RFK Jr. was confirmed yesterday as HHS Secretary and the MAHA Alliance held a press conference to celebrate this important moment in history.
Del Bigtree was RFK Jr.’s Communications Director. Now that RFK Jr. has been confirmed, Bigtree’s job is finished and he’s able to speak for himself without representing RFK Jr.
Sen. Ron Johnson introduces Del Bigtree at 10:20.
Bigtree’s speech starts at 16:00 and is a must watch for anyone concerned about improving our collective health, and righting the wrongs of covid.
If any of you, like me, feel the need for a little revenge after covid, this speech is righteous.
Bigtree brutally destroys the mainstream news media for their incompetence, indifference, and corruption.
This speech by RFK Jr. after his swearing in ceremony is also excellent.
I don’t have too many heroes, but RFK Jr. is one of them. This video is a nice introduction to the man.
Here is the president’s executive order authorizing MAHA. It’s inspiring and worth a read.
ESTABLISHING THE PRESIDENT’S
MAKE AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN COMMISSIONEXECUTIVE ORDER
February 13, 2025
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. American life expectancy significantly lags behind other developed countries, with pre‑COVID-19 United States life expectancy averaging 78.8 years and comparable countries averaging 82.6 years. This equates to 1.25 billion fewer life years for the United States population. Six in 10 Americans have at least one chronic disease, and four in 10 have two or more chronic diseases. An estimated one in five United States adults lives with a mental illness.
These realities become even more painful when contrasted with nations around the globe. Across 204 countries and territories, the United States had the highest age-standardized incidence rate of cancer in 2021, nearly double the next-highest rate. Further, from 1990-2021, the United States experienced an 88 percent increase in cancer, the largest percentage increase of any country evaluated. In 2021, asthma was more than twice as common in the United States than most of Europe, Asia, or Africa. Autism spectrum disorders had the highest prevalence in high-income countries, including the United States, in 2021. Similarly, autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, psoriasis, and multiple sclerosis are more commonly diagnosed in high-income areas such as Europe and North America. Overall, the global comparison data demonstrates that the health of Americans is on an alarming trajectory that requires immediate action.
This concern applies urgently to America’s children. In 2022, an estimated 30 million children (40.7 percent) had at least one health condition, such as allergies, asthma, or an autoimmune disease. Autism spectrum disorder now affects 1 in 36 children in the United States — a staggering increase from rates of 1 to 4 out of 10,000 children identified with the condition during the 1980s. Eighteen percent of late adolescents and young adults have fatty liver disease, close to 30 percent of adolescents are prediabetic, and more than 40 percent of adolescents are overweight or obese.
These health burdens have continued to increase alongside the increased prescription of medication. For example, in the case of Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, over 3.4 million children are now on medication for the disorder — up from 3.2 million children in 2019-2020 — and the number of children being diagnosed with the condition continues to rise.
This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. Seventy-seven percent of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy, and our security.
To fully address the growing health crisis in America, we must re-direct our national focus, in the public and private sectors, toward understanding and drastically lowering chronic disease rates and ending childhood chronic disease. This includes fresh thinking on nutrition, physical activity, healthy lifestyles, over-reliance on medication and treatments, the effects of new technological habits, environmental impacts, and food and drug quality and safety. We must restore the integrity of the scientific process by protecting expert recommendations from inappropriate influence and increasing transparency regarding existing data. We must ensure our healthcare system promotes health rather than just managing disease.
Sec. 2. Policy. It shall be the policy of the Federal Government to aggressively combat the critical health challenges facing our citizens, including the rising rates of mental health disorders, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. To do so, executive departments and agencies (agencies) that address health or healthcare must focus on reversing chronic disease. Under this policy:
(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;
(b) the National Institutes of Health and other health-related research funded by the Federal Government should prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick;
(c) agencies shall work with farmers to ensure that United States food is the healthiest, most abundant, and most affordable in the world; and
(d) agencies shall ensure the availability of expanded treatment options and the flexibility for health insurance coverage to provide benefits that support beneficial lifestyle changes and disease prevention.
Sec. 3. Establishment and Composition of the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission. (a) There is hereby established the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission (Commission), chaired by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Chair), with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy serving as Executive Director (Executive Director).
(b) In addition to the Chair and the Executive Director, the Commission shall include the following officials, or their designees:
(i) the Secretary of Agriculture;
(ii) the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development;
(iii) the Secretary of Education;
(iv) the Secretary of Veterans Affairs;
(v) the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency;
(vi) the Director of the Office of Management and Budget;
(vii) the Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy;
(viii) the Director of the National Economic Council;
(ix) the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers;
(x) the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy;
(xi) the Commissioner of Food and Drugs;
(xii) the Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;
(xiii) the Director of the National Institutes of Health; and
(xiv) other members of my Administration invited to participate, at the discretion of the Chair and the Executive Director.
Sec. 4. Fighting Childhood Chronic Disease. The initial mission of the Commission shall be to advise and assist the President on how best to exercise his authority to address the childhood chronic disease crisis. Therefore, the Commission shall:
(a) study the scope of the childhood chronic disease crisis and any potential contributing causes, including the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism;
(b) advise and assist the President on informing the American people regarding the childhood chronic disease crisis, using transparent and clear facts; and
(c) provide to the President Government-wide recommendations on policy and strategy related to addressing the identified contributing causes of and ending the childhood chronic disease crisis.
Sec. 5. Initial Assessment and Strategy from the Make America Healthy Again Commission. (a) Make our Children Healthy Again Assessment. Within 100 days of the date of this order, the Commission shall submit to the President, through the Chair and the Executive Director, the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment, which shall:
(i) identify and describe childhood chronic disease in America compared to other countries;
(ii) assess the threat that potential over-utilization of medication, certain food ingredients, certain chemicals, and certain other exposures pose to children with respect to chronic inflammation or other established mechanisms of disease, using rigorous and transparent data, including international comparisons;
(iii) assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight-loss drugs;
(iv) identify and report on best practices for preventing childhood health issues, including through proper nutrition and the promotion of healthy lifestyles;
(v) evaluate the effectiveness of existing educational programs with regard to nutrition, physical activity, and mental health for children;
(vi) identify and evaluate existing Federal programs and funding intended to prevent and treat childhood health issues for their scope and effectiveness;
(vii) ensure transparency of all current data and unpublished analyses related to the childhood chronic disease crisis, consistent with applicable law;
(viii) evaluate the effectiveness of current Federal Government childhood health data and metrics, including those from the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics and the National Survey of Children’s Health;
(ix) restore the integrity of science, including by eliminating undue industry influence, releasing findings and underlying data to the maximum extent permitted under applicable law, and increasing methodological rigor; and
(x) establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects.
(b) Make our Children Healthy Again Strategy. Within 180 days of the date of this order, the Commission shall submit to the President, through the Chair and the Executive Director, a Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy (Strategy), based on the findings from the Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment described in subsection (a) of this section. The Strategy shall address appropriately restructuring the Federal Government’s response to the childhood chronic disease crisis, including by ending Federal practices that exacerbate the health crisis or unsuccessfully attempt to address it, and by adding powerful new solutions that will end childhood chronic disease.
Sec. 6. Additional Reports. (a) Following the submission to the President of the Strategy, and any final strategy reports thereafter, the Chair and the Executive Director shall recommend to the President updates to the Commission’s mission, including desired reports.
(b) The Commission shall not reconvene, following submission of the Strategy, until an updated mission is submitted to the President through the Executive Director.
Sec. 7. General Provisions. (a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
THE WHITE HOUSE,
February 13, 2025.
<edit>
A few comments below from angry, now ex, followers suggest they were unaware of my gradual transformation over the last 4 years of observing and researching covid, from being certain RFK Jr. was a nut job, to now supporting RFK Jr.’s mission to improve our abysmal and worsening pubic health.
I’ve copied my replies to the criticisms here so that the reasons for my new beliefs are clear.
notabilia: You make excellent, well-researched points at times.
And you throw it all away by being an anti-vaxxer ass clown.
I too thought anti-vaxxers were nut jobs.
Then the experts I trusted renamed a 20 year old technology, known to be unsafe and ineffective in humans, from transfection to vaccine, pretended transfection was a new miracle technology, and coerced it into 5+ billion people after insufficient and fraudulent testing, including children that had zero risk from the virus, and when adverse event data showed the transfections were dangerous at levels far higher than had been sufficient to withdraw prior vaccines from the market, they doubled down, and hid and denied the data, and they continued to coerce transfections despite the disease being low risk for all except elderly and co-morbid people, and despite several safe and effective alternate treatments being available.
Today the rate of sickness and all-cause mortality is higher than pre-transfection, and the only thing our “experts” are certain of is that the cause is not the mRNA transfections. This despite there being several easy to understand first principle reasons to suspect mRNA transfections will never, and can never, be made safe.
The mRNA transfections are just the tip of the covid iceberg. They lied about every single covid issue, and they used tax dollars to corrupt news media, and to censor social media, to make us believe the lies.
Every covid policy was exactly wrong. To maximize your probability of good health the best course of action was to do exactly the opposite of what they told us to do. Incompetence does not explain this. They would have achieved a better public health outcome had they flipped a coin on every decision.
After observing 4 years of a healthcare system incapable of learning and correcting when new data emerges, and that pathologically lies, I no longer trust a word they say about anything.
So yes, I now proudly call myself an anti-vaxxer.
Go get ’em Bobby!
Anonymous: The health problems of the US population can largely be traced to a crap diet… good luck changing that. Any real attempt to do so will be shut down as a communist plot.
Yes, unhealthy food is a huge problem. It’s also not that complicated. Reducing sugar would be a good start.
We face many existential overshoot threats for which there is no “fix” thanks to MPP and MORT governing our behaviors, and thanks to the core design of the system that keeps us alive.
The threat from relatively recent, extremely poor public health is different. There is nothing fundamental blocking us from improving public health. I think we should support RFK Jr. and try.
A healthy population will be a strong asset, perhaps our only asset, when the everything bubble pops and modern civilization collapses.
<edit>
Secretary Kennedy delivers welcoming remarks to HHS staff.
Godspeed RFK Jr.
un-Denial 
Just in case you do not believe any of the common covid stories, John Cullen is pushing a different theory that that the covid transfections were actually intended to protect against H7N9 bird flu.
I don’t currently trust Cullen because he is a click chaser, but he does raise a few interesting questions.
If anyone has seen a good debunking of Cullen, please post it.
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I noticed that one of my posts got deleted. Is there any reason why?
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I am not comfortable discussing on this site sexual preferences. I consider it a private matter.
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What a tease. Now I’m super curious what that post said.
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Chris Martenson takes his gloves off on the covid crimes.
What if everything Chris said is true, except that it was a bioweapons threat response driven by the US military panicking about a leak from the Wuhan research it funded, and ordering pharma to do the evils it did?
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Good discussion on the problems with mRNA transfections.
They also announce a new independent medical journal free of pharma influence that sounds very promising.
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Very nice to see other people starting to echo one of Dr. J.J. Couey’s core messages that “intramuscular injection of any combination of substances intended to enhance the immune system is DUMB” on first principles.
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Loved this discussion. Very ethical docs who explain the persistence of the Covid antigen in the body as referenced in the Yale study above. And a good explanation of the whole seriously flawed mRNA transfection approach (except from a Pharma/Medical System making money approach). If RFK Jr. does anything it should be to ban mRNA “shots” or at least take away the EUA for them and bring back liability for all “vaccines”.
AJ
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Kash Patel was confirmed today.
I’ve been clicking the refresh button every 10 minutes to see confirmation that Bill Gates is on the Epstein list so we can destroy the balance of Gate’s life as payback for his covid crimes.
No sign of the list yet but a lot of people are ready pounce.
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How Elite Surplus and Inequality Lead to Societal Upheaval with Peter Turchin | TGS 164
To be honest, I disagree with him about Trump. I believe that Trump poses a grave danger to what remains of American democracy. As an alternative, I think America needs someone more like FDR. Surface level reforms won’t cut it. We need deep systemic change to address what led to the rise of Trump in the first place.
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This was a most enlightening conversation. Too bad Turchin is a techno-optimist and overshoot unaware because then he would see that there is truly no hope for our PREDICAMENTS.
However, that said he is brilliant in diagnosing where societies go wrong in that over time they overproduce elites and immiserate the other 90% of the population. He gets it with regard to this having occurred in the U.S. since the 1980’s when real wages stagnated for the lower classes while the ranks of the 1% oligarchs increased.
How to “save” the U.S. requires a more equal sharing of wealth and avoid violent rebellion. He also sees the future as very contingent on decisions that some of the elite do (such as Trump), “the most important thing a dictator can do is appoint the right people”; hence maybe Musk and RFK Jr. can make positive change. He also said that “all good comes from collective action”. Dems at the moment are pushing violence and that would be counter productive. It would be better if both sides tried to make the system more equitable but with declining resources I doubt that’s possible.
AJ
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Frankly, I don’t think the Trump administration has any desire to reduce wealth inequality.
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Tend to agree. Billionaires will not let their wealth go as that removes their power.
For someone with TDS you can still see very clearly. 😁
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I also watched, but have been reticent to put in my 2c worth, as all I took from this discussion was we have another expert in a field, that is so engrossed in their work/findings that they no longer see the forest for the trees.
Early on he did briefly mention that whole societies were wiped out in the neolithic period because of overpopulation, with the groups blaming each other, lots of blood spilled then revenge until virtually no-one left in the area.
Any techno-optimist that understands how 4 million humans meant overpopulation in some areas, that doesn’t understand 8,200 million humans is a problem has lost touch. The later hand wave of solar and batteries getting cheaper solving energy, climate, etc, even Nate Hagens took a deep breath and moved on.
This highlights the problem of complexity as a physical law as real as thermodynamic laws. It’s very, very complex, not simple laws like thermodynamics.
A complex self adapting system has so many moving parts, that leaving out any major, and possibly even minor aspect can render the entire conclusions as irrelevant. In Turchin’s case his theories of too many elites has probably worked in the last 10,000 years of increasing energy use, material use and complex technology development, in a stable climate with background levels of extinctions.
However to think the same will work in the period going forward of less energy, less materials, chaotic climate, more extinctions and collapsing technology is puerile at best.
I’m not saying his research about elites is waste, I’m sure it’s part of the overall big picture, but is not the sole main event, because of everything he leaves out.
The future will be totally different from the past, because the parameters operating are completely different from the past. It will be a world of less energy, less materials, more chaotic climate, decreasing species diversity, with greater levels of pollution leading to a more toxic environment for life in general.
The only way to look at the future is from the view of what happens to complex self adapting systems in a similar situation of where their major sources of energy, materials and environment change for the worse. The results are always the same, the system changes drastically, with the largest systems tending to have the fastest collapse, whereas the smallest systems last much longer with their collapse possibly giving time for adaptation to the changed parameters.
All higher lifeforms are very complex self adapting systems and all have a very fast collapse that we call death. A human body is composed of up to 30-40 trillion cells, with interactions vastly more complicated than our civilizations. We can adapt up to a point with new and different foods, environments etc, but a change too great for the body to overcome, or too little energy intake, and the body collapses in death, which is the rapid breakdown of every part of the highly complex system.
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I’ve started but am struggling to finish this episode.
Turchin seems to be yet another expert that understands everything except the important bit, and that blindness casts doubt on everything else he says.
A good argument can be made that we need elites today to keep the game going.
Our monetary system must growth or else it will collapse, and we’ve hit physical limits to growth, but a way to fake real growth is to concentrate growing paper wealth in the accounts of the elite.
If we were to redistribute that wealth to the poor, they would spend it, which would cause inflation, which would cause higher interest rates, which would bankrupt governments, which would accelerate collapse.
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We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. We will have to let go sooner or later, and when we do, the whole Ponzi scheme will unravel. How would we even begin to transition away from a debt-based money system?
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My guess, all money will lose value fairly rapidly and then life will be about survival. (which doesn’t necessarily mean everybody against everybody: that’s part of the current myths, social darwinism and such)
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Israel drops leaflets threatening Gaza’s population ‘leave or die’
https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-drops-leaflets-threatening-gazans-leave-or-die
States committing genocide usually try to conceal their crimes. Israel isn’t even trying to hide its genocide.
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Here is a full translation of the leaflet, apparently twitter/X won’t fully embed posts longer than 280 characters.
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I had not heard about this.
I’d like to think Trump’s bluster about buying Gaza and turning it into a resort was simply a tactic to scare the Arab states into coming up with a good solution, or putting up the money to rebuild Gaza.
This will be a test of Trump’s character.
Will Trump permit and enable genocide like Biden did?
I bet Trump will prevent another genocide. We’ll soon see.
If Trump permits Israel to resume the genocide my guess is the middle east will explode into a war and Israel will be defeated.
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Andril Zvorygin is a very interesting and impressive young man. He leads the best peak oil group and attracts top intellectuals as guests. He leads a religious group that seems to provide members with some comfort to offset their overshoot awareness. He has (I think) impressive food growing skills. And he’s a software programmer.
Now it looks like he’s running for mayor with a platform focused on food security and resilience for his community.
Very nice to see an aware person trying to do something useful for their community.
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This is obviously the root cause of every one of the 17+ million deaths associated with covid.
Why are our leaders not screaming to put the people responsible in prison?
Why has nothing been to done to prevent a recurrence?
WTF is going on? Seriously, WTF?
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I don’t know what is going on, or why they are doing this. It’s bewildering. Matt Ridley is in denial about overshoot so he may be missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley
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Just a thought on complexity as I continue to research as many different angles as I can possibly find about the subject, another window opened in my thinking of what gets left out.
While this is seemingly specifically about human civilizations, I also thought of how it would also apply to large stars, a purely physical complex system.
In all the work done on human settlement size and complexity from Prof Geoffrey West et al work, and there are hundreds if not thousands of research papers on this, all based on observation, the quick simple explanation is that as human settlements grow, the physical world of these grow at the power of 85% of the population growth, while the human social factors grow at an exponential rate of 115%, the inverse of the physical size. These are the scale or size power laws.
In nature this has also been observed in a variety of different fields from biology, known as “Kleiber’s law” where the power law tends to be 75%. In biology we don’t understand the increase in brain function of larger brained animals to work out if their are higher forms of complexity in memory, decision making, relationships with others and environment etc, so we don’t know if there is an equivalent to human’s settlements increase in social function by a different power law to the biologic one.
Back to human settlements… All the research I’ve found on complexity misses a simple function we know happens, Jevon’s paradox. Better technology makes whatever cheaper, which leads to greater use and uses. In our human civilization better steam engines, lead to more use of coal.
However it’s not that simple, it also leads to wider uses of coal for a variety of different purposes, that enabled other technology to develop as complexity increased. Likewise for oil and gas, initial uses not only grew, but variety of uses also grew, many of which underpinned further development of complex technology upon which modernity became reliant as it grew (think plastics, chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, etc).
Think of civilization as a pyramid, with different underlying layers. At the very bottom is the early use of energy as in food to feed the fledgling civilization, with not many layers above. As the system becomes more complex with growth, the more efficient and different uses of materials and energy, flows both upward and downward in the pyramid, growing all the layers while adding more newer complexity on top. As civilization grows so does the complexity, with the new complexity affecting all levels below, not just it’s own.
Think of an oil well drill bit, these days it has a range of sensors and other tools for measuring many details of the hole, but without simple plastic as insulators allowing these sensitive electronic components to work, they wouldn’t exist. Of course not ‘ordinary’ plastic, it’s highly specialised plastics and polymers, non of which existed when we were first drilling for oil.
How does Jevon’s paradox fit in? All the new complexity gets cheaper in a growing system, so allows for use of the new complexity in the varying layers of the pyramid structure, including the lowest levels, as it’s now cheap enough to use for the basics of human civilization. However the feedback loop is that now the lowest levels of functioning at the bottom of the pyramid become reliant upon the greater complexity provided by the growth of complexity within the entire system.
Super giant stars as a complex system, in the field known as astrophysics, is a highly complex and rapidly evolving area of science. What we think we know, is that the supergiant stars go through a main sequence of burning hydrogen in fusion like all other stars. The mass of these super giants produces greater internal gravity and pressure than smaller mass stars, all formed from a mass of a gas cloud. Because of the higher gravity and pressure in the core, once it has finished fusing hydrogen, the force of the energy from this fusion diminished, and the star begins to collapse in on itself, which increases internal pressure heating up the star further, allowing the combination of increased gravity and heat to start helium fusion.
To not turn this into a long drawn out astrophysics lesson, what happens is that convection currents from the hot core, go to the surface, with the fusion energy stopping the star from collapsing in on itself, with cooler surface gases and elements falling into the star, which sets up complex interactions of pressure, gravity, fusion of different elements in different layers, interconnecting with each other (hopefully not too many physicists are rolling their eyes in the very simplistic explanation).
The higher pressure and temperatures in the core and layers near the core are in a constant flux of interactions, with the higher element fusion dependent upon the earlier heat, pressure and gravity. At some point these super massive stars get to fusing iron, that absorbs energy instead releasing energy, so the energy that stopped the star from imploding into itself drops dramatically. It’s this implosion after it’s used it’s energy that causes a supernova by the whole system collapsing upon itself.
I can see the fusion of higher elements and the distribution throughout the system as a type of Jevon’s paradox, creating more energy for further fusion, keeping the system going, while affecting every aspect of the existing system.
The largest stars also give off the most energy in luminosity, solar winds and mass ejections, while the internal forces seem to become more efficient. I’m wondering if it’s a trait of highly complex systems to have huge efficiencies and inefficiencies at the same time in different aspects or locations of the system and these external inefficiencies are an inherent facet of complex systems. In other words the larger the complex system the larger the waste heat almost by definition.
Back to human civilization, again.. Given all the complex interactions affecting every layer of complexity and the currents transferring complexity into every aspect of the modern world, it becomes more obvious to me that at some point when the energy can no longer increase, to drive growth in complexity, the interactions that rely on the higher complexity will cease to function, rapidly negatively affecting even the bottom aspects of the complexity pyramid, because complexity has affected everything, leading to a very rapid implosion of 8 point whatever billion humans in our civilization.
Our energy cost of energy is the equivalent of stars fusing higher elements until they reach iron, which doesn’t give off energy during fusion, it uses energy in that reaction instead. Perhaps Renewables and Nuclear are civilization’s analogues to this, in using more energy in their mining, manufacture, construction and deployment, while we lie to ourselves about their net energy…
……………..
This was meant to be a short post, but got away from me. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m coming to the conclusion that civilization and every other complex self adapting system all follow basic universal laws of physics we don’t yet fully understand. Yet observation tells us that the largest systems are the fastest to collapse at the end of their lifespan, when they can no longer maintain energy requirements…
Sorry for the long post, it’s just so highly complex….
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Nice.
Before I became aware of your work I understood that the design of our monetary system, which provides the abundant credit required by a complex civilization, needs economic growth to function, and without growth our system will collapse.
Then you introduced us to the idea that mineral and energy depletion requires growth in both complexity and energy (a la red queen), to prevent the system from collapsing.
Now you’ve introduced us to the idea that depleting mineral qualities eventually outstrip the ability of extra complexity and energy to compensate, and that this is analogous to a star using up it’s fuel and collapsing. I like this idea and think it’s a good analogy.
At the beginning of your essay you say:
I think hierarchical abstraction is a good candidate to explain what is going on in both our brain and human settlements.
One key feature (besides denial) that distinguishes the human brain from other brains is its ability to construct and understand abstract hierarchies of ideas, as demonstrated by our language and its ability to communicate and facilitate the enhancement of complex ideas.
The efficiency and power of human settlements is also explained by hierarchical abstraction. When a village becomes large enough, it becomes possible to support an individual specializing in shoe manufacture and repair. Because the cobbler can focus he learns to make better footwear using less time and resources. Now instead of every household needing to know how to make a primitive shoe, it can simply trade something it makes for a better cheaper shoe. Shoe making is now an abstraction in another hierarchical layer of society. The improved shoes makes farmers and soldiers more effective which builds a bigger village which eventually enables a second cobbler, who now competes with the first cobbler making them both more effective, and so on in a self reinforcing feedback loop that continues until some energy or material scarcity constrains growth. Then the feedback loops reverse and the system unwinds.
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I should have also mentioned that the extended theory of mind that enabled the emergence of behaviorally modern humans is also a hierarchical abstraction.
Our brain effectively created an abstract class called “human” and assigned that class to both “others” and “self”. This gave us the ability to more effectively cooperate as a superorganism, and to understand that when we observed an “other” die it meant “self” was mortal too, so we created gods (aka life after death) using our tendency to deny unpleasant realities that co-evolved with our extended theory of mind.
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This theory is too complex to explain it to the masses and therefore will collapse. 🤣
Seriously though. I think that Hideaway has the best complete analysis of the ECOC and ECOM predicament.
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Do you mean ECOC = Energy Cost of Complexity?
Maybe we should just say ECOE = Energy Cost of Everything.
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sorry I meant energy cost of energy ECOE and energy cost of materials
but energy cost of everything is probably most apt.
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Rob…. “One key feature (besides denial) that distinguishes the human brain from other brains is its ability to construct and understand abstract hierarchies of ideas, as demonstrated by our language and its ability to communicate and facilitate the enhancement of complex ideas.“
I do wonder about other animals like Elephants, Whales and Dolphins, that have large brains, and also have this ability, but we just don’t understand their use of such intelligence.
Perhaps they have enough intelligence to know that destroying the surrounding ecosystem is a bad idea and communicate this to each other. They all definitely communicate with each other very effectively so have what we would consider ‘language’, that we just don’t (and probably can’t) understand.
The part about our energy use going to access lower grades of metals and minerals and lower fossil energy sources, in a mad rush to build more energy machines ,fusion, fission, solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, EVs etc, being the equivalent of a large star fusing iron, which uses energy instead of providing energy, scares the hell out of me, as it means we are much closer to collapse than I thought..
I only thought of this connection/analogy when I realised the Jevon’s paradox effect of complexity working on all lower forms of material gathering. The cheapness of the complexity as it’s used on such a scale, means simple tractors are not so simple anymore. We now rely upon computer guided tractors assisted with GPS location for planting and harvesting grain crops to get maximum yields.
Go back to old tractors, which are less fuel efficient and the yield is lower as the farmer cannot get the exact distance apart for plants as accurately as the computers.. likewise for spraying, fertilizing, harvesting. Any retracement of complexity, means less efficiency, lower yields, more fertilizer, fuel and sprays in an attempt to compensate. It’s exactly the same for every mining operation and every other operation where we use the natural world for our benefit.
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There’s a gradient of abilities in brains and some species like those you mentioned have high intelligence, theory of mind, and communication skills. None of them however are discussing the standard model or calculus, nor are they killing each other over which god is the correct god to pray to for eternal life. There’s a huge gap between humans and all other species.
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And of course, that huge gap is caused by doing the one and only thing that nobody else does.
I failed to annoy Art in my comment yesterday. Here’s what he said:
Not sure what he’s saying. But I think it’s along the normal human supremacy logic of, “But without fire and the other technology, humans would have had a much shorter run in the history books… and you and I would’ve never been born.”
Which I would answer back with, “Yes, but you make it sound like that’s a bad thing. Sounds exactly how it should’ve gone down in the history books to me. But humans dodged that fate by cheating (fire) and because of it, we are now responsible for the only species induced mass extinction that this planet (perhaps galaxy) will ever see.”
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Looks like I actually might’ve struck a nerve with Art. He had some time to sleep on it and replied again to my comment.
Guess I’ll have to put on my David Attenborough field costume and go digging for the evidence. While I’m at it, I’ll gather all the evidence that shows sapiens were zapped with full consciousness around 100-200kya. When I’m done with that, I’ll move onto proving once and for all that God does not exist.😊
I don’t think Art sees the big picture. And based on his 2nd to last paragraph, I’m not even sure if he believes this totally common-sense statement: the only possible way to get to agriculture is by way of conquering fire.
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You might ask Berman why when he predicted a near-term decline in oil supply he provided compelling evidence, and then when he reversed his prediction claiming there is no near-term oil supply threat he provided no evidence, nor did he explain why the original evidence was wrong.
On the god issue, just a reminder that the interesting bit is not whether god exists, the interesting bit is why did god emerge simultaneous with behaviorally modern humans, and why has every tribe, in every location, ever since, believed in god, and why does every single one of those thousands of religions have at its core a belief in life after death, and why does no other species believe in gods?
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The difference is we have intelligence and cooperation to work around & slow down the process of rapid collapse into a possible contraction. Purely physical systems like the stars do not and hence their rapid collapse is inevitable.
We cannot defy the law of physics, but we do have a shot at slowing down the rapid & disastrous collapse you guys here seem to blindly believe based on one person’s idea. How well we do then depends on the level of cooperation amongst human (which unfortunately is not high).
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Hi Nony, …. “The difference is we have intelligence and cooperation to work around & slow down the process of rapid collapse into a possible contraction.“
Can you please explain how intelligence and cooperation work around the physics of entropy and dissipation of the materials we use back into the environment, plus how a process of degrowth of everything, including complexity also works.
How do we gain access to really low grade energy, metals and minerals without the modern complexity of the required modern technology in gaining access to these things?
I’m looking for this type of feedback, as I’d really like to be wrong about all this!!
Also given the history of past civilizations and current direction of humanity as a whole, how likely do you really think our intelligence and cooperation are really going to slow down the process of rapid collapse??
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Don’t get me wrong. I agree with everything that you are saying about the collapse of complexity based on limits of physics and entropy.. apart from the speed of collapse.
I cannot explain in detail because the whole system is too complex for one person to understand. I’m just thinking along the lines of – as one part or several parts (of the entire system) faces decline, as a community of living things we will naturally attempt to work around it with everything we have, even if it’s just to slow down the “collapse”. This can be in the form of increased competition (wars) for the limited resources or increased cooperation though the former is more likely.
To the observer embroiled within the competition zones it may seem like a rapid collapse, but taking a vantage point above the entire civilization, it may look like an overall gradual decline with certain pockets facing faster declines while the others remaining stable, and these pockets undergoing declines may change regions over time with the overall effect being the decline of civilization back to a more primitive way of life.
It may that because of complexity every part is interconnected worldwide and that will lead to a domino effect of collapse. That’s true if you consider every aspect of our industrial civilisation. But are these modern things really necessary? We can always channel the limited resources we have towards the non-discretionary only especially agriculture. (even if it’s just by increasing the number of manual workers in the fields without machines and reduction in livestocks farming). It’s only the poor city dwellers like me that will suffer more if there’s a food collapse.
I do not have children. I require very little in life to be happy, and I belong to team nature (ironically as a city person). So i don’t think i have any cognitive biases here.
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Yes (to both your comments).
As you may already be aware, I have had this conversation multiple times with Hideaway before. At this point, it’s a matter of belief, or rather, should I say, conviction about the nature of reality. As I don’t really know myself how things will play out, I just respect there can be several ways to see the world and now (try to) shut up.
In any case, more fundamentally, to me, now, life is not about getting there, avoiding that, etc. Just presence suffices. Ahh, I don’t know how to express it…
On a more practical note, I recently finished reading this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/989670.The_Humanure_Handbook (https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Ecological_Building/Compost_Toilets/Humanure_Handbook.pdf) and that one https://books.google.fr/books/about/Vida_em_Sintropia.html?id=0vmdEAAAQBAJ (not available in english).
Anyway, thank you for sharing your thoughts.
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Thanks for sharing.
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Hi Ian, thanks for the response..
“It may that because of complexity every part is interconnected worldwide and that will lead to a domino effect of collapse.”
This is what I’m expecting in the future when overall energy availability starts to decline at an accelerating rate, assuming nothing else breaks first.
I expect the first part of collapse to be debt defaults and financial chaos, brought on by inflation that CBs and govts cannot control. People in the Western nations are already suffering from a ‘cost of living crises’ that no-one in the mainstream attributes to the combination of higher energy costs and higher energy costs of minerals and metals, plus the burden of unattributed inflation in asset costs, which is real inflation to those without assets.
“But are these modern things really necessary? We can always channel the limited resources we have towards the non-discretionary only especially agriculture. (even if it’s just by increasing the number of manual workers in the fields without machines and reduction in livestocks farming)“
Firstly the “modern things” really are necessary in the mining of fossil fuel energy, and metals and minerals. The grades of nearly everything are so low, that only our complexity with high energy use is keeping the flow going. The simple steel tools, still comes from iron ore mined in Australia, shipped to China, smelted there, forged into tools there, then shipped overseas, to large ports, then transported by diesel trucks to the nearest “shop/shops” to wherever you live.
In a collapse situation, where central control goes out the window, where does the cooperation and coordination towards non discretionary agriculture, with more manual workers come from? Who is directing whom to become the manual laborers when they use to be teachers or engineers or managers or hairdressers in the city? Where is the accommodation and facilities for all these extra workers, close to the farms, which use to be huge grain enterprises with large tractors and very few workers. Where and how does food get to these new manual laborers, who enforces that they don’t breed animals for their own use with almost nothing going back to the cities?
Realistically, I look at past civilization collapses for a guide on the way down, except this time we have 8.2B humans, not a few hundred thousand to a couple of million like previous civilization collapses. The prior civilization collapses all had plenty of virgin forest/jungle for the refugees from collapse to retreat to, we no longer have that luxury.
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I forgot to add how we are leaving the Holocene very rapidly with the damage we’ve done to the climate and environment, so what makes the odds of any type of agriculture possible in such a situation?
We were never able to settle into any type of civilization before the Holocene, despite 100,000+ years of Homo sapiens existence, so why will the future with wild climate and weather conditions make it possible?
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I’ll reply here to avoid the continue narrowing of threads.
Thanks for the replies. I would think the serious limiting factor is the amount of arable land we have left for agriculture (which means i’ll have to “escape” somewhere with this in mind in future). As for coordination & control and tools/equipment availability, that may actually be less of an issue at least at the initial stages. I did read somewhere that farming is actually a lot more difficult than what an inexperience person like me tend to assume though.
But like Charles said I still think we can’t know for sure what will happen. There’s an entire spectrum of possibilities and severity for how this will play out. Time will tell!
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It is. I would say, like every complex skill, you need 10 years of regular practice (by that I mean, roughly the weekly time of at least a part-time job) to see the whole picture. Then is the start of the path towards mastery.
Maybe, it can go faster if you have a skilled teacher and are not stubborn like me (meaning that, you follow your teacher’s way and do not try to find yours)
But, that’s if you want to keep doing things the way they have been done and are thus bound to continue failing.
So the reason I didn’t want to follow any teacher’s way is that agriculture, as practiced in the mainstream, doesn’t feel right to me (even at a low scale): it is extractive, destructive, goes counter-flow of natural processes. Just plain evil: raze the ground, then till, then plant your plants, then fight every plants and animals except yours and provide everything for your plants, then harvest and repeat. Human centered all the way. Full of separation and dominion. To me, this is not a way which can work for very long. And indeed it does not.
However, I think part of the difficulty comes from the fact that we usually approach the task in a purely technical manner (because our culture tells us so), rather than be guided by the heart. And another part of the difficulty comes from the fact that we are starting (in most places on earth), from extremely degraded land.
Ernst Gotsch presents the way life travels through space and time with this graph:
In his interpretation, life naturally follows a path of aggradation leading to an increase in complexity, the natural succession. It goes in a direction opposite to entropy: life creates more life.
Except human beings and their domesticated animals. (Ernst opinion is that some human groups did not adapt to the forest gaining ground because of the deglaciation happening 12000 years ago, and so they started waging war on the forests to keep the conditions of the steppes. I don’t know it that’s true. It’s a fun story to tell, though)
Anyway, Ernst Gotsch distinguishes three broad systems in this succession: colonization, accumulation and abundance. Colonization corresponds to the bootstraping of life (from bare rock to the first soil and plants), then accumulation starts until there is enough dead organic matter to cover the soil all year long, then is the start of abundance.
Each system has the life forms (and thus plants and animals) which are appropriate to its specific conditions (and needs). Basically, human beings are animals of the abundance phase.
Because of the way (most) agriculture has been practiced and other human impacts, most agriculture is now done on land that has regressed to “accumulation”. And it cannot work: the soil requires the accumulation plants (which this culture calls weeds, hence tilling and herbicides), the plants are not adapted (they require too much, hence fertilizers), pests attacks sick maladapted plants which are going to further deplete a fragile soil (hence pesticides).
All our “solutions” stem from our misunderstanding of the natural processes of life, of an incorrect interpretation, of a war against natural flows, (solutions to problems created from previous solutions <= that’s not Gotsch, but Fukuoka, among others).
So this starts to change (individually and collectively), the day we stop waging war. Farming methods which do not go counter-flow but act in the same direction as life are a way to travel together with life towards abundance. And, once the system is back to abundance, are easier, effortless (in the sense of the absence of friction, more optimal). But, most places are very degraded, and human beings (me included) are still going in all sort of strange directions, and skills are lacking, and there are many humans, and, and, and (all which Hideaway and other depressed and rightly so collapsnik will tell you). So, I guess, a man reaps what he sows.
Real change starts in our heart, with the desire for life, striving to observe and listen, finding pleasure and our function in the living community, in service to the macro-organism. (I know this sounds cheesy: but is it? Or are we programmed by 12000 years of bad habits?)
I try to follow natural farming (Masanobu Fukuoka) and syntropic farming (Ernst Götsch). To me, both are saying roughly the same thing, but within different philosophical frameworks, cultural traditions and diffferent (not really opposing) technical details. Only Ernst Götsch is probably bolder on following natural succession further along its path. Fukuoka had some more luxury for time and a more primitive, less scientific outlook. Both are dear to me, as well as Anastassia Makarieva with the theory of the biotic pump.
Today, I was in the mood for writing all this. Just my opinions 🙂
There, really, at this point, are no guarantee. That is, for those who are expecting a particular outcome.
Still, there can be joy, there is constant renewal, there is.
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40 years ago if anyone wanted to build a shed on their farm for whatever purpose, you went and built the shed, or contracted someone to do it.
Now if you want to build a shed for some purpose, you have to get a planning permit, including technical details (from professional services at your cost) to make sure it’s going to be compliant in a number of ways. It often takes several different professional services to write reports to pass the ‘planning’ aspect.
Then you need a building permit, to make sure it’s compliant with relevant building codes, again more cost. Then you either build it yourself or get a contractor to do it, once you have gone past all the permits..
To farm, you need money and a money source, plus you are in competition with other farmers, who are all trying to make money to pay all the costs involved and eke out an existence for themselves and their families. There are rates to pay, land tax, water access fees, insurance, most of these have gone up in price well in excess of official inflation. Small farms are subject to exactly the same packaging and handling rules and regulations for products sold to the public, all in the name of ‘food safety’ or ‘quality control’ and end up with approximately the same hurdles to pass as large corporate farms.
The larger the farm, the less per acre is paid in all these types of fees and expenses. These farms also have economies of scale in using less labor per unit area by having large machinery often automated if large enough. The system we live in favors the economies of scale, which is making the small farm less viable, unless you have a favorable niche market, which only will work in relatively good times.
I expect the situation to be more skewed towards larger farms as we head into collapse, as the system sees these as more efficient, which they are in energy terms, of what produces a lot of food for cities, despite being totally reliant on fossil fuels.
Lack of oil (diesel) in particular, along with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides etc, will effect the corporate large farms far more than small farms far faster. Food just not getting to cities will be one of largest signs of very immanent collapse, but I still expect govts to be pushing for larger farms right up to the point where they lose control.
This is also before we consider the rapidly changing climate that is likely to make any form of agriculture unviable anyway, which seems to be overlooked too often, because all of us have denial genes that kick in when something threatens our world and life view …
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Yes. The system is crazy, obsolete. Just let it rot and die.
At some time, a lucrative and useful (but not that easy) business may be to take some 0 rate credit from the system desperate to make more liquidities, buy the land of a large agricultural exploitation (see the vocabulary we are using in our culture), divide it in smaller plots and sell them individually (that is, if there are still property rights, notaries, land registers by then…)
Basically the same idea as real estate, but in the opposite direction.
That’s just a random idea: I certainly don’t have the guts, energy, means to do that 🙂 I just lower my expectations and try to avoid the crazy system.
You are right. Farming as a business has most probably a limited timespan. Farming has a limited timespan. And in a way, that’s what is beautiful with Ernst method: you enrich the whole community of life while getting something that you need. You accomplish your function and get rewarded for it. Guided by inner pleasure. And in the end, there is (in most part of the world) a forest: you did your part in getting the location revert back to where the macro-organism wants it to be, instead of fighting, struggling constantly.
Yes, there are no easy answers and we all love different things.
Best.
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Nice.
I agree it takes about 10 years to become competent at growing food. I think farming requires a certain mindset able to accept failures that are outside of your control, and it’s hard physical work often in crappy conditions, for very little financial return, so a prerequisite I think is you have to love it. I don’t think I fit the profile so I’ve struck a compromise by helping a farm with things I’m good at like infrastructure, repairs, construction, tech, etc.
I do hope to have a few of my own beds again this year but I’m going to focus on fewer crops that I enjoy eating, keep well into winter, and are not too hard to grow like spinach, kale, carrots, and beets. The beets I grew last year are keeping well in the fridge and I’m still eating them. Just made another 2L batch of refrigerator pickled beets.
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Thank you.
That’s great.
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Very interesting and all very new to me! Saving your post for future reference and research – i.e. the rabbit hole
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There is a trend in the US of removing old or poorly placed freeways (I don’t know if that trend will continue under Trump)
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/04/19/these-10-urban-freeways-deserve-to-be-demolished-but-will-they
From a perspective of peak oil and climate change, it actually makes sense to be removing some of those freeways.
The US is already struggling to maintain its infrastructure and freeway removal can be a way to collapse now and avoid the rush.
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Roads, freeways, tollways, railways, water mains, gas pipelines, electric transmission lines, phone lines, etc, are the equivalent to an organisms arteries, veins, lymphatic system, nervous system etc. They are all seemingly a small part of the whole, yet the function of the whole relies upon them.
Eventually all the internal networks of an organism start to fail as it gets towards the end of it’s life. However sometimes during the earlier stages of life some of these networks or parts of them fail, causing either minimal damage or catastrophic damage to the whole.
A thick vein in the leg might become clogged, and surrounding veins expand to take up the blood flow, in which case all is good, providing the blockage doesn’t move to a more important area, like the lungs. A similar sized blockage in a pulmonary vein can be catastrophic to the entire organism.
Will we only close the “important” freeways while managing or maintaining the rest? The problem is no-one wants to collapse first and avoid the rush, far more likely we all collapse together or very closely to each other part of civilization…
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It only takes a few good people speaking the truth to overthrow evil.
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A bizarre flip flop, then woo, now contradictions with prior contradictions. I have no idea what’s going on in Berman’s brain. It seems scrambled.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/solutions-the-art-of-avoiding-reality/
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I fully agree with this post of Art’s, it seems he’s either come to the conclusion that there are no solutions, civilization heads where it heads until it collapses itself and probably takes most of the natural world with it, or he’s rapidly coming to that conclusion.
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I agree, except he recently told us oil depletion is not a problem, and a year ago he told us it was an imminent threat.
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I think it’s because he has not put the big picture together yet of how it’s a combination of many aspects that guarantee the collapse of modern civilization, yet he grasps a lot of the separate pieces and treats them as separate instead of part of the whole.
Most people in the doom sphere are similar, they grab on to their bit of understanding of what’s not possible, so think collapse for one or a few reasons, but don’t grasp the importance of other areas they haven’t researched as a part of the whole picture.
I’m still learning and researching as I’m sure i don’t have a grasp of the interactions of every aspect yet…
By the same token people who have been hanging out here at un-denial seem to have the best grasp of the overall reality, and we are a small group….
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I left this comment, but it’s not showing yet. See if I can get Art pissed off😊
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Fire leads to full consciousness, which then leads to domestication, agriculture, and mining. Which then leads to fossil energy, which then leads to self-induced mass extinction.
Most advanced overshoot aware people can agree with the above… but for some reason they can’t agree with the below:
Those good ole days of “maintaining balance with nature”…. is just a stage in the process that cannot be prolonged. Very similar to when Old World collided with New World. The Native Americans were at a stage in the process where they looked “good” compared to the stage in the process where the “evil” Europeans were at. But the Natives would have gotten to that European level eventually (with time and energy). Just like those Colonialists used to be “good” back when they were in their earlier stage of the process (3000BC Mesopotamia?).
No species that conquers fire can ever fit in with the web of life. At certain stages it might appear possible, but it’s just an illusion. Let it play out and it will always end up miserably for everyone else. The easiest solution is to remove the fire users. Hence the mass extinction that comes guaranteed when you start playing with fossil fuels. Yes, lots of innocent victims perish, but it’s the only way for Mother Earth to rid herself of the megacancer called humans.
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I’d add that conquering fire gives whatever species a huge amount of excess energy available, that then leads to consciousness and all the other aspects you mention. It still took hundreds of thousands of years to lead to Agriculture as the climate was not ‘right’ for the development of Agriculture..
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Even just the extra energy available to the brain when consuming cooked food!
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Good job. Your story is becoming smoother and more compelling.
I remember struggling for years trying to explain Varki’s ideas clearly.
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Thanks.
Ya, I can’t imagine what those early years of MORT were like for you. At that stage where you understood it and it made perfect sense… yet you couldn’t convey it clearly and concisely (kind of like where I am still at for a lot of these topics)
Luckily for me, fire is like algebra101… MORT is more like calculus😊.
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Well said PAQ.
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Stumbled onto this movie last night. Caught my attention because I’m a cat person. Only put it on because I thought it was a silly cartoon and I wanted to give my cat some tv time while I was busy doing something else (yes, I have corrupted my Empire Kitty into being a couch potato😊).
But from the opening scene I was hooked. Cannot recommend this film enough. Here’s a few snippets from reddit that will give you an idea what it’s about:
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Thanks, I love movie tips. I’ll check it out.
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https://peakoilbarrel.com/short-term-energy-outlook-february-2025/#comment-786216
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I’m about half way through RFK’s book The Wuhan Cover-Up.
I’m finding it tough going. It’s very dense with crazy-making fact after crazy-making fact.
It’s also a little scary that (so far anyway) RFK doesn’t seem to understand the most important WHY? any better than I do.
For example, the US government gave big money to China many times through many channels to fund bioweapons research. Why? It makes no sense to fund an enemy to make weapons that could be used against you. Unless maybe it’s not actually a weapon???
Also eye opening is the control China has over the science journals which explains in part the lab leak coverup.
Still no insight into why China avoided mRNA transfections.
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https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/02/el-inexorable-colapso.html
Why are we getting upset? Human biology is not suitable for the civilizations that have developed so far.
Of course, this is often suppressed and denied.
Saludos
el mar
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Indeed!
Not easy to understand!
Saludos
el mar
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Hi el mar, I really like Quark’s work, but I always cringe when I see the above diagram of overshoot of carrying capacity. Most draw it like the diagram above as it looks like we are just a little in overshoot.
In reality the horizontal carrying capacity line should be 90% further down, well below the words “geometric growth”, then falling after the peak of overshoot (possibly earlier).
When the human population was 4M we were already vastly changing the environment with our use of fire and extinction of megafauna. I question if even that population/living standard was sustainable for something like a million years, which is still a drop in the ocean of geologic time…
This part of Quark’s post, is very very relevant…. “This time, it’s not that the oil shortage is failing, or there’s a stock market crash, or there’s widespread corruption. This time, everything is failing at the same time. And that’s why there’s no solution.“
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I would imagine that 4M would be sustainable if they were coastal and eating seafood mostly.
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I commented
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Canadian Prepper compares today’s reality with the world predicted by one of my favorite movies, Idiocracy.
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Thanks. Nate pumps out a homerun every once in a while. And just for him mentioning the evolution of Fuddruckers, it was already a great video😊.
ps. Mike Judge is awesome. This short clip might be his finest moment (1997)
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Just finished a few chapters in RFK’s The Wuhan Cover-Up that detail the dirty deeds of USAID including triggering the Ukraine war by overthrowing the elected government, and funding GOF research at Wuhan that leaked causing covid.
Is it a coincidence that Trump took down USAID first?
I think not.
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Canadian Prepper today predicted the stock market will crash this week.
I think a crash could happen any time in the next 3 years including tomorrow.
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That’s funny. My mom and I were talking about this last night because some of her sources are saying the same thing.
We were contemplating if we should cash out our retirement. We were guessing what a stock market crash might mean to the banks. We figure they would shut down immediately to prevent people from taking their money out. And then guessing what that might mean and so on.
My mom then says “ya, but they would have to open the banks pretty soon after that”. I was confused so I asked her what she meant. “So that everyone could still pay their bills”, she said. She could tell by my reaction (I fell face down on the floor😊) that I was not in agreement. I started to tell her how “paying bills” would be over at that point… same with going to work… same with grocery stores having food… I stopped myself from going into full on collapse mode because I could sense her fear. She had one more thing to add though, “ok, maybe car payments and credit card bills would go unpaid for a while, but the electric company is still going to be expecting payment, so the banks would have to be open for that. I politely said, “good point” and ended the conversation.
Holy shit! And she lives with me and hears my crazy doomerism every day. Now I know why so many people are gonna fall for that brilliant emergency advice the politicians gave a while back, “make sure you have three days worth of food in case the grid goes down”… Whew, it’s gonna be ugly😊.
The timebomb factor is what’s making this so crazy though. Could be tomorrow, or not for another decade. Keeping your sanity till that timebomb goes off is gonna be very challenging.
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LOL! I don’t think a total collapse is what CP was talking about. Nor me.
Just the stock market correcting to more normal valuations.
The total collapse will probably come when oil supply starts falling no matter what they do as Hideaway predicts.
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Ah, gotcha. For some reason “stock market crash” always equals the great crash of 1929 for me. Jeez, my clueless mother was probably more accurate than me in our conversation. LOL
ps. Speaking of CP, I have an all-time favorite moment with him. Was a while back when his guest was breaking down what currency’s will be best when SHTF. The guest was not talking good about gold and that had Nate squirming around and asking childish “what if” questions to try and make gold look better. It became quite obvious that he’s sitting on a ton of gold. Was hilarious.
I dont follow his channel so I’m sure I got the link here. Do you have any idea which episode or who that guest was? (I’m too lazy to search the comments)
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Sorry I don’t remember that episode. He interviewed someone yesterday who argued in favor of gold.
Personally, if I had to choose between $1000 of canned meat and $1000 of gold I’d take the cans.
If I had all the supplies I wanted and had some savings I’d put 50% in gold and 50% in cash. That way you’re covered for inflation, deflation, a stock market monkey panic, and the banks closing.
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That was written like you were in a mood or you dislike Canadian Prepper / Nate Polson. He obviously has some gold, but none of us are privy to the actual relationship
– is it real ownership, paid cash
– or maybe purchased using credit
I see a man running a business and sensible enough not to necessarily confront/discuss the real unpalatable truths. Prof. Nate Hagens and many others are exactly the same.
If Polson is relying on leverage (easy credit) to:
– fill his warehouse
– buy his 160 acres, 2013 McMansion with 3 car garage
– buy gold, etc.
Then maybe he is hoping that SHTF will be a hard full stop with no institutions to perform foreclosure, call in his debts. A slow decline, ironically is much worse, with mortgage margin calls and Blackrock sucking up everything.
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I’m still not certain how much awareness Nate Polson has on the overshoot threat. I watch closely. He gets climate change, and debt, and war, but I’m not so sure about over population and energy/mineral depletion.
I see a man struggling like the rest of us.
About a year ago the threat of Ukraine escalating into nuclear war freaked him out (as it did me). This seems to have spurred him to make the big decision to buy and build a doomstead farm. I’m guessing he’s just beginning to understand what a big commitment of time, effort, and money this is, especially when you’re also trying to run a business.
Today he’s worried about a market crash and has hinted he expects his business to go bankrupt. He’s also concerned about political trends in Canada (as am I) and now he’s talking about moving to the US.
I told him we should get behind Trump’s plan to take over Canada but he didn’t reply so I don’t know if he saw it.
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I’m not a fan of CP. Don’t hate him or anything, just annoys me with that schtick “I know that last time I did a video like this I told you guys it was the most important video of my life… but this time I really mean it”
Or maybe I’m just jealous that he figured out how to make ridiculous money from fearmongering.
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I watch CP with my skepticism filter dialed up to max.
He sometimes spots things other miss, occasionally connects an interesting dot, and is often an entertaining distraction to listen to while I work on my media hobby.
His interviews are usually excellent and he should do more. I dislike his prepping tips and find most of them childish and naive.
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The pope is sick, maybe dying.
What is the pope’s position on covid mRNA transfections?
This morning they announced he has a kidney problem, in addition to pneumonia.
Kidney damage is a side effect of mRNA transfections.
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He is also 88 years old.
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He killed many people by giving them bad advice without first verifying his facts. My god’s squaring things up.
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I’m not religious either. I was just saying that since he is 88 years old, his health problems aren’t necessarily caused by MRNA. If he were younger, I would say that MRNA is the likely culprit.
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I understand and understood.
My god doesn’t care. He’s an eye for an eye vengeful deity. Recall that he burned down Notre-Dame Cathedral as payback for the pope turning a blind eye to his priests raping little boys.
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Who is your god?
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Thermodynamics.
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Like as in the Spanish Gods Thermod y Namics.
Scary deities that control all the power in the universe.
Cool.
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Einstein said something like every scientific theory will probably change as we learn more, however thermodynamics is the bedrock and is unlikely to ever change.
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My god is complex….
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I thought your god was complexity. 🙂
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Maybe humans need large predators around to filter out stupidity like this.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/national/24956420.tiktokers-dropping-heavy-objects-feet-viral-trend-risk-lifetime-pain/
TikTokers dropping heavy objects on feet in viral trend ‘risk lifetime of pain’
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Film a tiktok video of outrunning a big cat.
The rest takes care of itself and we have plenty of laughs.
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Unfortunately Animal control/Law enforcement might end up shooting the big cat to save the moronic human.
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That’s what they do here when a cougar is seen anywhere near humans. They hire trackers with dogs, tree the cougar, and shoot it. Really pisses me off. We have a surplus of children and pets. Cougars are rare. In all my years working and hiking in the forests here I have never seen a cougar in the wild.
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This makes me ashamed of my species.
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Headline news this morning was Starmer’s speech in which he announced the biggest increase in military spending since the cold war to counter the Russian “threat”. The UK leads the collapse of advanced countries. They have no resources and their debt and population are way too high. Military spending will accelerate their collapse. When you look at a map of Europe with UK as a little island on the west side, and Ukraine a long way away on the east side, you wonder WTF he’s talking about. And yet the hatred/fear in his voice seems real. UK elites really are behaving like monkeys in denial.
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Good essay by Alan Urban comparing past false alarms with today.
Are doomers deluding themselves again?
https://www.collapsemusings.com/i-believe-the-world-is-ending-does-that-make-me-crazy/
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The boy who cried wolf.. what’s the lesson that should be learned?
A/ don’t put young amateurs in charge of something important..
B/ The boy was correct there was a wolf and it did eat the sheep.
C/ Always have someone else to blame when things go wrong…
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D/ Prep with confidence and purpose, and expect extreme and unanticipated measures by governments to kick the can, knowing this makes predicting the date is impossible, and that the inevitable collapse will be worse than expected.
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I think most people just want simple answers to complex problems and have no mental bandwidth or inclination to dig deeper wether it is collapse,pharma industry, geopolitics or any other topic.
Just staying with the topic of collapse most people see canada as a safe haven most resilient to collapse. I have friends in Calgary who are completely unconcerned about climate change or any such issue simply because of their location and as such have no interest to dig deeper.
Their point is Canada produces surplus oil , surplus gas, surplus hydroelectric power and surplus grains and has a low population. This means even if the whole world goes down in flames they will remain relatively unscathed. I am sure Hideaway can completely destroy their illusions with little effort but that would involve connecting the dots of complexity of various industries which is not easy for someone like me so I don’t try to contest their logic.
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Since we have the most overshoot aware crowd here I was curious to know what Canadians like Rob think of the arguments of resiliency usually made. It would also give me some material when I have another conversation like that.
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Since being infected with Hideaway’s extra strength reality I’m less optimistic about Canada.
The Canada of my childhood was resilient. Today not so much.
Everything manufactured I buy in the stores is imported. If international trade shuts down, how long do we have before things start to break and there are no spare parts to fix them?
There is some Canadian food in the stores like milk, eggs, meat, grain, and in season veg. However almost all of this is shipped 150Km to 4000Km on trucks to my community.
The farm I assist will struggle without fertilizer, plastic for greenhouses, irrigation pumps and parts, and diesel/gas for machines.
The oil we produce is the expensive stuff that will probably fail first. We do have good hydroelectricity but I wonder how long that will last without spare parts and diesel trucks to service the infrastructure.
Our leaders, like in most western countries, are REALLY stupid. I worry how they will respond to a real crisis. They were universally brain dead and unethical during covid.
Since Canada does have some things of value to export, I’d guess we’ll will do better than most countries for a few years, but then it will be a gong show here like everywhere else.
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Thanks for the detailed reply.
Since you channeled Hideaway I will channel my denialist friends in Calgary and play Devil’s advocate.
Alberta is a powerhouse in oil and gas industry along with agriculture and forestry. Yes we import heavy machinery as we don’t manufacture them here but as long as there is any industrial capacity left anywhere in the world we albertans will trade our raw materials and obtain the machinery via trade to continue providing them with our resources.
Oil sands may be difficult to obtain but is much easier compared to offshore oil rigs digging down several thousand feet below the ocean. Its just bitumen mined and heated with natural gas to produce the crude as product. So the equipment we need will be excavators, mining trucks and other such machines. Our gas has not yet depleted as compared to US so that will be a reliable and easy source of energy for us.
Since we have abundant gas fertilizers should not be a problem at all which means good degree of caloric self sufficiency. We also have massive biomass energy as well.
I accept your point about spare parts necessity and the fact that we don’t have the manufacturing base to produce the parts that will fail. But we can trade our unlimited resources for those parts and will only collapse after everybody else has and there is nobody left to trade with.
This will probably take decades and will not be relevant to me or my kids who are in their 20s.
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Those are good arguments. If you’d asked me to steel man their perspective I would have said similar things.
I wasn’t sure where the Haber-Bosch fertilizer plants were in Canada so I asked Grok. Looks like Alberta is in good shape:
As I said before, I expect modernity in Canada will continue longer than in other less resource rich countries. The question is how long? I have this uneasy feeling that modernity is so interconnected and dependent on a 6 continent supply chain plus a functioning financial system with lots of credit, that I could imagine the shortage of some special metal alloy used in the fuel injectors of those oil sands machines might be enough to bring the whole system down.
I’m not sure. It might not be knowable until we get there.
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P.S.
I spent a couple formative summers on a family farm in Duffield Alberta when I was about 9 years old. I was a poorish city kid and learned how to drive a tractor and a pickup truck and started to feel like a man doing real work. After a week of hard work our treat was a bottle of coke and a bag of chips on the weekend. No TV, no movie theaters, no gadgets. Just me and my cousins enjoying our chips and telling stories. Then for Sunday dinner my aunt would kill and roast a chicken with veg from her kitchen garden.
When I was about 18 in university I had a summer job in Eckville Alberta doing operations and maintenance on an oil pipeline. It was such a boring job that I met a rancher in the bar and he hired me. So every evening and weekend I went to his ranch and worked until it was dark. I looked after 1100 head of cattle and cultivated and seeded 300 acres of grain. He raced pony chuckwagons on the weekend so I had the place to myself and a bonus was a freezer full of t-bone steaks which was a real treat for a poor student.
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It sounds like a very wholesome life with deep connections to people and land around you. This is in such sharp contrast to the lives that most people lead today with their addled brains hopelessly addicted to their phones, chasing dopamine hits continuously and hopping from one hedonistic high to another.
Even with the deeply rooted life that you had it would take quite a journey to reach a point of overshoot awareness and see the reality but with the kind of fast moving, ‘buy,consume,dispose’ society we have it’s pretty much impossible to even begin to contemplate any of it.
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Hi Kira, …. “ I am sure Hideaway can completely destroy their illusions with little effort but that would involve connecting the dots of complexity of various industries..“
I’m pretty sure you could destroy their arguments by just following the lines of reasoning…
The argument is that Alberta can survive longer because we have resources, hydro etc..
However I’m fairly sure Alberta imports all the machinery, household, electrical goods, transformers and nearly every part of the maintenance of the electrical grid, plus every part required for trucks, pumps for oil lines, etc a long endless list..
The assumption is the roads, trucks, ports and ships keep working normally to ‘trade’ with partners. How many ports does Alberta have?? Then the assumption that the next state is working normally so all the necessary trade can happen. Then the assumption that the ports and factories in whichever region you are trading all of the necessary imports from also have ports working normally and world shipping working normally.
The areas that provide all the goods necessary for Alberta to run normally, have to be able to operate normally, so that all the workers turn up to the factories to do the work, plus all the trucks work normally, plus all the imports of raw materials keep flowing into that area, which means all the ports of the raw material exporters need to operate normally, and the mines, plus all the community that supplies all the mines needs to run normally. This takes a lot of machinery and fuel, which comes from factories elsewhere, so other places need to run normally providing all the machinery and fuel, to not just the mines but the whole area/country..
Once people understand that, everything runs on a 6 continent supply chain of all the necessary minerals, fuel, metals, ore concentrates etc, it’s easy to follow a chain of ‘what’s necessary’ to keep any one area or region going with any type of modernity. Without the modernity of electrical equipment what good is a hydro dam? Without modernity how long can the oil sands be mined? Without the huge electrical pumps pumping oil along pipelines that require regular maintenance, how long before it all fails due to lack of parts from elsewhere in the world?
Working normally, is a highly complex network of flows of energy and materials around the world, in a way that no-one fully understands all the links. It has worked on growing energy and materials use combined with larger markets for every single aspect of modernity, all built with debt that assumes the system will get larger to pay back the debt.
I’m pretty sure that when Alberta collapses along with the rest of modernity, most people in denial will be looking for scapegoats to blame for their poor situation.
It’s simple, complex civilization grows until it can’t, then collapses in on itself. No single area totally reliant on the whole of modern civilization can withstand the collapse. Any minor area (like the USA) that thinks they can survive alone, and tries to build everything they need, will quickly run into the joint problems of not a large enough market, not enough workers to produce everything, lower grade mineral shortages, more people and equipment required for ‘defense’ of supplies of necessary materials form other areas etc.
Small areas of civilization can only continue with much reduced complexity, but much lower complexity likely means all the ‘resources’ that an area has become just dirt in the ground as it relies on modern large scale complexity to extract and utilize…
Of course if your friends are like mine when I try to explain all this, they invariable turn to some magic form of undiscovered energy as being the solution, to try and divert the conversation, that they usually start…
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My province British Columbia is on the coast adjacent to the land locked province of Alberta.
If Alberta wishes to trade with any country other than the US it will need permission to use our ports, and railways, and highways, and pipelines.
We of course will want the same standard of living as Alberta aspires to so our transit fees will vaporize half of whatever Alberta thinks it has.
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Exactly!! Then what about the Northern states of the USA if Alberta wishes to flow it’s oil through them? Likewise I’m sure!! Then to the East through Canada, they will also want the same..
The concept of “our area” will be OK in collapse simply doesn’t and can’t work.
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I sometimes forget how huge Canada is. It’s like 10 countries joined into one massive country all connected by trucks. I think being next to US is a massive risk factor as when America collapses all the chaos will definitely spill over into Canada. There is also a possibility that the resource rich regions like Alberta suddenly develop “organic protests” for secession from Canada and joining the US if Canada refuses to supply the much needed oil.
Being America’s neighbor is like living with a junkie who is functional as long as his drug needs are met but the second he runs out he will go into serious withdrawal and spiral out of control. When that happens he becomes a danger to himself and those around him.
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Yes there are a lot of risks living next to the US. In addition to those you mention I imagine a flood of climate change refugees invading from California, and toxic fallout from China nuking the critical Bangor submarine base just south of the border when WWIII starts.
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Based on your experience working on a farm I was hoping you could give me your opinion on the most common belief many people hold about contingency measures that could be deployed after collapse speeds up. I get this especially from my Canadian friends.
They say that Canada has a lot of Arable land which has probably not been depleted as much as lands elsewhere along with abundant water supply which is all that is needed for surviving.
If a family of three living in Calgary realized where the civilization is headed and decides to take measures to survive could they pick up farming skills within a few years and be ready?
What are the irrigation options without electrical pumps? Does Canada have robust canal system? Is farming possible without fertilizers and pesticides (as the cold might stop the pests)? Without tractors and other machines what is the draft animal availability? Does the climate support multiple planting cycles?
Sorry about so many questions.
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Hi Kira,
That’s a lot of complicated questions that depend on many factors like your age, where you live, your skills, your financial means, etc..
I will think about writing a long essay with my opinions however if you want to narrow the question to something bite size I will try to answer it now.
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Hi Rob
I am commenting here as the limit for replies on this thread seems to have been reached.
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Thanks for that detailed answer.
The problem is that they take the opposite of your systems approach and start backwards by selecting the essentials like agriculture,sanitation or anything else they need and work their way to the end by choosing convenient components and hand waving the rest. I am familiar with this method as I used to do the same.
Unless one has spent decades studying complex systems and mastered the whole interconnected systems approach it is easy to be stumped by the magical thinking approach and be at a loss for words.
For instance my friends in Australia think their electricity is guaranteed as they have one of the largest coal reserves as for them the way to get electricity is to burn coal to rotate the turbines and just “transmit” the electricity to the power sockets at home. I used to think so too. Only now have I realised how much of stuff like sub stations and transformers are needed to get the energy to the homes and manufacturing them needs all of supply chain along with transportation powered by oil.
The ‘what’s necessary’ and tracing that all the way to the end is a habit I have only recently begun to cultivate after watching you do the same. Are there any books that teach systems approach or complex systems analysis that could help?
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Kira,
I always find that Joseph Tainter’s book ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ combined with ‘Limits to growth’ and a basic understanding of entropy and dissipation is all any person needs to come to the correct conclusions, until the denial gene kicks in somewhere along the way, which happens to most people..
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Hi Hideaway,
Thanks for the recommendations. I am familiar with Tainter’s book and the LTG. My question was about systems approach in general to any topic at hand and not just civilization or collapse. What I mean is if I want to analyze an ecosystem and its complex interactions the tendency is to take a piecemeal approach as opposed to the systems approach. This seems to be a pitfall of modern education system with the specialization and super specialization leading to siloing. This seems to be the reason why so many people who are experts in their field seem unable to grasp the complexity of civilization and all its moving parts. We see this on Nates podcast all the time.
So I was wondering if there was a method to cultivate that mindset/skill where one could see all the moving parts and the various feedbacks and interactions between them. Or is it a philosophy of thinking to be cultivated organically.
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Maybe this is part of what you are looking for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems:_A_Primer.
I have come to the conclusion that it is not possible to build a model of everything. A model is an abstraction. It will have a limited domain of applicability and aspects of reality over which it will fail miserably. I think we build models to answer specific questions. And it’s OK to have only partial models (slices of reality) to that end.
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Hi Charles,
Thanks for the recommendation.
I agree completely but I just wanted to overcome or at least combat this subconscious bias to fragment things into individual bits for analysis rather than taking a systems approach. I am often at a loss for reply when someone talks about electrifying mining trucks and powering it with solar panels. It takes me a while to formulate a response to such BS ideas. Hope this book helps in it.
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Yes (I am replying here, because we reached the edge)
I believe it is not really possible to avoid fragmentation using language, the intellect, reasoning. Words are knives. System thinking is another form of fragmentation. Only, reality is cut differently.
To me (and I am not trying to convert here, just sharing), re-uniting (or rather noticing the ever-existing unity) is done at another level (before). A level which requires no effort whatsoever. Let the veil of thoughts down and see. It’s so simple, we can’t get it. “Here” is the only place we can’t travel to.
🙂
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Dr. Tom Murphy argues there’s nothing special or better about the human brain, it’s just different.
Feels like pleading to me by the brain that measured the distance to the moon to about a millimeter accuracy.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2025/02/the-great-escape/
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Was worried about my aging brain’s memory and being accused of exaggerating…
Dr. Tom Murphy measured the distance to the moon. What was the accuracy of the measurement?
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Nice simple comment from Joe Clarkson on this article on resilience.org. Why does this make so much sense to me but put it in front of others and they either go silent or start talking about solar panels from mushrooms?
“The basic assumption presented here, that we need to use our brains differently, is wrong. The human brain has been roughly the same for 300,000 years and it’s only recently that this brain has enabled modernity and its depredations. Prior to the last several hundred years, our brains allowed us to live on the earth without destroying it, so what has changed?
Fossil fuels. Modernity is not a product of the human brain alone, otherwise it would have appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago. It is only the combination of brainpower and lots of surplus exogenous energy that allowed modern industrial cultures to exist. Take away the energy from fossil fuels and humans are relatively harmless on a global scale. Sure, they can muck up local areas, but so can most other species.
It’s not the brain or the way we use it that’s the problem, it’s the scale of the power made available by abundant energy supplies. We don’t need to change how our brains work, we just need to power down. Fortunately, that’s coming fairly soon, whether we want it or not.”
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I always like Joe’s comments… but I keep looking at this one and can’t stop from nitpicking.
I don’t agree, but I guess I can accept it. The problem is when I accept it, I start to lose focus. All of a sudden, it’s perfectly fine that one species busted through the resource constraints of fire & agriculture… seems like flawed logic.
Conquering fire is what created that combo of brainpower and lots of surplus exogenous energy.
As long as there’s a fire using species running around on the planet, the rest of life will always be in danger of that species eventually creating a future self-induced mass extinction.
ps. I give myself half credit for that last quote from James@megacancer because I found it buried in his comment section and then added the beginning and end to make it a complete story😊
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The thousands of German citizens that lurk at un-Denial will appreciated this snark.
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Recession incoming.
First cut interest rates. Then panic and print. Then inflation. Then pissed off citizens and rising interest rates. Then war.
I’ve argued this point before with HHH without satisfaction. I think the Fed doesn’t matter until the government wants to spend a lot more than the markets will lend it at a reasonable price. Then the Fed does make difference by causing inflation via QE.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-19-2025/#comment-786314
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Big deal at the UN today.
US, China, and Russia voted for a motion about Ukraine that western rich countries voted against.
I don’t recall that ever happening before.
A lot of people I respect think Trump and team are faking real positive change.
It looks genuine to me.
I actually have a little hope for peace and justice being delivered to the bioweapons/covid criminals before everything goes to shit via economic collapse.
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Certainly feels that way.
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It’s possible there will be no improvement for the Palestinians under Trump however despite a lot of saber rattling there has been no genociding since Biden lost power. We’ll see.
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https://x.com/aizvo/status/1894604159170597273
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Sarah Connor has a new one today. I enjoyed it, but I have no idea if this came from a human or a bot.
Engineered Collapse of the Middle Class
Main reason I’m commenting is because I got this link over there from Ali R. I saw this early in my journey thanks to Michael Dowd. Fun to watch again after more than three years have passed… I was a scared, unconfident rookie doomer back then, now I’m a professional maniac😊.
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Sorry, I should have at least said what the link is about. LOL.
It’s a short story about how even the rich aren’t going to be immune from collapse.
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Thanks, I’ve never seen that video.
I keep a decent cache of vodka. Plan to add some cartons of cigarettes if I can figure out how to buy them tax free from the native reservation here. If things get really bad I’m going to have a serious party and watch a bunch of my favorite movies before saying goodbye.
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LOL. Thats my kind of exit strategy… I might have to copycat it.
But they’d have to be very very carefully selected movies. Films like Independence Day or Armageddon would probably talk me out of going through with it.😊
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Art Berman criticizes Peter Turchin for being energy blind.
Then Berman explains what’s going on in the world.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-great-game-reborn-energy-geopolitics-and-the-reversal-of-the-liberal-order/
The Great Game Reborn
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Europe has become really dark. They arrested Romania’s Georgescu today because he’ll probably win the election then stop construction of NATO’s biggest military base intended to threaten Russia.
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Dr. Tim Morgan is flailing around (again) today trying to make sense of material and energy blindness, because he’s not aware of Varki’s MORT theory.
His concluding comment on the failure of Apple’s $189 billion investment in technology is hilarious. I used to have a senior position in that industry. I can confirm that’s a LOT of money to spend on R&D to achieve nothing.
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Ed Conway debunks Trump’s claim that he’ll recover $500 billion via rare earth’s from Ukraine.
Oddly, Conway ignores what I think is the most important point, Russia has already taken most of the territory that has rare earth deposits.
There must be a different story behind the public story.
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Good essay today by el gato malo on how the overton window has shifted and how much further it has to go.
A lot of people need to go to prison.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/move-overton
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Am I the only person on the planet that gets creeped out every time Chris Martenson brings his good looking vacant lot spouse on as a co-host? WTF is he thinking?.
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I stopped watching him ages ago, he just has too much of a used car salesman vibe. So creepy.
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I find Martenson to be a Jekyll & Hyde.
On topics in his wheelhouse that he cares about like overshoot or covid, he can be excellent, especially when speaking with knowledgeable peers.
When he’s in subscription sales mode discussing click bait topics like the evils of bankers he is cringeworthy bad.
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Trump Shares DERANGED, Sick Gaza Video
Frankly, that video is so morbid and over-the-top that it is almost comical. It basically depicts a theme park built over a mass grave. I just thought to myself “Is our president really this deranged and delusional”?
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I will bet you a can of sardines that this is a tactic by Trump to scare the Arab countries into paying for rebuilding Gaza for the Palestinians, or finding a nice new home for them. We should pay attention to what actually happens, not the words being said.
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Everything is a plan within a plan. Most of what we are told is not what is going on. You need to think levels deeper than you are. Start with this, assume that DJT is hyper intelligent (I know it doesn’t seem that way but) how is he trying to trick or manipulate his target with what he presents. We should apply this to all people in power.
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Good advice. I personally think Trump is no genius but he’s street smart and he’s surrounded himself with a really smart team. Biden was surrounded by morons.
What I see is that the genocide stopped and the supplies started flowing into Gaza as soon as Biden lost power.
This may change for the worse, but so far Trump’s been a lot better for the Palestinians.
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A plausible explanation for the insane behavior of the UK regarding Ukraine, and the strange insistence by Trump that Ukraine give the US minerals it probably does not have.
UK is broke and needs collateral to refloat its banks. Apparently UK already has a mineral deal with Ukraine and plans to use this as collateral. Trump knows about this deal and just blew it up, maybe as payback for UK orchestrating the whole debacle including convincing Ukraine to walk away from the Istanbul agreement which would have maintained Ukraine’s territory rather than the path they are on now of losing everything.
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I don’t know if I’d go as far as peak oil spiritual leader of the world Andril Zvorygin, but this is a good example of how bad Canadian leaders are. They are literally morons.
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Haha!!
I keep trying to write a funny line about it, but it just ends up being misogynistic as hell.
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Already 90F/32C out here in the desert. February for fu#k’s sake. Should be 70F. This is more in line with how I think climate change will work. Not so much 130F world record hot days, but a bunch of days/nights where its 20+ degrees above the norm.
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I used to respect Bill Gates. Then I read RFK Jr’s books. Gates is possibly more evil than Fauci. The Epstein list will be released today. Fingers crossed for serious payback.
This is a short funny parody video of Bill Clinton making a statement before the Epstein list is released.
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I hate the way products are deliberately made hard to repair these days. I bought a very good quality battery operated bluetooth speaker 10 years ago for $150 and used it every day. It’s operating time recently became very short and I concluded its battery needed to be replaced. Being a good prepper I have spare 18650 batteries so I decided to attempt a repair.
The screws used to secure the case require a rare 5 star torx security bit with center hole. Nobody in town stocks it. So I ordered bits from AliExpress for $6, waited 2 months, and got a refund because my shipment was lost. Then I ordered bits from Amazon for $12 which arrived in a few days. I got the case apart to discover the battery was spot welded to a small charging circuit board making it very difficult to replace. I broke off the spot welds and attempted to solder directly to a new battery trying not to heat the battery too much so it did not explode on me. I was unable to make a good connection, gave up, and discarded the speaker.
All of this could have been avoided had the manufacturer simply used common screws and installed the battery with a clip. The speaker would have worked fine for another 50 years. Now it’s in a landfill plus I burned a lot of carbon buying tools needed to repair it that I will never use again.
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I’ve had a very similar experience, including having to buy a new screwdriver, while repairing a bluetooth speaker (old batteries and knackered charging port). I did manage to repair the thing, after much faffing. Contrast to, I have some bedsheets from my wife’s great grandmother; they are over a century old, and still in good condition (some repairs, some stains, but nothing I’m not happy to sleep on).
Simon.
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Yes, I love durable well designed things. One of my favorites are lowly plain white Corelle dishes. The design and color has been unchanged for 55 years. You can buy replacements or add to your collection from many local stores. The technology is unique and the manufacturing plant involves huge capital, machines, and energy that will not be possible in a post collapse world. That’s ok because the dishes never break and are super hard so show very little wear after years of daily use. They are thin, light weight, and stack efficiently making them perfect for small kitchens. Corelle sells plastic lids so the same bowl can be used to refrigerate/freeze food, heat it in the microwave, and eat from it.
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I’d never heard of those dishes, as they seem to be an American thing. Shame, they look nice. Here’s a video I found about their manufacture. Agreed that it’s hard to imagine such a capital-intensive process being around in a post fossil fuel world.
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I love that video and have watched it several times over the years. It’s a great example of what it takes to make some of the products we take for granted. I smile and am grateful every time I look at my collection of dishes.
What’s not shown in the video is that the plain white pattern has a huge selection of shapes and sizes of dishes. I’ll bet it’s the largest selection of any pattern from any manufacturer.
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Hopefully, peak oil means the end of planned obsolescence.
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Regarding whether Trump is playing to the crowd or actually trying to make a difference (I too think the latter), the Epstein release will be a good indication, I think.
“Alina Habba says she just met with Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, and DOES expect the “Epstein List” to come out today, describing it as “shocking”
Habba says she “absolutely” expects criminal charges to come as a result.”
https://xcancel.com/_/status/1895166339804762295
here’s to some (lots) of arrests.
Simon.
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I’m seeing some people who made a living for years by opposing the policies of the US government losing their minds over Trump. They are certain Trump is just as evil and are freaking out because they are losing subscribers who disagree. Beliefs are often determined by how someone makes a living. Examples include Canadian Prepper, Brian Berletic, J.J. Couey, and Larry Wilkerson.
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It is possible that Trump isn’t evil but just a grifter.
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Time will tell my friend. I think we are all traveling blind right now. But take solace in knowing that as individuals we can’t change things on the bigger playing field, we just don’t have any influence. So sit back and watch and try to see the game for that is what it is. I feel your discontent too.
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I was really surprised by Larry Wilkerson. He has been one of the most astute people on war that I follow and now he thinks Trump (Hegseth) is making the military into a white supremist evangelical coup (by Trump) supporting crowd. He is going down the same rabbit hole as Chris Hedges who sees Trump as an out and out Fascist. I don’t get that feeling from Trump – but I could be WRONG.
I don’t think Trump is intelligent or thinks outside his 1st grade bully mentality, he is just a semi smart narcissistic sociopath (like a lot of CEO’s).
AJ
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I noticed that too and agree. Trump has a strange super-power to make intelligent sane people go crazy. Sam Mitchell is another great example.
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FYI for anyone here that suffers from wheat intolerance. Dr. Bret Weinstein has had severe wheat intolerance since he was damaged a couple decades ago by a flu vaccine. He’s in Europe and is running an experiment with European wheat. So far he’s had no reaction and is enjoying bread for the first time in a long time.
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Interesting. I’ve heard about injuries from covid “vaccines”, but not run-of-the-mill flu vaccines.
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The adjuvants used in traditional vaccines like aluminum have not been properly tested and cause toxic reactions in some people.
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Yes I know people that had eaten seafood at the time of a vaccine injection and then developed an allergic reaction to seafood for the rest of their lives (so far).
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Adjuvants are deliberately toxic to irritate and wake up the immune system to build defenses against the target foreign protein in the vaccine. If there happen to be other foreign proteins present, like say wheat or seafood or peanuts, then you can end up with a lifetime allergy to that food. There was no such thing as peanut allergies or gluten intolerance when I was a kid.
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‘1.7 million’ Palestinians in Gaza? Trump’s statement raises questions about death toll
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559
On multiple occasions, Trump has referred to the population of Gaza as being 1.7-1.8 million. Is he mistaken or does his administration have intelligence suggesting that over 400,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza?
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Got this link from a commenter on Crazy Eddy’s blog.
Was staring at it for a few minutes. Got hypnotized. It never stops climbing. Nothing shocking, but if you’re into antinatalism, this breeding counter might drive you insane.
World Population Clock: 8.2 Billion People (LIVE, 2025) – Worldometer
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😮
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Global one child policy now!
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nice 😬.
Where’s that kill, stab and burn Bill Gates Emoji when you need it. 😁
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Hopefully, this website has a low enough profile that the spooks aren’t monitoring it.
I don’t want law enforcement kicking our doors in…
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Just having a few drinks and feeling it now.
I would just like to say that it would be nice to be sitting around a camp fire with all of you chatting and feeling an analog closeness instead of a digital connection but it is what it is. So cheers all and thank you for the constant comments and this community.
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Hanging out around a campfire would be very nice. I have no one in real-life to discuss un-Denial issues with, so I hang out here.
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Yikes! Change is in the air.
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I know this is taken out of context but Zelensky is collapse aware, ‘his’ country is literally being carved up in various methods by Russia and now the US. His commentary between 0:50 and 1:00 is prophetic of what is to come. ‘You (USA) don’t feel it now as you have nice big ocean but you will feel it in the future.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-meets-zelensky-says-minerals-deal-be-signed-today-will-use-ukraine-rare-earths
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20’s Civilization/Modernity is screwed.
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