment is needed, even if ASML’s lithography machines are $2 billion each. As long as there is demand, they will continue to pile up more complex and advanced technology to produce the next generation of chips, and then set a price based on their own costs.

    What happens when demand is destroyed by high oil prices? What happens when the economies of scale start breaking down?

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    1. Good questions.

      I think there is also the issue of diminishing returns in play.

      Computer speed and capacity is good enough now, even for nerds like me.

      I upgraded my computer 4.5 years ago. I do a lot of heavy computing that requires speed and capacity. I expect I will never have to upgrade again.

      Ditto on my 5 year old Samsung Note 9 phone. I already replaced its battery once. If it does not break I will probably never upgrade.

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  45. Today, March 4, 2024, I feel like I am a civilian, in somewhere like France’ prior to WWI and I heard of the plans of Archduke Ferdinand to go on a tour of Serbia tomorrow.

    We are marching up to Nuclear Winter and the only thing between us and that end is a couple of rational, sane people in the Kremlin who are becoming paranoid, exasperated, and frustrated that they are not being paid attention to by the senile fools in the U.S./West. All humanity (and the biosphere) is held hostage to the ability of those in the Kremlin to avoid certain near term extinction amid the collapse of Western Civilization in its death throws attempt to maintain global hegemony.

    To wit, the conversations (probably leaked by Russia) of the discussion by German generals, to launch German missiles, utilizing German troops controlling those missiles, from an air base in Germany that hosts U.S. F-16s and U.S. nuclear weapons. INSANITY!! Since said missiles can be launched from those planes and can be loaded with those nukes.

    One can argue that this release of the conversation is Russia’s attempt to bring down the current German government (Scholtz) and maybe NATO AND avoid having to hit that air base with a missile preemtively.

    I don’t think we have ever been as close to Nuclear War, except during the Cuban Missile crisis (but then both the USSR and the US had sane leaderships.

    The following two articles flesh out most of these points:

    https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/03/03/the-braindead-american-foreign-policy-establishment/

    https://johnhelmer.net/the-good-germans-are-blowing-smoke/

    AJ

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    1. AJ, it’s nice to know there’s someone else out there that sees the same insanity.

      Germany is such a disappointment. First Nordstreamm, now this. I just don’t get it. What’s their plan? Who are their friends? They will be destroyed again.

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      1. Rob,
        My problem is that it’s not just Germany, it’s all of us in the west that are immediately at risk as Chuck Watson so eloquently pointed out many times.

        I watched a so-so movie yesterday on Netflix called “The Killer” and in a scene the Killer (hero? protagonist) is going to kill another assassin after a dinner and that person said something to the effect “I guess I should have eater Hagen Dazs after all my meals” – meaning that when you are going to die youngish why did you worry about your health. I feel that way now.

        To further reinforce the dire state we are in:
        https://www.indianpunchline.com/putins-nuclear-warning-is-direct-and-explicit/

        AJ

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          1. I was recently talking to my sister about some of the crazy laws in Canada. Like how difficult it is to buy, register, and insure a secondhand vehicle. How difficult it is for one person to sell a vehicle to another person. That’s terrible for emissions and personal finances that Canada incentivizes people to buy new cars on finance through stupid laws.

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      2. Yes, Germany is disappointing. At least the government, which acts completely against the interests of the people and is foreign-controlled by the USA – that means, they are not allowed to have own plans, to answer your question.

        But most Germans are too prone to the western propaganda and dont’t recognize this, because Germans as a whole are simply too naive and gullible. As everyone knows, we were already to blame for WW1 and WW2. And this guilt is instilled in every German during their school education and by everyday propaganda – whether it is true or not (history is always written by the victor).
        Nevertheless, after WW2 we were rebuilt by the USA. Certainly not out of a good heart, but as a servant and buffer to the Soviet Union. Then as a cash cow for Europe and the Western world. And now that resources are becoming scarce and economic power has been used up, Germany can be leveled to ground again. What could be better than another world war to blame them for? All good things come in threes… Why should we look for a new scapegoat when the old one has proved so successful and has willingly accepted the blame?

        It’s like a narcissistic relationship on a global level. The Americans are the narcissists: arrogant, grandiose, irascible, you name it. The Germans are the co-dependents who allow themselves to be bossed around and humiliated again and again. The other Europeans are America’s flying monkeys, supporting the narcissist in it’s false reality over the victim. The victim can’t end the relationship because they are at the mercy of the narcissist’s rage. Russia would probably be the better partner for Germany – but the narcissist would never allow this over his dead body:

        “The main interest of the United States, over which we have fought wars for centuries – the First, the Second and the Cold War – is the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united they are the only force that could threaten us. And we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
        George Friedman

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        1. Thanks for explaining. It’s very sad. I’ve only been to Germany twice but I was very impressed with everything. Precision machine shops filled with skilled workers are so much more impressive than software developers and baristas.

          Listening to this podcast on Germany’s economic problems it sounds like China is a bigger factor now than the US. China is a more important trading partner and is threatening Germany’s automobile industry.

          https://unherd.com/watch-listen/germanys-economic-reckoning/

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  46. B today echoes AJ’s worries and tries to make sense of Europe’s implosion and its incompetent leaders.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/stragedy-unfolds

    Fossil fuels are both essential to our existence, and are killing us at the same time. This is why no nation is ditching them willingly, and every one of them who can increase their consumption does so. “Renewables” on a global level thus only come on top of a mountain of carbon emissions, and not as a substitute. Sure, civilization is possible to maintain without fossil fuels, just not this one… In a sane world, we would be actively preparing for a hard landing following ecological overshoot; equipping communities and people with the necessary skills and knowledge to have at least a slim chance of surviving what’s coming. In order to avoid an abrupt downturn, we would be also working on prolonging the descent as much as possible and making it less steep, not pretending that it can be avoided…

    There is one, and only one exam one needs to pass in order to succeed in such a political environment buried in denial: the test of loyalty. Once one manages to get into the inner circle by first having been born into the right family, and then by proving his/her/their (or fill in the blank) loyalty to the cause by demonstrating a firm belief in an alternate reality, it absolutely doesn’t matter how big a failure they turn out to be on the job. No wonder, that the opposition is getting stronger by the day (who could’ve guessed that?) and that bad news are just getting more numerous.

    Those who understood from the get go that an energy and resource deprived subcontinent of Eurasia with a hollowed out economy and a grossly overestimated GDP could not possibly win an economic (let alone a shooting) war with a well industrialized and relatively resource rich neighbor (who by the way did everything they can to avoid such unfortunate turn of events) were quickly pushed aside. Even today, when all this has become glaringly obvious, the party line still insists that winning is only a question of money and political will — and crossing even more red lines… Newsflash: one cannot buy that which is no longer there, nor send in troops trained for a wholly different kind of war, and hope to succeed. Besides, pouring more cash on a limited industrial and resource base only ends up in inflation — and again, the parallel is hard not to see with green energy policies.

    Given this deadlock, where questions of physics, geology, mathematics or military science are subject to loyalty tests, it is hard to imagine how a realistic plan could be put forward. Perhaps it is not surprising, that instead of planning for a radically different future, we see a growing push for more centralization, and the hardening of existing structures. In other words: increasing bureaucracy and complexity. In a world where energy and resources are about to become even more scarcer, however, this is the diametric opposite what systems allowed to do their job tend to do. Increasing complexity always begets a corresponding rise in energy consumption, thus when energy inputs become inadequate, simplification and decentralization is what usually follows. And the later that decomplexification is delayed, the louder the crash becomes. Human folly reliably goes against natural tendencies though, so just like with other civilizations who encountered more predicaments they could pretend to handle, ours in Europe is duly on track to self-implosion. As Arnold Toynbee once astutely observed:

    “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

    We have reached a level of detachment from reality where a complete political collapse have not only become inevitable, but something looming ever closer. So just like we could not help but walk straight into the stragedy now unfolding on the eastern battlefronts, we are most unlikely be able to save ourselves from the economic collapse stemming from an entirely self imposed deprivation of fossil fuels, as opposed to a strategic withdrawal and an active planning for a post-industrial future. Europe is just about to prove Toynbee’s point in a spectacular way, which we can but hope will not end in a continent wide war.

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  47. Kunstler today discusses 5 insanities gripping US leadership and concludes the only good path towards self-harm reduction is for the states to breakaway from the union.

    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-five-fubars/

    The Five FUBARs

    “How many of these places where polite society turns out to be provably insane do we have to see before we stop taking their judgment on anything as significant?” — Bret Weinstein

    What are we going to do about any of this? Return to the metaphor. The runaway train is still picking up speed. You can’t just jump off at 150 mph. If you’re one of the passengers watching this in horror, maybe you can decouple your car, or get the conductor to it by any means necessary. Let’s say that each car behind the engine of this train is a state of the United States. Let the engine up front with the dead man at the controls ride that runaway to its terrible conclusion. Cut loose the cars behind it to take care of themselves, to slow down, get a grip on their situation, and make plans to find a better engine to pull the train. Decouple. Cut loose. It’s the only way.

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  48. Another excellent interview with Ray McGovern on the insanity of NATO.

    Why is it I never come across a fact rich deep discussion by an expert on why Russia is in the wrong? I’m not talking abut slogans and talking points. I’m talking about a deep intelligent discussion explaining why NATO is right and Russia is wrong. Has anyone ever seen such a discussion?

    Perhaps it’s the same reason I never come across a fact rich deep discussion by an expert with integrity and no conflicts of interest on why the benefits of mRNA exceed the harms.

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    1. Lex Friedman #415 released today, interviews Sherii Plokhy. 3+ hours long. I listened to it but I’m not sure I agree with the interview. Plokhy, prof at Harvard(?), is of Ukrainian or Russian heritage. Most of what he was saying that wasn’t ancient history I found suspiciously like what a proponent of Ukraine’s position would say. I never got any inclination that the US perpetrated all of this on the former Warsaw pact countries and was attempting to destroy Russia. I’d be very interested in anyone here’s take on what he said, if you listen to the whole thing. I skipped around a lot.
      AJ

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    2. I’ve posted this before, but it is possible that some of our leaders would prefer a nuclear war over the U.S. not being an unchallenged superpower.

      “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich.”
      ― John Kenneth Galbraith

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      1. The late great Joe Bageant used similarly colorful language as Galbraith:

        “the world’s aristocrats do what they have always done: surf the crest of power and wealth with their dicks pointed into the sunset of their civilization and their heads up their asses.”

        -The Audacity of Depression (2008)

        http://www.mendacitypress.com/5.2008Bageant.html

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        1. I’m about half way through and had to post, that link is a must-read. I have a fondness for some writers and rarely for speakers, with some exceptions – the late Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry and the male voice that read the late night BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast for most of my adult life.

          I wish I had discovered Joe Bageant a long time ago. 1946 – 2011, 65 years.

          I raise a glass to you Joe.

          Theme (Sailing By) to the Shipping Forecast by the late Ronald Binge 1910 – 1979, 69 years.

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv

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          1. Yes, very good essay. I added the quote to the sidebar.

            Two billion more people since it was written.

            Compounding everything is the fact that it is quite human and even pragmatic to passively accept reality as it is. Until it’s too late to do anything. As my late friend Virgil the philosophical backhoe operator summed it up: “If we fucked everything up so bad tryin’ to do our best, maybe we oughtta just leave’er be for a while. Quit thinking about it so much.”

            Thinking gnaws away at everything so relentlessly, until it finally breaks a tooth on one truth or another. And one of those truths is that the technology enabling those digital greeting cards that play “Happy Birthday” is systematically destroying nature and toxifying and maiming the millions of drudgery filled souls whose sole purpose for existence is industrial.

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  49. I really enjoy Katie Singer’s work and her new-ish substack is going from strength to strength. I thought I would link her here for un-denial readers not familiar. Katie is particularly interested in communicating the real footprint of the technosphere, but is very much across population overshoot as well. I like that in much of her writing, she brings it back to practical things anyone can do in their own life. I find her way of looking at problems really helpful.
    https://katiesinger.substack.com/p/defining-overshoot

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