Today’s post includes a recent sobering comment on overshoot reality by un-Denial regular Hideaway that I thought deserved more visibility, and a new essay on acceptance by B, who has recently emerged as one of the best writers about human overshoot.
The ideas of Hideaway and B complement some of the recent discussions here about acceptance and the nature of our species.
P.S. I did not receive permission from B to re-post his essay but I’m hoping that since un-Denial is not monetized he will not object, and I will of course remove the essay if B expresses concern.
By Hideaway: On Radical Reality
The human enterprise of modernity and 8.1+ billion humans is going down. Reduction in available energy is the trigger and there is nothing we can do to stop it, or make it less unpleasant, or save the macrofauna from extinction.
As we build more energy machines of any type, their output increases overall energy available, and used, providing this happens faster than the retirement of old energy producing machines. Over the last few decades we, as in humanity in it’s entirety, have increased fossil fuel use developing more, tearing up the environment more, while increasing the build of renewables.
On a world wide scale, we have not replaced any fossil fuel use, we have just increased all energy use with more fossil fuels being part of that increase, and renewables being part of the increase. At some point growing energy use must stop, unless we make the planet uninhabitable for all life, which means we stop anyway.
Because of our economic system, as soon as we stop growing energy production and use, the price of energy goes up, and we go into recession/depression. It becomes impossible to build ‘new’ stuff of any kind once energy use declines, unless we take the energy from other users, for our ‘new’ builds.
Building more renewables, batteries, EVs, etc., currently means using more fossil fuels to build it all. There is no realistic attempt to build it all with electricity from renewables, nor is that possible. If we diverted existing renewable energy production to, for example, a new mine, then that renewable energy, removed from a city, would have to be made up by increasing fossil fuel generated electricity for the city.
If we ‘ran’ the new mine from new renewables, then these have to be built first, meaning we need the mine for the minerals to build the renewables, or we take minerals from existing users, elsewhere. It’s all just more, more, more and none of the proponents of renewables, including major green organizations want to acknowledge it.
The circular economy can’t work as we cannot physically recycle everything, plus we would need to build all the recycling facilities. If we were to try and do this without increasing total energy use, where does the energy come from to build these new recycling facilities? Other energy users? For the last couple of centuries it’s always come from ‘growth’, especially in energy use. None of us, nor our parents or grandparents, have known a world where the amount of energy available to humanity does anything other than grow.
Because of losses of all materials due to entropy and dissipation into the environment, we will always need mining, of ever lower ore grades, meaning an increasing energy use for mining. It is simply not possible to maintain output from mines once we go to zero energy growth, unless the energy comes from other uses, and users.
Once energy production growth stops, the price of all energy rises, because we need energy production to go up just to maintain the system, as population grows, ore grades decline, etc. If energy production was to fall, the price becomes higher, making everything else cost more. We can see this on a micro scale every time an old coal power plant is closed. On average, the wholesale price of electricity goes up, until compensated for by some newer form of electricity production (the new source taking energy to build).
Visions for the future usually include extra energy efficiency for buildings, etc. but never, ever, include the energy cost of these energy efficiency gains. For example, a simple hand wave about using double glazed or triple glazed windows. To do this, on a worldwide scale, we would need to build a lot of new glass factories, and probably window manufacturers as well. It will take more energy to do this, just like everything else ‘new’.
The phrase ‘build new’ means more energy is required for construction and mining the minerals for the new or expanded factories. The Adaro coal power plant (new) and aluminium smelter (also new) in Indonesia are perfect examples of our predicament. The world needs more aluminium for ‘new’ solar PVs, EVs, wiring, etc. which means more energy use and environmental damage, regardless of whether we use fossil fuels, solar panels, or pumped hydro backup.
Civilization is a Ponzi scheme energy trap, we either grow energy and material use, or we stagnate, and then collapse. Following feedback loops, we see there is no way out of this predicament.
People often claim the future is difficult to predict, yet it is simple, obvious, and highly predictable for humanity as a whole. We will continue to use more energy, mine more minerals, and destroy more of the environment, until we can’t. The first real limit we will experience is oil production, and we may be there already.
Once oil production starts to fall with a vengeance as it must, say 2-3 million barrels/day initially, then accelerating to 4-5 million barrels/day, it will trigger a feedback loop of making natural gas and coal production more difficult as both are totally dependent upon diesel, thus reducing the production of both, or if we prioritize diesel for natural gas and coal production, then other consumers of diesel, like tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, must use less.
Mining and agriculture will come under pressure, sending prices for all raw materials and food through the roof. World fertilizer use is currently above 500 million tonnes annually. A lot of energy is required to make and distribute fertilizer. World grain yields are strongly correlated to fertilizer use, so less energy means less fertilizer, which means less food, unless we prioritize energy for agriculture by taking energy from and harming some other part of our economy.
If we banned discretionary energy uses to keep essential energy uses going, while overall energy continues to decline, then large numbers of people will lose their jobs and experience poverty, further compounding the problems of scarcity and rising prices.
Money for investing into anything will dry up. If governments print money to help the economy, inflation will negate the effort. If governments increase taxes to fund more assistance, then more people and businesses will be made poorer.
The ability to build anything new quickly evaporates, people everywhere struggle between loss of employment, loss of affordable goods and services, increased taxation, and will be forced to increase the well-being of their immediate ‘group’ to the detriment of ‘others’. Crime rates go through the roof, the blame game increases, with some trying to dispossess others of their resources. This will occur for individuals, groups and countries. Crime and war will further accelerate the decline in energy production, and the production and shipment of goods in our global economy. One after the other, at an accelerating rate, countries will become failed states when the many feedback loops accelerate the fossil fuel decline. Likewise for solar, wind and nuclear.
We rapidly get to a point where our population of 8.1+ billion starts to decline, with starving people everywhere searching for their next meal, spreading from city to country areas, eating everything they can find, while burning everything to stay warm in colder areas during the search for food. Every animal found will eaten. Farming of any type, once the decline accelerates, will not happen, because too many people will be eating the seed, or the farmer. Cows, sheep, horses, chooks, pigs, deer, basically all large animals will succumb because of the millions or billions of guns in existence and starving nomadic people.
Eventually after decades of decline, humans will not be able to be hunter gatherers as we will have made extinct all of megafauna. Whoever is left will be gatherers of whatever food plants have self-seeded and grown wild. Even if we were able to get some type of agriculture going again, there would be no animals to pull plows, all old ‘machinery’ from decades prior would be metal junk, so food would remain a difficult task for humans, unless we found ways to farm rabbits and rats, without metal fencing. While we will use charcoal to melt metals found in scavenged cities, it will limited to producing a few useful tools, like harnesses to put on the slaves plowing the fields, or for keeping the slaves entrapped.
Once we go down the energy decline at an accelerating rate, nothing can stop complete collapse unless we can shrink population much faster than the energy decline, which itself may very well be pointless as we have created such a globalised economy of immense complexity, where fast population decline, has it’s own huge set of problems and feedback loops.
Our complex economy requires a large scale of human enterprise. Reduce the scale, and businesses will have less sales, making everything more expensive. Rapid population decline will mean many businesses won’t just reduce production, but will often stop altogether when the business goes bust.
Because of interdependencies of our complex products, a scarcity of one seemingly uncritical component will have far reaching effects on other critical products. Maintenance parts will become difficult to obtain, causing machinery to fail, in turn causing other machines to fail that depended on the failed machines. Think of a truck delivering parts required to fix trucks. The same applies to production line machines, processing lines at mines, or simple factories making furniture, let alone anything complicated. If we only reach population decline as energy declines the problem is still the same.
By B: On Radical Acceptance
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/on-radical-acceptance
So what is radical acceptance? For me, it means: accepting that no single technological civilization based on finite resources is sustainable. Neither in the bronze age, nor in the iron age; let alone in an era of industrial revolutions. None. Why? Because all spend their nest egg — be it fertile topsoil, forests or coal, lithium and copper — a million times faster than it can be replenished. Recycling and “sustainability” practices can only slow down the process somewhat… At least in theory, but rarely in practice. The “circular economy”, together with „renewables” are nothing but fairy tales we tell ourselves to scare off the wolfs at night. Sorry to be this blunt, but the decline of this techno-industrial civilization is inevitable, and is already well underway.
The only type of civilization (if you want to use that term), which proved to be more or less sustainable so far, was a basic hunter-gatherer society; complemented perhaps with some agroforestry, pottery and some low key metallurgy. Anything beyond that inevitably destroyed the soil and the very resource base supporting the entire edifice. With that said, I’m not suggesting that we should immediately go back to the caves and mud huts… That would be impossible for 4 billion of us, entirely supported by large scale agriculture based on artificial fertilizers and a range of pesticides. However, it is important to note, that this is the direction we are headed, with the only question being how fast we will get there and how many humans can be sustained via such a lifestyle.
And this is where acceptance comes into view. Once you understand (not just “know”) that burning through a finite amount of mineral reserves at an exponential pace leads to depletion and environmental degradation at the same time, you start to see how unsustainable any human civilization is. All that technology (in its narrowest technical sense) does is turning natural resources into products and services useful for us, at the cost of polluting the environment. Technology use is thus not only the root cause of our predicament, but it can only accelerate this process. More technology — more depletion — more pollution. Stocks drawn down, sinks filling up. Simple as that. Of course you can elaborate on this matter as long as you wish, conjuring up all sorts of “game changer” and “wonder” machines from fusion to vertical gardens, the verdict remains the same. It. Is. All. Unsustainable. Period.
There are no clean technologies, and without dense energy sources like fossil fuels there wont be any technology — at least not at the scale we see today.
Many people say: Oh this is so depressing! And I ask: why? Because your grand-grand children will have to work on a field and grow their own food? Or that you might not even have grand-grand children? I don’t mean that I have no human feelings. I have two children whom I love the most. I have a good (very good) life — supported entirely by this technological society. Sure, I would love to see this last forever, and that my kin would enjoy such a comfortable life, but I came to understand that this cannot last. Perhaps not even through my lifetime. I realize that I most probably will pass away from an otherwise totally treatable disease, just because the healthcare system will be in absolute shambles by the time I will need it the most. But then what? Such is life: some generations experience the ‘rising tide lift all boats’ period in a civilization’s lifecycle, while others have to live through its multi-decade (if not centuries) long decline.
I did feel envy, shame, and anxiety over that, but as the thoughts I’ve written about above have slowly sunk in, these bad feelings all went away. It all started look perfectly normal, and dare I say: natural. No one set out to design this modern iteration of a civilization with an idea to base it entirely on finite resources; so that it will crash and burn when those inputs start to run low, and the pollution released during their use start to wreck the climate and the ecosystem as a whole. No. It all seemed like just another good idea. Why not use coal, when all the woods were burnt? Why not turn to oil then, when the easily accessible part of our coal reserves started to run out? At the time — and at the scale of that time — it all made perfect sense. And as we got more efficient, and thus it all got cheaper, more people started to hop onboard… And why not? Who wouldn’t want to live a better life through our wondrous technologies? The great sociologist C. Wright Mills summed up this process the best, when writing about the role of fate in history:
Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.
Scientifically speaking this civilization, just like the many others preceding it, is yet another self organizing complex adaptive system. It seeks out the most accessible energy source and sucks it dry, while increasing the overall entropy of the system. We as a species are obeying the laws of thermodynamics, and the rule set out in the maximum power principle. Just like galaxies, stars, a pack of wolves, fungi or yeast cells. There is nothing personal against humanity in this. We are just a bunch of apes, playing with fire.
Once I got this, I started to see this whole process, together with our written history of the past ten thousand years, as an offshoot of natural evolution. Something, which is rapidly reaching its culmination, only to be ended as a failed experiment. Or, as Ronald Wright put it brilliantly in his book A Short History of Progress:
Letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while, but in the end a bad idea.
So, no. I’m not depressed at all. It was fun to see how far a species can go, but also reassuring that it was a one off experiment. Once this high tech idiocy is over, it will be impossible to start another industrial revolution anyway. There will be no more easy to mine, close to surface ores and minerals. Everything left behind by this rapacious society will remain buried beneath a thousand feet of rocks, and will be of such a low quality that it will not worth the effort. Lacking resources to maintain them, cities, roads, bridges will rust and crumble into the rising seas, while others will be replaced by deserts, or lush forests. The reset button has been pressed already, it just takes a couple of millennia for a reboot to happen.
Contradictory as it may sound: this is what actually gives me hope. Bereft of cheap oil, and an access to Earth’s abundant mineral reserves, future generations of humans will be unable to continue the ecocide. There will be no new lithium mines, nor toxic tailings or hazardous chemicals leaching into the groundwater. Our descendants will be forced to live a more sustainable, more eco-friendly life. There will be no other way: the ecocide will end. This also means, that there will be no “solution” to climate change, nor ecological collapse. They both will run their due course, and take care of reducing our numbers to acceptable levels. Again, don’t fret too much about it: barring a nuclear conflict, this process could last well into the next century, and beyond. The collapse of modernity will take much longer than any of us could imagine, and will certainly look nothing like what we see in the movies. And no, cutting your emissions will not help. At all. Live your life to its fullest. Indulge in this civilization, or retreat to a farm. It’s all up to you, and your values. This is what I mean under the term, radical acceptance.
We are a species of this Earth, and paraphrasing Tom Murphy, we either succeed with the rest of life on this planet or go down together. Nurturing hope based technutopian “solutions”, and trying to remain optimistic does not solve anything. This whole ordeal is unsustainable. What’s more, it was from the get go… And that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. And that is fine. We, as a species are part of a much bigger whole, the web of life, and returning to our proper place as foraging humanoids will serve and fit into that whole much better than any technutopian solution could.
Until next time,
B
un-Denial 
Dr. Philip McMillan discusses the health elephant in the room and wonders why everyone ignores it and no one is investigating.
Hint. It’s the same reason everyone ignores overshoot, peak oil, peak minerals, biodiversity loss, and an honest assessment of the climate.
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LOL. 🙂
Hideaway’s still banging on the members of a site that studies peak oil but refuses to acknowledge overshoot.
Notice there’s no similar site that studies overshoot but refuses to acknowledge peak oil.
That’s because to study overshoot you need defective denial genes.
Also notice Hideaway’s not changing anyone’s beliefs regardless of how much evidence and logic he presents.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-1-2024/#comment-773186
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-1-2024/#comment-773189
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I’m obviously bias towards Hideaway because I am sitting there rooting for him in the comments. And he cracks me up with some of his one liners:
“Once again, now 3 weeks in a row, I’ll ask all the usual cornucopians the same question”
“so let’s have your answer instead of the usual deflection you give about any of the downsides of this bright green future”
“This is what you are in favor of, yet you don’t want to understand it, no matter how many times I explain it to you”
Hideaway is not the only one over there that knows what he is talking about. But my god, some of those people are a joke. Would be great if there was a way to measure the amount of energy being wasted by people who are clearly wrong in the first place. I bet the amount worldwide would be mind boggling.
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Brilliant posts, especially Hideaway’s. For historic background using another popular culture medium, there was an ABC News film from 2008 called “Earth 2100” that can be viewed free on YouTube. Though it tried to present itself as only a “worst-case scenario” imaginative rendering via animation, it got many of the details of our present collapse overshoot correct, just with wrong dates (2070, 2080,…). There are some amazing real-life cameos in the show, including one Nostradamus-like one about viruses by a certain favorite of un-Denial.
I don’t buy individual people like HS describing their states of happiness and acceptance regarding the gathering Climatastrophe – who knows what they really do or feel as they scupper about. I do like the name of the scientist quoted in a March 2022 Guardian Antarctica melting lowdown: Fretwell. Peter Fretwell.
Remember, none of us fossil fuel colossi have to stick around when our inherited profligate way of existence hits the ground below the cliff. That will be become the one remaining “civil right” – not that I’m particularly looking forward to it, mind you.
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Rob, this video is portrayed by the ABC presenter as the worst case scenario, if we don’t do anything. Then at the very end they have the required happy ending.
Lucy’s life that’s portrayed is totally unbelievable, as everything in the world continues to work until 2080 when ‘the virus’ brings the world undone. Unrealistic as the ‘gated’ city of New York still seems to have plenty of food, power and materials to build their wall against sea level rise.
To me it’s a classic case of not understanding all the feedback loops in the world. There wont be the food in NY, given the rest of the background story, nor the materials to build the sea wall. In an earlier bit where they just fly hundreds of jets to spread the sulphur dioxide, despite most of the world being in chaos, is again unbelievable, as those jets would only be built and maintained plus have available fuel, flight crews etc in a normal world as we see it, not one falling to pieces.
It’s like the story tellers don’t understand complexity and feedback loops, of how energy depletion and overall reduction of energy availability, will rapidly simplify so much of our complexity, including the energy gathering mechanisms. Then we find we don’t have the materials for a simpler system available, plus we have 8 billion eaters, all at the same time…
I have a friend who is pretty doomerish, but always looks at some Arab country closing the Straights of Hormuz or something like that triggering collapse, despite me continually reminding him, we don’t need a huge trigger, just depletion by itself can and will make all the worst case scenarios happen.
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Thanks for the review. I’ll skip it.
Systems thinking is indeed a key to understanding our world. I don’t recall them teaching us anything about systems in school, and very little in my engineering curicullum.
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That’s a very helpful review, in the sense that it shows the limits of your pretensions to oracularity.
Lucy’s life, as imagined back in 2008, is by no means” totally unbelievable,” and indeed hits some major commonalities with our own world. New York has made plans to build a sea wall (I don’t know how far they’ve gotten), and as of 3:30 today, April 11, 2024, they seem to have plenty of food, power, and materials.
The geoengineering scheme of sulphur dioxide jets is by no means dormant in the minds of our social planners. The vacuous word “simplify” that you try to smother everything with, like our gaseous friend N. Hagens, ignores the great discrepancies in access to power and energy that the capitalizer class has a lock-grip on. There’s going to be nothing “simple” about what awaits us.
The “Straits” of Hormuz could be a precipitating event, as could many, many other factors, including the scarcity of minerals that Chris Clugston has forecast.
The experts and other cameos in Earth2100, including that of our hero Antony Fauci, make it a wonderful curio to greet our new world with. if you’d rather listen to some droning pontificators, or could point to a more engaging collapse video from the earl 2000’s, be my guest.
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Hideaway’s post – correct.
notabilia‘s post – LOL!
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Notabilia, It was the inconsistencies in the show itself. They portrayed a world where oil was in short supply in 2015, yet many decades later they drove across the country.
Crops were being attacked by insect pests that we had no answer to, yet somehow NY had food for years. So did many other cities that had walled themselves off as fortresses.
How would food or anything else get to NY with the world falling apart, decades earlier, as they portrayed?
The world they portrayed, with everything falling apart, they suddenly had hundreds or thousands of jets and all the appropriate, fuel, runways, replacement parts that come from our global complexity, suddenly available to spread massive amounts of Sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. You do know that the sulphur we have for industry comes from mostly sour oil and gas.
It was all portrayed as the worst case scenario, yet had all this ‘stuff’ readily available, that simply wont be available once the oil shortage is as bad as they portrayed in 2015-2030.
Most people have no understanding of the complex interconnectedness of our civilization, and how it works as a whole, not separate parts. We have lived for 2 centuries with increasing amounts energy available, meaning we are able to build whatever is imagined as needed. once we go into energy decline, we rapidly lose the ability to build anything new, as we wont have the energy to do it, because all existing energy is fully utilized now.
Someone, somewhere has to miss out in a world of falling energy availability, as we already need increasing energy just to keep supply of existing minerals up, as ore grades of everything are falling on average.
Energy feeds the industrial sector, yet itself can’t survive without the modern inputs from the industrial sector. People working in the industrial sector, need education, food, and medical care. Where do any products come from if there is less energy in a spiral down year after year? That show missed feedback loops, which by itself does not need a catalyst (Hormuz straight closure as example) to destroy modern civilization. The energy decline is the catalyst!!
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That’s a good response from you, but you do know we are talking about an ABC News special from 2009. I’ve been observing and writing about the supersystem and its collapse since the. Reagan era, and I cannot identify one other time in my sojourn in this vast wilderness where the mainstream dared to dip its toe into that subject.
The show had as many of the talking heads superstars the lowly intellectuals who provided the pre2023 base of our little subculture – Heinberg, Homer-Dixon, a pre-psychotic breakdown Kuntsler, and some other lower-case names from academia.
Are there terrific inconsistencies within this remarkable effort from within corporate media headquarters? You’d have to take that up with them. The supersystem may well persist with a staggeringly disjointed have/have not dichotomy for as long as it can maintain itself, as it is now.
The “worst case scenario” was an advertising tag/lie that was needed to get the dystopian images aired to a national audience – as I said, worst-case has now become our case.
We are not in a secret cult here with badges for being an OG. I’ve been reading and writing about the “complex interconnectedness” of our modern civilization for decades, but who cares? No amount of rarefied knowledge gives anybody Nostradumus-like powers. Who is expected to know where all this modern technological shit comes from?
But if we dare to write about, first we should be able to spell “Strait” correctly, and second, we should be able to try to back up our claims, knowing that the interlocutor may have some better wisdom on some points.
Lastly, the collapse is not a “We” thing – it’s a “they” thing, as in the constantly-replenished capitalized class. We are just the ultra social ants living in their world, which made Earth2100 a rare spectating pleasure for me. I’ll be wearing its T-shirt at the next un-Denial Collapse Convention.
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I’m really surprised you only found one spelling mistake in my work, maybe Rob corrected others. I’m not a wordsmith and like everyone else make mistakes, as I’m human. I’m much better with numbers and it’s through all types of calculations that has convinced me that modern civilization is going down hard, not softly and probably much harder than most in the doomsphere realise.
However including lots of different numbers and calculations in a long post on anything and most of the audiences eyes glaze over.
If you have been writing about these topics for decades, perhaps you could put up a post for Rob to host, perhaps you could fully explain the “they” part of the story. My take is ‘we’ all go down together, as there will be no modernity without a mass participation as everything about the modern world is so highly complex. When the system breaks “they” might last a bit longer in their bunkers or whatever, but entropy will destroy everything so eventually “they” will not have any more modernity than the rest of us.
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First, I’ll admit to being a spelling snob and word snob, which makes it all the more painful errors have been exposed. Writing is a spelling medium, in the same way that plumbing is a mechanical medium. Bad plumbing won’t make it, so why should bad spelling?
I’ll admit my knowledge gaps freely, as they can provide amusing correctives to the vanity that accompanies writing of any kind. I still have no idea of where sulphur for the eternally flying supplier jets comes from in reality.
I fully agree with you that the word “collapse” is not anodyne, that it describes a horrific, basically unassimilable process of suffering, mass death, putrefaction spreading everywhere.
I’ve written for no publication, and have no one to oblige with style or content. There was never going to be a market for what I write, and it was much better when working for the Man to be an anonymous nobody. Dropping out is sometimes the best way to survive and prosper- getting off the crazy train ride of commenting at OFW was a much happier experience, for instance.
The “they” part refers to the ultra social nature of human existence. Humans cannot accept that they are lowly worker-ants who have no agency, free will, or cosmic consequence, so they forever are using “we” to connect to larger social events they have had, and will have, no functional involvement.
Nobody in the George W administration asked me whether Iraq should be invaded. I wasn’t there when GM bought up all the streetcar companies. I don’t get a paycheck derived from running a data center. Yes, it’s going to be a collective problem when hypercomplex modern society self-implodes in greater and greater rings of connectedness, but it’s a highly stratified, hierarchical hyper complex world now.
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I second that suggestion to the ‘notable one’. show us your stuff of all these years, dear sir.
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Hello Notabilia. If you are new to un-Denial, don’t let this discourage you. If you’re not new, I apologize (haven’t seen your name before).
These pit bulls have been shooting down my theories ever since I came here 3 months ago. But I’m still here and I keep pushing my ideas on them because I respect the hell out of their opinions and feedback.
I watched that film last month (I had found it on the mandatory viewing page of Collapse2050). I did not love it, but I certainly didn’t see it the way Hideaway did. Him and Rob are especially good at detecting bullshit.
So as long as you’re overshoot aware, keep the posts coming. We need more voices on this site.
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I’m blanking on who HS is. Can someone remind me please?
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I guess it is for the Honest Sorcerer, aka B, the author of the second piece you put up (https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/on-radical-acceptance).
By the way, it was a great idea to put these two essays side by side. I loved it.
It also shows how much can be in the eye of the various beholders.
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Thanks, yes I published the two together because I thought it was a great example of how you can be fully aware and have different perspectives on the future.
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https://www.okdoomer.io/youre-not-numb-you-have-alexithymia/
Does anyone here feel like this?
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https://www.okdoomer.io/the-media-has-turned-on-us/
Is the author aware of MORT?
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I just followed okdoomer.io on Twitter – Jessica Wildfire @JessicaLexicus
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A quick skim suggests she thinks the covid virus is the cause of our health problems, not mRNA, and she’s hopeful that a new vaccine is will be available soon to protect us properly.
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Yes, I think she is wrong on the virus is the cause, I think it is the vax. She has a PHd in English.
If I set the bar at 100% correct, there would be no one to follow.
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Agree. I follow a lot of people with flaws and tune out the crap.
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I am feeling a little numb these days.
Covid broke something in me with it’s extreme incompetence/corruption and the fact that all of my friends and family bought the bullshit, and still don’t care.
I’m acutely aware now that I’m surrounded by moron denial zombies. The coming scarcity is going to be a shit show. No one will interpret what is going on correctly nor respond wisely.
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LOL!! Not laughing at you Rob, because I agree with every word. Just that you kind of sound like Rick Sanchez from the tv show Rick & Morty and it made me laugh.
Worth checking out if you’ve never seen it. Too vulgar for sure but reminds me of the brilliant Futurama. And I’m convinced that Rick understands MORT completely.
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it is in the name of the show
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Jeez, how did I not notice that? Makes me wonder if the writers were fans of Varki or this website. Looks like the show was created in 2014.
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Got back into watching Daniel Schmachtenberger interviews and came across my absolute favorite Schmach moment. Simplified but effective at helping me understand the two themes that have always been running throughout human history… it only takes one & technology is always a trap disguised as progress.
“Many historians believe the invention of the plow killed animism, which was nearly universal prior to the plow. I can be a hunter and kill a buffalo while still being animistic. I can pray to the spirit of the buffalo, cry when I kill it, take no more buffalo than I need and use it all well, and then say I am eating you and when we die, and get buried, we will become grass that your great grandchildren will eat and we’re part of this great cycle of life. But I cannot breed a buffalo into an ox, yoke it, cut its testicles off, bind its horns, and beat it all day long, and be animistic and still respect the spirit of the buffalo. At that point I have to say its just a dumb fucking animal that is here for us and man’s dominion over earth.
Technology that is highly advantageous to use, is obligate. Meaning you dont get to not use it and still make it thru history. Someone else will use the plow. They’ll grow their population because of the massive caloric increase. They will make it thru the famines. If we dont use it, then our tribe will get killed by them and or die in the famine. So even if I dont want to use it, I have to. And If I dont, then I dont make it thru history. The technology then codes a pattern of human behavior, instead of hunting-gathering, now I am beating an animal all day. This codes a pattern of values in the human psyche. Which eventually codes the entire culture.”
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I buy the technology argument. Not so sure about his animism argument. A lot of people want to believe that we were different and better and lived sustainable lives in the past.
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Does the lion say a prayer before devouring the gazelle or does it just take a bite? It might be that humans, or some humans are the only creatures to ‘care’ for others, the plight or extinction of others.
I would suggest the pet cat, well fed if it caught the female orange bellied parrot alive, wouldn’t care or know it was the last of it’s kind and kill it anyway. May not eat it if very well fed…
I also buy the technology argument, it’s MPP in action, survival of the fittest of those that recognize opportunities to benefit themselves and their group over others.
Imagine the Saudi’s closed 90% of their oil production voluntarily, so the oil ‘lasts’ 200 years or whatever. How long before the US or someone else came up with lots of anti House of Saud arguments, that eventually led to invasion replacement of the leaders, with those that could see the benefit of opening the oil taps fully, for the benefit of the people of course…
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I see the Maximum Power Principle as the foundation of Gresham’s Law – bad money drives out good (wiki). When two or more businesses are competing, if everything is equal (quality of product, service, warranty, same input costs, etc.) then the one that can lower the price by cheating and not getting caught will prevail.
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No surprise there. I’m swimming with sharks when it comes to this topic. Like I said a while back this site is where hopium goes to die (lol). But I have to admit, I am a lot more open to agreeing with you guys than I used to be.
I’m still willfully ignorant of MPP and cannot embrace it. I hate the absoluteness about it. You know I need to dumb things down: if we could run the human experiment thousands of times through some magic simulation, MPP is gonna create this wetiko world every single time? C’mon, I can’t buy that. Perhaps its my MORT.
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Dear Paqnation,
I hope you are feeling well.
I can understand the mental gymnastics you present.
The fact however is in biology, that would have to be changed and overridden.
– Highly unlikely by all means due to evolutionary tendencies which by default prioritise the obtainment of energy for survival and procreation. Not on how to rationally maintain long term equilibrium by utilising a highly costly intelligent organ towards the salvation of the biosphere.
– Perhaps such a process is happening right now…?
However, highly sensitive observant groups would likely be outcompeted and displaced by the more shortsighted less sensitive groups who are more prone to engage in dominant behaviour.
– As we have seen happening in our world and the animal kingdom.
Alas, henceforth I advise you to not concern yourself with such notions.
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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Hello ABC. I like your reasoning, thanks for that.
Sustainable cultures is probably the biggest disagreement within the small community of “people who get it”. Most people think its more illusion than fact. Wisdom was not the relevant factor, and it was more about the energy constraints. And regarding Daniel Quinn’s leavers and takers… leavers had not figured out how to bust through the energy bubble, and thats all it is. If they could have figured out a way, then they too would have become takers in a heartbeat.
I’m not there yet. But un-Denial is slowly pulling me in that direction. It is one of the reasons I like this site so much. Most people hear that plow story and get emotional, but un-Denialist’s hear it and immediately call bullshit. So ya, maybe it is my MORT and I am just trying to hang onto something.
And dont worry, when I finally write my masterpiece, I will give you the credit you deserve. 😊
Chris
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New interview with Dr. Ajit Varki on his MORT theory.
Have not listened to it yet but I noticed from a skim that his speech is different. In the intro it is disclosed that Dr. Varki has developed Parkinson’s disease. 😦
The intro does a very nice job of summarizing Varki’s impressive credentials and accomplishments in case you’re wondering about his credibility.
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The interviewer’s questions are reasonable and Varki’s answers are good however there no new insights about MORT.
No connection is drawn to our overshoot predicament.
It occurred to me that there are many important questions I have never heard anyone ask Dr. Varki. I’m going to compile a list of important questions and submit them to Varki in the next month or two. If you have questions, please send or post them and I will add to the list.
I’m thinking about questions like:
1) What evidence would falsify MORT?
2) What are some of the possible ways evolution could have implemented MORT?
3) Could research into the human genome prove or disprove MORT? What might be the most fruitful research strategies?
4) Does an extended theory of mind enable the evolution of more CPU horsepower? If not, does this mean elephants have sufficient CPU to discover general relativity but are blocked?
5) Is my assumption that doomers have defective denial genes likely correct?
6) What explains why a small number of people have broken through denial? Were they always defective? If not, how might we replicate this awareness?
7) Could a gene therapy be developed to override denial? Could this be delivered via mRNA?
8) Does my idea have merit that MPP will prevent high intelligence from emerging in the universe without denial?
9) What change in the brain mechanisms might have enabled an extended theory of mind? Is this extra level of abstraction the same mechanism required for symbolic language? Are MORT and language intimately linked?
10) Are any scientists investigating MORT? If not, why not?
11) Have members of your CARTA organization shown any interest in MORT? If not, why not?
12) Do you agree finding a religion that does not believe in some form of life after death would falsify MORT?
13) tbd
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Great list of questions. And sad to hear about his Parkinson’s. Based on how he sounded throughout the interview I would not have known anything was wrong.
Regarding #5 & 6: I think it’s more about some of us being able to close our MORT door a little bit. I thought it was knowledge that does this but that makes zero sense. I can provide my inner circle with the best overshoot knowledge available, and it will not make a dent.
Maybe it’s more about a belief in something (conscious or subconscious). I don’t know what though. Reality? A genuine love for non-human life? A desire for human extinction?… And if you already possess any of these “beliefs” then you might be a prime candidate for understanding & accepting our predicament.
I dont know. I wanted to add a question for you to ask him, but I’m all over the place.
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Good article Mike! Did not know you had a blogsite. Cool.
Loved that death rituals link. The clips showing animals mourning their dead really got to me.
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Excellent Mike.
I think you are proposing at least 3 alternate explanations for human denial, one of which is the supremecy of MPP over all other behaviors including intelligence, which I’d already planned to discuss with Varki.
I will have to read your essay a few more times to distill your arguments down to questions for Varki.
Do you want to propose questions for Dr. Varki or would you like me to extract them from your essay?
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I had done most of this before I got on with other stuff but thought I’d get it up and let you know. You’re welcome to use it how you see fit.
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Very good. If I get anything interesting back from Dr. Varki I’ll probably create a new post.
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Excellent piece.
Homo Naledi was entirely new to me and much appreciated.
Maybe the absence of denial leads to the actions taken by Robin Williams (wiki) and Michael Ruppert (wiki).
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Agreed, good thoughtful essay on the human phenomenon.
I’m not fully on the MORT train, and still think there may be other, or additional causes for our species level inability to avoid long term downsides, even when we can see them unfolding.
I found this book to be a good possible mechanism for our uniqueness as a species. The key concept is robust cultural transmission becoming more of an evolutionary pressure than the physical environment.
https://darwinsunfinishedsymphony.com
Personally, I am aware of my individual demise, and do not feel that the logical, inevitable response would be depression and less reproductive fitness. It could also simply be acceptance and making one all the more prone to live for the day, thus for reproduction, maybe additionally to attain some form of immortality?
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Remember, a key insight of MORT is that given an extended theory of mind (which enables the cultural transmission you favor) enabled us to take over the planet, why haven’t other species evolved full extended theory of minds? As Mike and others have pointed out, other species are close, but none have made it all the way like us. It’s such a useful fitness trait that something must be blocking an extended theory of mind in other species.
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https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/come-out-you-animals-how-the-massacre-at-al-shifa-hospital-happened/
‘Come out, you animals’: how the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital happened
During the massacre at al-Shifa Hospital, the Israeli army shot patients in their beds and doctors who refused to abandon the sick, separated people into groups with differently-colored bracelets, and executed hundreds of civil government employees.
If Russia, China, or Iran did something like this, it would be condemned unanimously by western politicians and you would hear about non-stop on western news/propaganda outlets.
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https://www.collapse2050.com/farmers/
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The area north of the American farm belt is the Canadian Shield, which is poorly suited for agriculture. Actually most of the American Corn belt goes to animal feed (i.e. industrial meat production), biofuels, and junk food (in the form of high-fructose corn syrup).
https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-01-16-MapofAnimalvsHuman.jpg
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There’s an interesting collapse experiment underway. How long can a modern country function without a reliable electricity infrastructure?
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-41124-zelensky-in-shock-as
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More crazy footage from Richard. I dont know where he gets these video clips. Watch it now because they usually disappear in a couple days.
When viewing this type of content all I can think about is how far off the path humanity has gone. Pure madness, and a push of the reset button (or extinction button) is long overdue.
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Dear Chris,
I hope you are feeling well.
Heed this warning;
For all whom want to murder their inner idealistic self, your wish will be fulfilled .
Wisdom has no inherent value in a world of energy, and never stood a chance against unhinged violence.
In such a world, might makes right and the pen will never be mightier than the sword.
An unfortunately ghastly species we are, as Professor William Rees spelled it;
“Too clever by half, not nearly smart enough.”
As a self-proclaimed determinist, it is a strange sensation I experience as I acknowledge how such ancient theist book posses rather incredible insights on human nature.
“For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, as knowledge grows, grief increases.”
Kind and warm regards,
ABC
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The 17 Things I Am 100% Certain About | Frankly #60
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Another seemingly vaxx event here. A teacher at our local school dropped dead playing hockey on the weekend. She was super fit in her late fifties and boostered. The other teachers are starting to get nervous now (mandated to keep job, but mandates are now dropped). It is slowly dawning on people just how much of a bad choice they made.
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I wonder if Parkinson’s is an mRNA side effect? I have not heard anyone discuss it but lots of people discuss brain cell inflammation and clots.
It feels to me like there has been a big drop in IQ over the last few years but maybe I’m misinterpreting the usual denial?
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Degraded brain function a likely result of mRNA vax. See this Tucker C interview of German researcher Dr. Michael Nehl describes in great detail how constant exposure to fear-based messages leads to a strong neurotoxic effect in the brain. In a recent interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Nehl described how the spike protein, when it enters the brain, stimulates the production of an entire cascade of pro-inflammatory cytokines that interfere with the hippocampus and shut down our ability to think. And, in his words, “And it gets worse.”
Substack by Dr Tenpenny https://substack.com/redirect/9e517f61-cf11-4b61-a515-9b170ff1b670?j=eyJ1IjoiYjAwcWgifQ.poibOx6RN_5Yii73POXYU-sykgP-seCr_q5zyutYlW0
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The video near the bottom of that article is a must watch – especially if you are concerned about any kind of dementia, specifically the effect of the spike protein, the role of vitamin D, micro doses of lithium (1 mg per day), exercise, etc.
Here is a shorter URL:
https://drtenpenny.substack.com/p/neuroinflammation-connecting-the
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I just added Dr. Nehl’s audiobook “The Indoctrinated Brain” to my phone and hope to listen to it soon.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167898031-the-indoctrinated-brain
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My daily multivitamin does not have lithium. Is anyone taking a lithium supplement? Is healthy eating good enough?
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This is what we have : (Amazon.com), the comments are worth reading.
Trace Minerals ConcenTrace Drops | Full Spectrum Minerals.
The ingredients are listed in the “Important information” and “Compare with similar items” Magnesium (250 mg); Chloride (650 mg); Sodium (5 mg); Potassium (3 mg); Sulfate (40 mg); Lithium (1.5 mg); Boron (1 mg).
It is not clear if the numbers above are per dose or per drop – likely per dose which is quarter to half a teaspoon per day.
The bottle we have says 96 day supply, likely using a quarter teaspoon per day. The bottle linked above is the same 237mL, but says 48 day supply.
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Thanks. Are you taking this these Trace Mineral Drops as a lithium supplement?
How you noticed any change in brain function since you started?
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I’m on 20k IU D+K, Selenium (2 Brazil nuts a day), various other vitamins, MCT oil, Methylene blue (30 drops per day in 1L of Costco IV drink), half a tea spoon a day of the trace minerals (which happens to include 1.5 mg Lithium), studiously avoid seed oils and things cooked in them (e.g. hash browns), recently switched to sour dough bread, try to avoid fast carbs, religiously avoid HFCS and equivalent, avoid highly processed foods – it never ends.
Consequently it is hard to single out if one thing makes a significant difference – I still think I’m smart but that could be arrogance. The hand tremor suggests I’m slowly losing.
I’m probably your demographic twin – so far, I have no comorbidities, blood pressure good, BMI bad, no meds, non smoker, need much more exercise but too lazy.
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Yowser, you are serious about supplements!
I try to follow a similar diet. I also eat a couple brazil nuts a day but didn’t realize I was doing for minerals.
Cheated recently on sugar by making some homemade butter tarts as a treat but I’m back doing physical labor at the farm so thought it might be ok.
The Amazon product is a little small and a lot pricey for this bulk buying prepper but I’m going to check Costco on my next visit for a big ass cheap bottle of trace minerals.
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Another potentially beneficial mineral is silicic acid (link to Google). Professor Christopher Exley (wiki) linked Aluminum with Alzheimer plaques. The very powerful aluminum and vaccine lobbies conspired to discredit him and persuaded Google to make him and his work ‘disappear’. The University of Warwick (UK) also cut off his funding, even though they were only a conduit. Aluminum as a metal (not oxide) does not occur in nature.
Recent work appears to have Iron playing a more significant role in Alzheimer’s. It would have been nice to let Exley complete his work and rule Aluminum in or out.
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A view of the future from Tom Murphy
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/post-modernity/#more-5784
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Rob,
Preston Howard here, with two comments:
First, the wide range of ideas presented and the overall high level of the intellectual discussion on un-denial.com is a unique and enduring creation. I cannot begin to express my joy in the material you and the others who post on un-denial.com share with me. Many thanx to all.
Second, recently there have been a number of references to the Maximum Power Principle (MPP), often as a wave in passing as the post continues to explore other aspects of an issue. For example, Rob, you began a recent post to Mike Roberts as follows:
”I think you are proposing at least 3 alternate explanations for human denial,
one of which is the supremecy of MPP over all other behaviors including intelligence,
which I’d already planned to discuss with Varki.”
I myself have been wrestling with the possible overlap between MORT and MPP. As you and others discuss this, and especially as you prepare questions for Dr Vakri, I wish to propose Occam’s razor (IMHO) perhaps suggests MPP is the more fundamental, controlling influence in behavior, rather than a process limited to the behavior of creatures with human brains (as with MORT).
As I noted in my contribution, MPP operates at the cellular level of ALL life:
1. MPP operates in single-cell life forms (paramecium).
2. A person may be regarded as a collection of cells, quoting Alfred Lotka.
3. Plants demonstrate MPP as they compete for resources.
4. Mammals demonstrate MPP as they compete for resources.
5. MPP assures us that humans — those powerful enough to do so — will
continue to use every available energy source and material resource
until those materials are no longer available. We cannot do otherwise.
As for myself, I wonder if Dr Vakri has a perspective that more clearly integrates MORT and MPP. Some of your proposed questions embrace parts of the overlap. My apology for failing to suggest a precise wording of how I think we might ask this. Perhaps others can suggest.
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Thanks for the kind words about the site Preston.
MPP will be a very interesting issue to discuss with Varki. In the early days of our species it’s easy to imagine the MPP perspective is not in conflict with MORT: extended theory of mind -> mortality awareness -> depression -> less than optimal MPP -> block mortality awareness with a tweak to our fear module to retain the super useful extended theory of mind.
It is harder to accept that a genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities (which is a side effect of mortality denial) explains why super smart well educated polymaths today are unable to absorb simple facts about our overshoot. Perhaps MPP has another path for blocking intelligence? But such a path smells too complicated for evolution to invent in the short duration of our species’ existence.
On the other hand, beavers are born with the skills and knowledge required to build dams so maybe it is possible?
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Hi Preston,
Does MPP account for how many, if not all, plants make more sugars than they can use and distribute them through their roots to other plants and/or soil life-forms? While in exchange taking up minerals and other materials? Basically, plants and their associated life-forms support the commonweal.
‘Nature bats last’ as Guy McPherson likes to say. It seems reasonable to assume nature will still share on some scale with our species as we progress toward a lower-total-power future.
I do believe some human knowledge will also be of value in the future.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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Paging AJ, paging AJ, what’s your assessment of the escalation risk?
Are we ok for a few more years?
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Yeah, I’m still here. Mostly just “like”ing what I’m reading and not commenting.
I, on one level, expect to see everything fail (internet, power, communication) in an instant and we will have had little inkling that nuclear winter is on its way. On the other I try to cope with the never ending drizzle and clean up the damage (fallen trees) from the freezing rain storm in January while simultaneously starting a the gardens and rehabbing an old mountain bike. All while everyone around me is in denial about everything important.
Of course, the last few days has been spending some time wondering if Iran (the Islamic resistance), Russia and China can pull off the escalation ladder detour and yet still inflict a strategic defeat on the U.S./NATO and Israel. It appears that Iran really doesn’t want a war but is being forced to respond by increasing escalation by Israel. All we can hope is that Israel doesn’t start lobbing nukes. If they do who knows how Russia and China will respond. I know many are worried, Col. Wilkerson, John Mearsheimer, Allister Crooke, Duran, etc. Now is the time I would like to hear from Chuck Watson again (maybe not?).
BUT, we all die someday and as all here know this civilization is past it expiration in some many ways.
AJ
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Thanks AJ. I forgot about your ice storm problems. 😦
Today’s discussion by John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen is pretty good.
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Again a good synopsis of the situation from the Duran. I still disagree with Mearsheimer on the point that he still thinks the U.S. is the premier superpower (i.e. # 1). That is so 1990’s thinking as Martyanov makes clear again and again – the U.S. is a has been power with Nukes and Russian military technology is 10 – 15 years more advanced that the U.S. and the U.S. has no chance of catching up (Patriot anti-missiles are useless and U.S. has no hypersonic anything). Sometimes I wonder if Mearsheimer just says that because that allows him to be somewhat acceptable to the status quo OR he’s just in denial.
AJ
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An under the covers look at the bright green technology of the Cybertruck battery pack.
Looks very repairable and 100% recyclable to me.
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Amazing technology and engineering, I’m sure, but dang – all the material inputs that went into it…. The Cybertruck weighs over three tons, and the battery pack alone is as heavy as Honda Civics from the early 1980s. I hope those guys have steel-toed boots on, in case that thing goes off-balance on the cart.
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I’ve only driven a Tesla once for a couple kilometers. I noticed the extreme weight.
If we were serious about energy and materials conservation we’d drive golf carts powered by lead acid batteries. Low speed and light weight are critical for energy frugality. Plus lead acid batteries are a recycling success story.
We have two golf carts at the farm and use them like pickup trucks. Yesterday I towed a small trailor for hauling blueberry and black current prunings I chipped into mulch.
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Yes, indeed. Did you ever hear about the Citroen electric Car calles “Ami”? That’s build like that. Quite successful too, as it is not very expensive either. https://www.citroen.co.uk/ami
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I like it but it uses Lithium-ion batteries.
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I think you need a /sarc emogi Rob.
I watched the whole video and just look at all the plastic and mica in there, wondering how anyone thinks such a thing is viable long term, because of the plastic and polymers, or recyclable by any type of process other than pyrometallurgically which of course uses fossil fuels.
Plus of course, have one damaged battery cell and the whole battery pack needs replacing, very, very costly..
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It took me years to master the happy face and sad face emojis but I’ll try to take on a new one. Is there a keyboard shortcut for /sarc?
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Weogo,
Many thanx for your interest in MPP. You asked:
”Does MPP account for how many, if not all, plants make more sugars than
they can use and distribute them through their roots to other plants and/or soil
life-forms? While in exchange taking up minerals and other materials?
Basically, plants and their associated life-forms support the commonweal.”
I agree plants support the commonweal in situations where the intermixed life forms are not in competition for the same resources or energy. For example, plants and fungi are known to cooperate when it is mutually advantageous.
However, the oak tree knows this seedling came from its own acorn, but another nearby seedling didn’t. So, the parent oak does things to help its offspring and acts to hinder the other. It may move its branches to block sunlight from the intruder while maximizing sunlight for its offspring. It may push its roots toward the interloper (forcing it to compete for water and nutrients), while attempting to keep its roots away from its sapling (allowing it all the available water and nutrients).
The general rule is that Nature wants each living entity to maximize its own success (or the overall success of the species, depending on situation specifics). Sometimes women and children are put in lifeboats first, even though men could make the kids stay on the sinking ship. Similarly, the mama bear will fight a pack of wolves to save a cub, risking her own life (and the possibility she could have more cubs in the future).
While I agree nature bats last, I also know nature likes diversity. So, it’s not always a simple exercise to apply MPP in a given situation. This brings me back to earlier comments concerning MORT and the fascinating borderline between psychology and biology.
However, my bottom line remains: We have broken the World, and we cannot fix it. The Earth will heal once it rids itself of the human locusts. Except for MPP, humans could recognize the situation and attempt amends by acting to support the survival of whatever life may follow us. But, we won’t. So I, like other un-deniers, stand witness to the current global collapse. May you live in interesting times.
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Highly recommend this video on Game Theory. Also helps to explain why life is evolving to helpful to other life.
Also, you may find this interesting; the Titanic was a unique exception where women and children were prioritised to lifeboats. Statistically, men have a much better survival rate in disasters – that is to say most men save themselves first.
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You really can’t blame the men. They’re protecting millions of precious sperm cells that can replace the women and children.
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OMG haha
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I have another interesting factoid; you’re descended from twice as many women as you are men.
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Do not understand, how does that work?
Another factoid I do understand. The critical dna in our mitochondra that regulates our high voltage power plants only comes from the female germ line.
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Basically, most women will breed, but let’s say only 50% of men will. A surprising number of children a raised by a man who is not their biological father.
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need another sarc emoji here Rob! (or not?)
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I’ll use the sarc emoji as soon as someone teaches me what it is and how to make it.
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Very good video, thanks.
I like that the winning strategy is to be 1) nice 2) forgiving and 3) don’t be a pushover.
The best nice and forgiving strategy is Tit for Tat. Curious minds want to know what strategy Iran and Israel will choose.
Inability to forgive is big flaw in my character. Would like to improve. I thought forgiveness was a central tenet of Christianity so I sought advice from religious friends but did not receive any useful tips.
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The Veritasium video above, on the Prisoner’s Dilemma was indeed very good. I think you have oversimplified by ignoring :
(3) don’t be a pushover
Also, the ‘better’ outcome of the dilemma depends upon :
Personally, I don’t see “Inability to forgive” as a flaw, with caveats – has the individual needing forgiveness acknowledged their wrong doing, have they been punished, was punishment adequate / appropriate, are they contrite?
For groups, forgiveness should involve a rope and a sturdy tree branch.
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Agree, I over simplified too much.
Good points about forgiveness however staying angry at someone that does not properly apologize can ruin a lot of time that could have been spent enjoying life.
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Thank you for this recommendation. The video was excellent and fun.
I particularly enjoyed the part (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM&t=754s) which explained that if the end of the game is known, then rational players will defect all the way from the start (which still ultimately doesn’t make sense from an external observer, as the players then get a total reward 3 times less than if they had both cooperated)
So, in a way, it’s the uncertainty about the exact moment of the end which makes defection less probable (in the presence of rational actors).
(It seems to me that, in the real world, the game is even more subtle/complex, as the exact values of the rewards may not be known before hand and fluctuate.)
Maybe, this explains the current geopolitics in various places of the world. As we are nearing the point where modern weapons will be rendered useless (lack of fuel, maintenance issues, amunition production issues), maybe many players want to take advantage of their remaining strength to get in the most favorable position for the “next” world. (expand territory, get strategic locations, level thorny configurations) That may also be the reason Poutine (a most rational player, if any) said we are in the most dangerous decade since ww2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNg3Axaetew)
In a way, to mere mortals like me, and the rest of life, unpredictable, sudden, rapid collapse may prove to be the best outcome of all. This may be the only path which both avoids a nuclear exchange (be it triggered inadvertently or not) and prevents humans from exerting continous pressure on the living world, thus grinding it to total exhaustion.
To me, at this point, only collapse may provide some form of respite.
(in any case, I am also of the opinion that, at some point, we will collectively choose to collapse as it will seem preferable to what the previous system has become)
Just some random thoughts…
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Good thoughts Charles..
Your comments made me think how this game has the same weakness as modern economics, it makes the assumption all players are rational, yet we know from studies in psychology that humans are emotional creatures as much as rational ones, with neither being 100%.
I can remember a property development back in the 1970’s in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. The developers were going to build a shopping mall in this large area of older industrial factories and a few homes scattered around, but had to buy all the properties. Simple, offer enough money and the rational decision was people would sell.
They all sold except one lady, whose house was in the middle of the development, so the developers used the usual tactics of trying to make her leave, but she was staying. They even tried compulsory acquisition via council and state government as the project would employ XXXX numbers so was important for the state yada, yada, yada. None of it worked, she kept winning in court as it was her house that she had bought in an area designated as ‘housing’ when she bought.
Courts ruled that until she left there could be no compulsory acquisition. Developers had to redesign the entire complex around her house and yard, leaving the existing old fence in tact. They put a car park all around her house, but her emotional attachment to the house cost them millions (yes they tried offering her double and triple the value of the house, after the court wins). She lived well into her 90’s, so that house remained for decades.
I just looked on google maps and that house is now gone and a new shopping mall is where her house use to stand, (Station st Camberwell, Melbourne for anyone interested).
If the developers had offered her 2 to 3 times ‘market value’ before the court cases and publicity, they would have probably obtained the property quickly. However they were being rational by offering only ‘market’ value, before trying the rational court approach.
Come to think of it, this entire page of Rob’s, being un-denial is about how humans are not rational creatures. After all, a huge percentage of the population believe in some type of life after death, being an emotional belief based in no reality or rationality, so why should we expect players in the games of life to act rationally, like in the game above or economics?
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That point is critical. There are also many other assumptions that make the game a purely academic exercise with little application in the real world :
one-model vs one-model : Eventually many models were considered, but like a league table they were pitted against each other one at a time. In the real world all teams would have been on the pitch at the same time.
Cooperation leads to a better outcome : in a world of shortages, changing climate, etc. it is not necessarily a given that cooperation can produce a better outcome.
I thought it was good from an intellectual perspective.
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Really nice story. Thank you for sharing. Yes, I agree.
Our minds are limited. We necessarily create abstractions (models) to reason about the world. Make simplifications. In these simplifications, lie the unknowns, the errors, the unpredictable, the freedom. Oh so easily do we tend to forget that the world is not just reduced to the idea we have of it. Isn’t it a form of arrogance?
Aren’t we made in his image? And thus contain as much irrationality as the “surrounding” creation. Does faith in rationality really “work any better” (or worse for that matter) than awe? 😉
If cooperation were always ensured to be a winning strategy, wouldn’t the world tend to become static? Change and steady-state are finely intertwined in an eternal dance.
Increasingly, I tend to consider the manifestation as a beautifully complex continuously unfolding fractal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhOSM6uCWxk or wisps of smoke rising from the pipe of an old dervish.
🙂
The life after death question is meaningless, because the definition of self (“I”) is arbitrary. This cannot be understood from within the self=body, subject/object model of the manifestation.
Those who “believe” there is no life after death are as foolish as the ones who believe there is. See that.
Forget the model for a moment. Let go of the belief That (the manifestion, the creation, the universe, that which can’t be named because it can’t be bound) is reduced to only be the currently widely accepted model (in the self-labeled rational sapiens western world).
Then, you can choose to live by it, if it is still of your liking…
Just a proposition 🙂
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“a huge percentage of the population believe in some type of life after death, being an emotional belief based in no reality or rationality“
Don’t be so ludicrous. What reason or evidence do you have to suppose a “life after death” is unlikely?
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Simply, because there is no evidence for it
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It seems that Iran and Israel are on the brink of war.
https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-04-13-24/index.html
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The angel of death, Stephen Jenkinson, seems to have that 50/50 split where you either love him or hate him and nothing in between. But for those of you who are inspired by Native American lifestyles, or if you have major issues with death, then you might enjoy this 2008 documentary called Griefwalker. I watched it again last night and was reminded of why I like him so much. This was one of the first things on my journey that helped me with my fear of death.
СПЪТНИК В СКРЪБТА (Griefwalker) (youtube.com)
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New video of Simon Michaux with his impossible Venus Mission. I’m amazed at the change in Simon over the years. You can go back to really old videos of his, over 10 years old, where he really does have a grip on reality about future problems.
It’s called “Everything You Know About Commodities is Wrong”.
The chief problem with this new video is that it highlights for me the lack of understanding about complexity and what it takes in our modern world to build modernity. A computer or a smart phone have hundreds of different tiny parts, all with their own specialist mineral contents. How complex is the facility that could separate everything in either 100%, so that a circular economy could work? No-one knows as no-one has built such a facility anywhere. It is likely that it’s impossible to separate all the minerals and ‘some’ have to be continually replaced by new ones.
In other words some mining would always have to take place, which doesn’t work for a concept settlement, as there might not be the required minerals anywhere near by.
Another aspect is that they are going to build the new settlement from scratch. In other words they are going to rely totally upon the existing system for every aspect of their ‘new’ concept, which is likely to cost billions of dollars and never get permission from any government to do. This is because of the privately operated thorium reactor for their own use, unless they agree to pay a lot of ongoing taxes of some type for the ‘privilege’ of occupying that area of land. This immediately brings the problem that they need to make a surplus by selling something to the outside world, to pay the taxes. Plus of course the normal fossil fuel economic world has to continue to exist to provide all the very specialised ‘stuff’ they need to build their perfect world.
I wonder if Simon has worked out that no-one is going to employ him when he talks gloom and doom, but provided he has ‘solutions’ the money to keep surviving in the modern world will flow his way? (no matter how ridiculous the solution is!)
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I of course think this is MORT in full plumage.
Here we have a very smart guy with education and experience directly relevant to overshoot, who became aware of our predicament, studied the “solutions” proposed, realized they were all obviously going to fail, tried to warn others, learned that no one in interested in reality, then couldn’t accept his own conclusions, and linked up with tribe that I bet has some spiritualty and special sauce, plus as you say the possibility of income, that gave Michaux a home and hope.
If not MORT, what else can explain this bizarre behavior?
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If it is not MORT, the only other thing I can think of is time. In that he needs more time to come to grips with reality… But why do some people get there much quicker than others?
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I agree, there is certainly ‘something’ that stops people from accepting reality and MORT does explain it. I can accept MORT as the ‘something’, as no-one seems to have a better answer.
It would be easy to write a long post showing everything wrong with the concept of a ‘town’ of 10,000 being totally self sufficient living a modern lifestyle, one that can build and maintain a thorium reactor. It’s so easy to pick apart the concept, I’d be surprised anyone would throw money at it, but human ‘exceptionalism’ or MORT always win out, until they can’t.
We only need to look around us in whatever home we live in, to see so much stuff made of so many different smaller bits, even the tap in the kitchen or the oven or toaster, to realise that this community of 10,000 people would need the industrial set up to make many thousands of different parts, and when it comes to anything electrical, wires covered with insulation made from plastic.
Think of the processes to make that plastic without fossil fuels. run through the equipment and parts needed to do it. Suddenly we are up to hundreds of thousands or millions of separate little bits, that are all manufactured in the modern world to precise specifications.
We simply can’t have complexity without vast numbers of people to run the myriad of different processes needed to keep that complexity going, plus need enormous markets for every little widget so there is viability in the manufacture of every little part. We have complexity because of massive size of population and therefore markets. It only exists because of this size. Reduce the size and you reduce the complexity, something Joseph Tainter worked out in his research when writing ” The Collapse of Complex Societies”.
Simon Michaux is smart enough to understand the complexity issue so it’ either MORT or just knowing people will give him money to find ‘solutions’ and not ‘predicaments’.
I also find it more than just interesting the number of ‘professors’ or people former high up in academia that explain the reality of coming collapse, after they have retired, so no longer rely upon getting or maintaining ‘positions’ that require some type of answers or solutions for the modern worlds problems. I suspect most knew our situation when teaching others about solutions, but needed the cash for day to day living, loan repayments etc.
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I can be obtuse at times but I think here and in your essay above you may be politely telling me that I am also in denial for favoring rapid population reduction as a response.
In my defense, I don’t claim population redution will solve our overshoot problem and preserve complexity, however I do claim that proactively reducing our population will reduce the suffering that will occur on the path to the same lower population if we let nature do it for us. In addition, fewer people will mean more time to adjust, maybe a lower probability of nuclear war, and possibly less damaged ecosystems at the destination.
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I also favor rapid population reduction, but with it we will get a rapid simplification of complexity as well. The level of population we need to get to, is beyond imagination. Falling rapidly to just 1 billion is not going to save the ecosphere once we don’t have fossil fuels, as we have reduced the carrying capacity of the world.
I’m of the opinion that only around 15% of humanity is currently part of the modern civilization we in the west think about, which means if 85% of the population disappeared tomorrow, most likely from the global South, the damage to the ecosphere would just continue until oil production crashed.
Even if we had something like Jack Alpert’s plan of a lottery for having births, starting tomorrow, it would take many decades to get the population down to 4B. It’s too little too late. We don’t have decades until collapse, it’s more like ‘years’ at best, assuming we don’t nuke each other to cover oil/energy decline.
I don’t think it’s physically possible to maintain modernity once fossil fuels are gone. Fossil fuels gave us the seemingly unlimited energy to do everything in our modern world, while population growth in relative peace, gave size to growing markets that allowed complexity to grow. Take away either and we decomplexify the system we call modern civilization. They go together, not separately from each other.
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I’m pleased we agree.
I find the “n-1 is better than n suffering” argument compelling and is reason enough to try. Even if passing laws proved politically impossible, just honestly discussing the coming suffering and why population reduction laws should be passed would be enough to cause many people to have fewer or no children, and therefore we succeed by causing n-1.
I’d also bet that having the conversation would change a lot of behaviors in a positive direction and would bring social presssure on high consumption behaviors.
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Perhaps the form of denial is that it is not impossible to organise an unified response as a species to this predicament. We need 100% agreement on the issue of overshoot so that an authoritarian response is not required. I feel that that is impossible and collapse is the only outcome. How fast and how bad? All just a guess.
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We don’t need 100% agreement to publicly debate the need for population reduction which will result in at least n-1 suffering which is a success. What am I missing?
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Every country agreeing to that? I don’t see that likely. Certain religions would see that as a sin. The talk already is that we are going down soon in population and that is a problem. Humans don’t seem capable of acting as a colony of social creatures that put the colony’s survival before the individual. Or can’t see what the real problem is for the colony. I don’t think we are clever or wise enough.
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I think you may be missing my point. We don’t need an agreement between countries. We don’t need a law passed in any country.
By discussing the coming suffering and why we should reduce our population many people that listen will independently choose to have fewer or no children and therefore we succeed because n-1 suffering is better than n suffering.
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I agree that n-1 is better, I just wonder for every couple that reduces is there a couple that for religious or cultural reasons increase their offspring number.
Our problem is that reason will never outpace emotion. Our emotional side of the brain actually works faster than the rational side. But that can be changed with training.
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I know many of you think Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche is an untrustworthy doomsayer. I disagree and think there’s high probability Bossche will be proven correct.
I don’t have the skills to assess this complex topic but I do have a nose for people with integrity that are seeking to understand what is going on. Here we have two doctors with experience treating people with covid, and with good understandings of the immune system, who spend 90 minutes taking a very deep dive into Bossche’s hypothesis and conclude he is probably right and we will soon face a medical crisis.
The takeaway is that highly mRNA’d people at risk with co-morbidities should begin taking prophylactic anti-virals immediately.
https://philipmcmillan.substack.com/p/reanalysis-of-geerts-concern-for
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Yea I listened for about an hour – very hard to follow for non medical people
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I don’t think that he is a untrustworthy doomsayer, I just feel he is a little too self absorbed. I find his views extremely valid and credible.
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Thanks for clarifying.
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I’ve been following Mark Kulacz @ Housatonic for a couple years. I’m still trying to figure him out and I do not vouch for his integrity, however if like me you are confident nothing makes sense about covid, and you enjoy well researched plausible rabbit holes, then Kulacz digs some of the best.
https://rumble.com/v4pihgq-ep-91.q-covid911-on-full-display-in-march-2-2020-white-house-meeting.html
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Apparently, climate scientists can’t publicly say that the solution to climate change and other symptoms of overshoot is a serious downsizing of the human enterprise.
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They also ignore the work of Dr. Tim Garrett which explains why all climate change policies have failed to date and will continue to fail.
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Here is some of the Latest of Tim Garrett’s research.
Why will half of humanity perish by mid-century from climate change-related consequences, even if we make the CORRECT global fossil fuel reductions? Welcome to Garrett’s Climate Change Dilemma
https://www.joboneforhumanity.org/why_half_of_humanity_dies
According to Tim Garrett’s calculations even Peak oil won’t save our bacon.
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Thanks. There’s a third important dimension to this puzzle. What will be the BAU trajectory caused by fossil energy depletion? This must be considered before choosing an optimal path.
I will bet you that the optimal path is population reduction plus forced fossil energy conservation at a rate slightly faster than will occur due to BAU depletion.
I’ve never heard of Job One for Humanity and do not recognize any of the names on its board. Are they a good group to follow?
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But don’t worry. According to Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, the Earth can support over 50 billion people! (This comment is facetious).
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I forgot to provide the context for my comment.
Dr. Garrett denies near term fossil energy depletion.
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There are acres and acres of trees dying in this beautiful part of the world. It has been that dry for that long. I went for a drive to Hobart today. On some hillsides in the Huon valley, nearly every tree looks dead. Tragic. Hopefully some recover.
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I see sick trees here too. It really upsets me.
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The Huon Valley and Hobart, that puts you extremely close to Mike Stasse (DamnTheMatrix) a couple of kilometers west of Geeveston. He still regularly posts and lives in a partially earth sheltered bespoke house.
2024 April 15 a YouTube video link, Limits to Growth is Here
2024 March 25, The other Nutter from Tasmania
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Hello Hamish,
Hope you and your family are well. It seems that there are a few of us Nutters here in the Huon Valley of Tasmania! Amongst the undenialists here, Perran and I also call this valley our home, although our family is under transition to leave this island for a warmer (and wetter) clime in the hopefully near future. When we first came to Tasmania from the States 25 years ago, we chose this valley because we thought we could make an attempt at a more sustainable (now I know how loaded that word it) lifestyle. In the ensuing years the weather has become ever more erratic, with increasing dry summers and snap frosts which curtail the growing seasons. This past year our area sustained a freak hailstorm in spring that knocked off much of the fruit on the trees or damaged the rest. Not to mention a major thunderstorm with lightning strike to a tree only 50m away and caused power failure for 4 days. The almighty crack of thunder that shook the house I will never forget. We’ve somehow managed to dodge yet another bullet this season with no major bushfires, but that will certainly come. Hope your climate zone is as stable as can be given the circumstances, and will remain so for as long as possible.
Namaste.
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I promise I will read his article. But did he say why it is only 50% that will die. I think it will be 93.75%. Because pre-fossil fuels that world had 1 billion. I.e., 87.5% of people are only here thanks to fossil fuels.
Plus, the world was in much better shape back then. So, I will shave off another half or so for that. Leaving just around 6.25% left.
I think that we saw with Covid and see with Climate Change/Peak Oil is that leaders will prolong BAU as long as possible, in the hopes that a solution comes along before the consequences hit.
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At this point, We should see a declining populations as an advantage not a disadvantage.
I would rather the inevitable population collapse happen through low birth rates than through the four horseman of the apocalypse.
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I agree with you. I just found his 50% decline way too optimistic
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B today on battery hopium.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/thermal-storage-hopium
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While it is another solution that won’t be chosen, I think that shifting our grid from load following to generation following would be the cheapest and make our grid last longer than any other path.
In other words, everyone will only have access to power when it’s available. Metering equipment would have to be changed out, but this could add several decades to the life of the grid. Massive change in lifestyle, but then, that’s going to happen either way. This would be part of a softer landing.
This is a thought experiment I did a few years ago:
http://viridviews.blogspot.com/2019/11/demand-side-power-management.html
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Maybe in an energy-strained world, businesses will adjust their hours to when solar energy is the cheapest. Quite likely, services we are accustomed to getting 24/7/365 will only be available for part of the day or part of the year.
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Hi Steve, nice essay on a topic that is not discussed enough.
I agree with Hideaway that there’s nothing we can do to avoid the destination created by the end of fossil energy, but there’s a lot we could do to extend the time it takes to get there.
We could make do with less of many things and still have decent lives.
I see you have written a lot over the years. Please continue to link to other work you think the audience here might be interested in.
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Hi Steve, Going back a few years I use to look at energy the way you are in that essay about how people could adjust their use, and everything looked possible. I even came up with a new concept for a fridge, which had a small battery to run a fan and a frozen separate liquid chamber that would retain ‘cold’, that could be spread to the fridge during the time the power was off.
My entire attitude changed once I focused my gaze on production of appliances, not their use. Everything suffers from entropy and every appliance needs to be replaced at the end of it’s life, so I focused entirely with the mining and making of ‘stuff’. Everything we rely upon in the modern world.
Just about every industrial process we have from mining to processing minerals to manufacture are continuous processes and it’s highly inefficient to allow them to become intermittent. Plus some processes need constant heat for a relatively long period of time, longer than just when the sun is shining. Take glass as a simple example, after rolling and forming to shape a lot of the time it has to be cooled very slowly so it doesn’t shatter, or a process of heating and cooling, all dependent on the type of glass required. Likewise for Aluminium smelters.
It’s probably possible to come up with intermittent processes for everything, but it would most likely mean redesigning and rebuilding all the equipment needed for these new processes, using energy and resources we don’t have, at the scale necessary
Turning a process like mining at a remote location, into an intermittent process would mean less produced per year, a lot more inefficiencies in the mining and the processes used to make the concentrate For some it may not be possible, plus all the workers are paid for their time at the mine site, whether it’s going or stopped, so minerals will all become much more expensive and we’ll have a lot less of them.
One of the biggest mistakes those thinking of a bright green future come up with, is that we will overbuild solar panels, then use the excess to make hydrogen or whatever, so the energy is fully utilized. It sounds totally possible, until you realise that the electrolyser, being a very expensive piece of equipment, is going to sit idle most of the time, but still only has a limited life, probably shortened by running intermittently. If the excess solar power is only 3-4 hours for 4-6 months a year, it is a waste of minerals just sitting there idle most of the time. Like everything though, there is more. The elecrolysers are designed to use water heated to 60-80 degrees C, so the first bit of excess electricity from solar, will go to heating the water before it will operate properly, cutting down the operating time even more.
Basically, my point is it’s an entire system we have built over 200 years using fossil fuels, none of it is designed to operate differently, and every time any idea of…. we just need to build more of whatever, so we can …………… (fill in the blank with ‘operate intermittently’ or whatever else), will need massive energy and resources to set up, on a worldwide scale, the exact things we will be cutting back on because of scarcity.
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Don’t disagree at all, but your comment reminded me of yet one more reason the collapse arc will likely be steeper than one might hope for, and that is planned obsolescence. Appliances, electronic gadgets, cars, all manner of artifacts we churn out COULD have been designed for long life, but they were not. Next quarter earnings reports govern all.
The old rotary dial phones lasted decades, the heavy old ( but inefficient) refrigerators lasted decades, but current day energy using devices are short lived and unrepairable.
Even if my band aid concept for keeping the grid ticking a bit longer was enacted, all the rest of our technology would be scrap soon anyway.
So it goes.
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“planned obsolescence”, poor quality, incompetence, corner cutting, deferred maintenance, fraud, malfeasance, everything nature can throw at us, black swans – I’m sure that over time (that we don’t have) a compendium could be assembled of all the reasons that the collapse curve is going to be terrifying.
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I listened to Dr. Nehls’ audiobook “The Indoctrinated Brain” a couple hours today at the farm.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167898031-the-indoctrinated-brain
Don’t know if I will be able to finish it. I find it mentally exhausting.
Nehls is overshoot blind and not very strong on understanding what is and is not possible with technology.
After pretty much every sentence I have to ask myself if Nehls was overshoot aware, and he assumed our leaders had even partial overshoot awareness, would he interpret the evidence he is discussing the same way?
I think not.
For example:
It would be great to find someone with both a deep understanding of overshoot and the covid crimes/insanity.
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Our leaders are disgusting.
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Jesus Christ!! Cmon man. I need competent leaders to deploy my covid theory. These jackasses cant even bullshit properly.
Indi’s article today also references this clip.
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Don’t see as much of him since he blocked me but Dr. Joe Lee’s still banging on the morons that ignore his String Theory.
https://josephyleemd.substack.com/p/explaining-the-broken-science-of
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Why did he block you? He’s either brilliant or completely off his rocker
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I tried several times to build bridges between Lee and other influential covid dissidents to create awareness and momentum for String Theory. As soon as the communication channel opened up Lee would blow it up with some rude comment to the other dissident. I told him he was screwing up and had offended so many people that he was yelling into a vacuum on X because eveyone had muted him. Then he blocked me.
I’m still trying to help him because my guess is he’s correct and has spotted something that could kill mRNA that everyone else has missed. I’m currently trying to get Dr. Philip McMillan to look at String Theory.
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Wow he’s in denial about his behavior not helping his cause.
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Looks like many are making the decision to forego bringing new humans into the world like you hoped Rob.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/15/health/climate-crisis-parenting-bill-weir-wellness/index.html
Nothing you can say can convince them of this however. They must decide for themselves.
Tom
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Another deep dive into the implications of discarding 100 years of pandemic wisdom and injecting billions who were not at risk with a non-sterilizing vaccine in the middle of pandemic. Rintrah arrives at a similar conclusion to Bossche, however assuming I understand correctly (because its complex), we should expect a more virulent variant like the original covid virus that creates more brain dead zombies, but not the global death apocalypse predicted by Bossche.
https://www.rintrah.nl/hey-look-serotypes/
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If you prefer movies over physics papers, Dr. Tom Murphy scripts one today in an attempt to make us aware.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/04/humans-the-movie/
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Loved that movie idea. Murphy is all in with Daniel Quinn lately. Obviously that story conflicts with some views here at un-Denial. I am gonna try and get back into Quinn. Its a much healthier mindset (for me at least) than the MPP version of that movie where humans are a failed experiment, and it could never go any other way.
And I am aware that because I like the happy story vs the dreadful one, it could easily just be MORT pushing me into Quinn territory.
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Don’t sweat it. Nothing wrong with a little hope.
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At this stage, we need to be thinking about what must be done to allow modernity to fail gracefully?
Or at least minimize the damage of its inevitable failure?
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I certainly think the wise thing to do would be to build a softer landing zone.
All of our leaders and most of our citizens disagree because they are unable to see our peril.
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Agreed.
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My top vote goes to planting trees. The right species of trees, in the right places.
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And agreed.
(Even though it could even be simpler: just letting them grow would be enough. The quantity of saplings erased each spring just by mowing. And leaving remaining primary forests untouched.)
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Indrajit Samarajiva interprets the Iran attack.
https://indi.ca/the-impact-of-iran/
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B has been my favorite blogger for maybe a year now. But Indi is slowly taking over that spot. Another great find for me because of this website.
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Dwight Eisenhower warned America about this over half a century ago.
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/15/rjwp-a15.html
Biden condemns Iran’s strike on Israel: A case study in imperialist hypocrisy
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Putting together 2 threads from above, the game theory one, which I found out so much more than I previously knew on the topic, and the Iran/Israel situation.
A couple of years ago the US did a drone strike on Iran taking out one of the main people (Soleimani ) they wanted to take out. Iran had to retaliate, fired a barrage of missiles at a US airfield in Iraq, but warned the US first. The base was almost deserted but they did do some damage and injured a lot of low ranking soldiers, mainly concussions etc.
Then the tit for tat was over, lots of words and sabre rattling by both sides, for home audiences of course, but that was it…
Now Israel has attacked the Iran embassy in Damascus and Iran has retaliated, after telling Israel/US they were going to do so.
Points scored, we have had our tit for tat, lots of sabre rattling for the home audiences by both sides, but my suspicion is it’s all over, Israel will not up the stakes as Iran has proven they can hit inside Israel with missiles and/or drones, even after warning the other party.
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Let’s hope you are right. There’s another force in play that may override Tit for Tat. Israel wants the US to go to war with Iran. Israel might attack Iran to cause an escalation that US politics cannot stay out of.
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Don’t think Israel would be stupid enough to attack Iran without prior approval from the US, it’s a big gamble assuming the US would come to their aide without prior agreement.
The current administration would be very aware that a shooting war would send oil prices into the stratosphere in an election year, and the people of the US would vote against whoever sent their fuel prices a lot higher.
I would not be surprised if the US had already told Israel they do not want a shooting war with Iran…………..
….
….this year.
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Maybe. Israel has more influence over the US congress than the US president.
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Looks like I was wrong, and Israel have indeed responded by sending missiles to Iran. IMHO it means they have approval from the US to do so, or are just ignoring the US.
We need new world leaders, this is escalating too quickly which is what happens when morons are in charge.
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I worked closely with Israelis for several years. I never did care for their culture but always respected their intelligence and competence.
Then something strange happened. They volunteered to be the west’s test lab for a new mRNA technology and became one of the most transfected populations in the world. Now they are behaving like the stupidest country on the planet.
Coincidence?
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Hideaway, looks like today’s attack was a nothing burger so you may not be wrong.
We’ll need to wait a few weeks or months to know for sure.
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21st century cargo cult:
https://reason.com/2024/04/06/progress-rediscovered/
Sharing this since the current un-denial topic is about facing reality (or not).
I’d laugh if it was not so whistling past the graveyard pathetic.
Reason magazine/website is where the libertarian branch of denial hang out. I go there to see what the topic of the day for ranting is, not for information, though the Volokh Conspiracy section is pretty good for legal analysis.
If you’ve not been there, avoid the comments- much worse than OFW used to be. ( I haven’t been there lately, so don’t know current temperament of the commentariat).
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So many people with no clue what is going on that think they understand everything.
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So many people are blaming “productivity” for our drop in economic performance and living standards. They think it’s a matter of innovation and making employees work harder – for sure that’s part of it. But what really drives productivity …. awkward it’s fossilized carbons.
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When you hear someone say we need to increase our productivity to solve our growth/debt problem, they are right, however you also know they are energy blind.
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Week 14 2024 covid update for the US by The Ethical Skeptic.
Meanwhile:
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2024/04/16/the-state-of-things-pandemic-week-50-2023/
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I have been looking at road death statistics in New Zealand as a control for countries like the USA reporting excess road deaths and blaming it on medical reasons. We collect very good data on road deaths in NZ and we are a small country so it’s easy to do. There has been no trend change since covid or vaccinations that I can see in our road deaths. We did have a particularly bad summer this year, but overall, there is no change.
I know some people have speculated that vaccine damage to the nervous system will delay people’s reaction speeds and result in more road deaths. If this was the case, surely, we would see it reflected in our data in NZ, considering we are highly vaccinated, and many are boosted up as well.
Also, I have a download of the raw data going back to 2018 – so I can keep checking this in the future. If we controlled for population growth and drop in deaths due to covid lockdowns (we were getting in trouble for leaving our suburbs during the lockdowns) there
https://www.transport.govt.nz/statistics-and-insights/safety-road-deaths/
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Got to finish my sentence – there would be even less of a trend. I haven’t bothered to do this since just looking at the raw data was enough for me to call BS on this idea.
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I followed your link and changed to “Deaths – calendar year”
“We did have a particularly bad summer this year”, your summer is December, so spans the year end – does that mean the number is split between 2023 and 2024?
Also, it would be nice to see the numbers for earlier years – I would expect to see gradually reducing numbers due to safer cars, better traffic law enforcement, etc.
Maybe a better thing to look for is not deaths, but insurance claims vs miles-driven-per-capita (derived from fuel consumption) – this would be reflected in increased insurance premiums above the rate of inflation, which I think is being seen everywhere. Alas, a confounding factor is that more modern vehicles are much more expensive and therefore more expensive to insure.
You also have to consider, ‘they‘ don’t want us to know.
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Due to the politics in NZ and how our insurance works, I am very confident our data is sound. Here is a graph with the previous years. Previous government was implementing stricter speed restrictions. I think the overall increase in deaths in just an increase in the number of people on the road – our population has grown by a million in the last 10 years.
NZ-road-deaths-over-last-decade.png (603×351) (aa.co.nz)
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New Zealand appears to be some weird exception.
UK https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6512a1b4f6746b0012a4b9af/image-1.svg
Germany https://www.statista.com/statistics/1331134/road-traffic-fatalities-germany/
France https://www.statista.com/statistics/437904/number-of-road-deaths-in-france/
Even the USA (Transportation.gov), which is a basket case managed a reduction :
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We have a few problems in NZ with our driving: narrow winding roads, high speeds, tourist drivers, drink driving, and our men drive like muppets.
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In the U.S. deaths among pedestrians are rising though.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deaths-high-traffic-car
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I rarely see reports of life in countries that are likely to collapse first.
h/t Panopticon.
https://punchng.com/national-grid-collapses-again-throws-nigerians-into-blackout/
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“due to gas supply constraints” … Nigeria has over 200 Tcf of gas reserves and exports millions off tonnes of LNG every year. That would be a simple law guaranteeing local supply first, unless the corruption of the govt is so complete they don’t care about the locals at all. I shouldn’t be surprised…
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Did you guys see this in the news? Greece’s latest statistical report shows their population is declining.
Greece prepares for ‘population collapse’ amid rising deaths, potentially 1st country to face such crisis (msn.com)
Do we have any Greek readers on this site who can look at the report for us?
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Also I highly reccomend the Reuters video linked in the article
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Most if not all countries in the world will go through population collapse. Some will collapse softer and earlier due to low birth rates, in other places, let’s just say it won’t be pretty.
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Good afternoon Stellarwind72,
I hope you are well.
Can you please provide the source/link for this picture?
Warm and kind regards,
ABC
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Hi ABC,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#/media/File:Limits-to-growth-figure-35.svg
From memory, I don’t think the original book had the dates (1900 and 2100) that the current version of the graph does.
Thanks and good health, Weogo
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I installed the TikTok app to see what young people are up to.
We’re doomed.
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haha yes it is very much targeted towards making you buy crap you don’t need
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I was attracted to this site because of the denial/MORT aspect. It instantly helped with my confusion about why so many people much smarter than me were so blind to overshoot & energy. That was the short-term effect. The longer-term effect has been the chopping down of my hope for waking people up so that we can soften the blow. I used to think that if we put the perfect message together that we could get the masses to stop consuming so much, quit their jobs, boycott certain things, etc. But this site has made me aware of how hopeless and downright hilarious that kind of thinking is. We’re gonna get the overshoot unaware masses to willingly start sacrificing things in their life? Haha!!! Shit, even the people who understand our predicament struggle with meaningful sacrifice. So you can forget about the blind zombies ever joining in.
Recently I’ve been seeing a higher-than-normal degree of this type of desperation in the collapse community. Why? Are there more people joining the community so naturally this naivete is spilling over into the collapse content? Or are we sensing the end of our species and that is activating some type of evolutionary instinct to try and save it? Or are we just terrified of what’s coming?
I think “terrified of what’s coming” is the correct (and obvious) answer. In some of my content about pre-columbus america, I’ve read about this constant terror of dread concerning the upcoming winter being extra harsh (also droughts, floods, famines, and heatwaves, although it mainly referred to coldness). It all had to do with an intense fear of starvation (as well as the fear of cannibalism). They had a word for it. But the meaning of this word began to change when the greedy white men started showing up. The reason being the white man was much more cruel & unforgiving than even the most brutal of winters. The word is wetiko.
I bring this up because I feel like this word is gonna revert back to its original meanings. This intense terror of dread regarding starvation/cannibalism is a concept that most of the modern western world has no clue about. When it gets to the point where we cannot walk inside of a grocery store for food and instead have to hunt/grow/trade/forage for ourselves, there will be a huge sense of shame and failure built into this fear of hunger. This constant mental state for most people will be too unbearable to even function. I think the collapse world is starting to really sense that this nightmare will happen much sooner than later. And that is the cause of the uptick in desperation that I’ve been sensing.
Becoming overshoot aware is the closest equivalence in our world to swallowing the red pill in The Matrix movie. And yes, there are many perks to being aware, but this has to be the biggest downside… this correct intuition that the wetiko is coming for us all, very soon.
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The collapse community can’t be that desparate. Most are still not talking about population reduction. Unimaginable suffering is on the horizon, and they’re worried about being politically correct.
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LOL. Good point with the pc. So disgusting. I do think I’m correct that I’ve been noticing it more. Gonna keep an eye on it.
And maybe it’s me who’s desperate and I’m projecting a little bit. Feels like I have my fears/expectations under control, but you never know.
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Perhaps having a good spice rack will put those cannibalism fears to rest.
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All I need is garlic salt & lemon pepper
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This is a super interesting investigative report on how one aspect of global censorship works.
I often hear people say George Soros is an evil puppeteer but I usually tune out because it sounds like BS left/right politics.
Can anyone here explain without politics what Soros believes and what he’s trying to accomplish?
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I really abhor social media, so went directly to the website. unheard is now saved in my ( way too many) bookmarks. The well done report was an eye opener, but I felt confirmation, not surprise.
A book club I belong to recently read Cryptonomicon and The Splendid and the Vile. Both good reads in my opinion. WW2 was central to both books, but propaganda, disinformation, and manufactured fog of war was also. It struck me the Goebbels was a hamfisted amateur, and those currently working to manipulate the populace are orders of magnitude more sophisticated now. ( And the multi- exabyte data storage facilities like the UDC, coupled with AI are the next level probably already reaching functionality)
And then there is this: https://www.byrontau.com/means-of-control
I suspect Soros is just one entity in a puppeteer ecosystem, where all the various power centers battle with one another to push their agenda. He was just one of several funding the GDI. The real ones to worry about are the ones we hear nothing about. I swear I’m not a conspiracist!
This is from a note I recently sent to a friend:
Epistemology has taken on a new urgency of late. Trust in information sources is no longer a simple thing. Several reasons, but it still makes us struggle to form an opinion if we are trying to keep our beliefs somewhat aligned with reality.
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Thanks for the book tips. I’ve added them to my queue.
I agree they are very sophisticated at shaping opinion now. I am often amazed at how friends and family repeat the official bullshit without giving any thought to the validity of their opinions. This suggests the coming collapse will result in blame and wars, and may be dangerous for those of us that think and question.
Trust is a valuable trait today. I try to take my time and observe for a long time before I trust a source, and then I make mental notes on their blind spots which everyone has. I also love it when someone I trust vouches for another person because it saves a lot of time.
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They want us to hear unheard voices and stop behaving like grazing animals – it is actually unherd.
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damn spell check
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Unherd recruited a marketing agency, which relied on grapeshot (acquired by Oracle), which used GDI.
The need to do due diligence increases, while the ability to do so slips away.
Things can really go awry when ‘groups‘ make decisions (Sydney, Australia):
From this video at YouTube.com
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A must read essay today by Art Berman explaining how oil underpins the current middle east conflicts. I like that he simply states the facts and avoids politics.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/almost-everything-is-about-oil-in-the-middle-east/
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Been going through Sarah Connor’s mandated viewing list for the ones I have not seen yet. Came across this one with a tagline of “A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the American Lifestyle”. I was expecting just another run of the mill journey story.
But after watching it, I’m surprised I never heard of it before. Appearances from the all-stars of the collapse world with R Heinberg, W Catton, D Quinn, D Jensen, T Berry. Catton stood out the most. When that guy talks, I shut up and listen. And Richard Manning (who I had not heard of), was the highlight of the documentary for me.
The most impressive thing is that it was made in 2007. That’s around the time I was just waking up and starting to read Chomsky, Zinn and Naomi Klein. I backed the wrong horse. Took me another 14 years to find Michael Dowd and become overshoot aware. Makes me wonder if I would have been better off or worse off had I seen this back then.
What A Way To Go: Life at the end of Empire (full movie) (youtube.com)
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Yes, I have that one in my library and recall it was very good.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/16/gaza-civilian-deaths-genocide
Has anyone heard about what is happening in Sudan?
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This may be why the U.S. gave the green light to the assault on Rafah, despite being fully aware of the consequences.
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Sarah Connor has a great article about EROEI. I like when collapse writers tackle this subject. For me it’s identical to MORT. Very easy to grasp the concept and colossal importance of it. But understanding the details, not so easy.
Its one thing to collapse and not understand or see it coming (which is how I picture most of our past civilizations). But we know all of the vital subjects to be focused on, and the system will never allow these subjects to breakthrough the wall of ignorance. Such a tragic waste of knowledge.
EROEI and Civilization’s Forced Decline (collapse2050.com)
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Very good essay, thanks.
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https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a1127/4206698/
Since we use about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food in our agricultural system (in the U.S.), the EROEI is ~0.1. That, implies that without fossil fuels, our food system will collapse.
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What happens when you have 2 smart people without STEM education who are fascinated by technology and who make a living studying world affairs with brains that can’t accept what they observe every day?
You get Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson with deeply held beliefs that supernatural UFOs have lived amongst us for thousands of years and are guiding us to discover new civilization saving technologies.
If you want hope from depressing overshoot awareness then succumb to your inner MORT and embrace what Rogan and Carlson do.
They’re happy, successful, and rich.
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I quit watching when Tucker said there is no evidence that humans evolved from a single cell organism.
Yowser.
It’s all connected to MORT. Denial of mortality leads to denial of overshoot, which leads to the requirement for a supernatural force. Or aliens.
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Both Rogan and Carlson are such intellectual disappointments. They can understand some things political yet buy into such FIBs (Fantastically Irrational Beliefs) about many things – aliens included. I have to rigorously parse everything Carlson says since he goes along with the “Climate Change is a Fraud” belief system of the political Right. Sure the Right is correct that there is a lot of fraud in science (Covid/Big Pharma) but Physics and Engineering (and Evolutionary Biology) are not fraudulent Science. MORT is the best explanation for Rogan & Carlson. As a species human beings are truly not homo sapiens.
AJ
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More MORT.
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There is a reason I have zero respect for Elon Musk.
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Rob, don’t get me wrong,
I love your website, BUT I think it’s hilarious to be a software ngineer and believe in evolution. Random! mutations in a DNA code, and more advanced “products” as a result. Write 30 lines of code and then apply a random change there – your code won’t even compile…
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Evolution does seem implausible until you understand it is based on small random changes to a chemistry dependent on molecule shapes, with a near infinite number of shapes, and a near infinite number of ways of coding each shape, all steered by the constant pressure of replicators competing for finite energy and materials.
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Anyone who doubts evolution can go and read the following link, which was an experiment proving evolution. They created an environment not fully suitable for E Coli bacteria, and eventually had a new species develop after 32,000 generations (IIRC). They were then able to replicate the experiment by going forward a second time from the 20,000th generation.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14094-bacteria-make-major-evolutionary-shift-in-the-lab/
I’ve often invited some Mormons into the house for a cuppa in the past, and eventually they get around to religion, or very subtly of course and when they raise Evolution not ever being proven, I quickly bring up the above example. A couple of times I’ve had the ‘elder’ person quickly decide they need to leave, because the younger person is becoming interested in the proven evolution.
These days I haven’t had a visit from them for over a decade, I think I’m on their avoid list…
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No thinking necessary, you are definitely on their avoid list. Hilarious! I can just imagine the elder picking up the kids “nothing to see here” and then peeling off in the driveway.
Ya, organized religion sucks and has done a lot of damage.
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“Code” in the biological sense is a metaphor. It’s not the same thing at all as a software code
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