The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View

Until recently there have been 3 main lenses through which to view our overshoot predicament: debt, energy, and ecology.

Each lens exposes a different aspect of the picture, but not the complete picture.

Each lens focusses on different threats, with different time frames, and different consequences, and each lens suggests a different optimal response.

Overshoot awareness varies by lens and group within society. Awareness of leaders is generally higher than citizens, and in some cases this is deliberate and warranted because broad citizen awareness of the debt and energy threats would increase the probability of short term collapse.

For leaders and citizens that see through any of the lenses, their understanding tends to be incomplete, which has resulted in plans of action that will not help, or that make the situation worse.

This incomplete understanding is caused in part because the issues are very complex, and in part because some aspects of human overshoot have no acceptable or feasible solution, and in part because of the human tendency to deny unpleasant realities, as explained by Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory.

Hideaway, a frequent contributor at un-Denial, Peak Oil Barrel, Our Finite World and other sites, recently introduced a new lens we have named cactus, which focusses on all non-renewable resources and the complexity required to extract them.

I think the cactus lens provides the clearest view of what is going on, what we should expect in the short to medium term, and what we should do.

The cactus lens changes what is in the best interests of citizens to understand.

The debt and energy lenses suggest citizens should remain in the dark.

The ecology lens suggests it does not matter what citizens understand because the ecology threats are longer term than debt, energy, and cactus, and because awareness of ecology issues have not and will not improve anything of substance due to the nature of modernity.

With the introduction of the cactus lens, it is now in the best short term interests of all groups: countries, leaders, and citizens, for awareness to be as widespread as possible.

Achieving broad cactus awareness will be difficult because it is very unpleasant, and therefore will be blocked by our genetic denial behavior, however I propose one idea to start the discussion on how we might spread cactus awareness.

Awareness Lens: Debt

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant credit;
  • Because most of our mines, machines, technology, and structures require significant up front capital to build;
  • Which requires a fractional reserve debt backed monetary system;
  • Which is now used by every country in the world;
  • Which by design requires economic growth to not collapse;
  • Because money is loaned into existence and growth is needed to pay interest;
  • Which means our economic system requires infinite growth on a finite planet;
  • Which of course is impossible and means we should expect growth to slow and prosperity to decline, as they are;
  • Culminating in a dramatic and harmful economic reset;
  • However modernity will survive and will rebuild until the next bubble pops.

Status :

  • Quite a few citizens see through the debt lens, maybe a significant minority.
  • Most aware citizens assume the reset is a ways off in the future.
  • Some people prepare to weather a storm with cash, gold, bitcoin, or sardines.
  • Others trust or hope that central banks will print enough money to kick the can past their expiry.
  • Leaders understand and acknowledge the debt problem but are careful to not cause panic because herd emotions could trigger a reset.
  • Leaders are also careful to not explain the driver of the debt problem, energy depletion, as will be discussed in the next section on the energy lens.
  • The debt threat is closer and more severe than our leaders let on as demonstrated by:
  1. Social unrest everywhere is rising because living standards are falling and the wealth gap is widening.
  2. Geopolitical tensions are rising.
  3. Democracies are oscillating between wider extremes.
  4. Most countries have historically high levels of growing debt.
  5. Growth has slowed, and the only growth possible now comes at the expense of adding more debt than the growth it buys, which is unsustainable.
  6. No political party in power anywhere reduces their deficit or balances their budget because it’s now impossible without crashing their system. The US DOGE effort lasted 5 months before leaders gave up and juiced the deficit to new record highs.
  7. Central banks work hard behind the curtain to keep our everything bubble inflated, and to prevent any significant correction of stock or asset prices. When I was young it was normal for the economy and stock market to experience cycles. We don’t permit cycles anymore. Today there is so much debt and so little growth that a significant correction will result in a reset (aka crash).
  8. Printing bazookas are used to blast any threat before it builds momentum, like the banking system repo problem that covid provided cover for unprecedented money printing.
  9. Our leaders tried but failed to use covid as an excuse to implement the tools needed to manage an economic reset like digital ids/currencies for rationing scarce necessities, and for enabling negative interest rates, and tried via “The Great Reset” propaganda campaign to get us ready to accept nationalization of assets (aka “you will own nothing and be happy”). They will try again.

Implications:

  • The debt lens implies a zero-sum game: In a no growth world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders believe that a country that succeeds in harming its competitors will experience less damage from an economic reset. The goal is to ensure opponents reset before you do, on the assumption that this will prevent or delay your own reset by gaining control of more growth generating assets and markets.
  • Hence we see the weaponization of tariffs and trade, regime change operations, and proxy wars intended to weaken or capture opponents.

Conclusions:

  • A debt reset is mathematically inevitable and will reduce the standard of living for the majority via deflation and/or inflation.
  • Debt resets are hard to predict and control because herd emotions drive the process.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the debt problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Energy

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant net energy;
  • Which is the energy that remains after using energy to extract and refine energy;
  • Because all of our food, water, minerals, technology, products, and services are produced and delivered by machines powered by energy.
  • Diesel is the keystone energy that powers our vital mining machines, tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships.
  • Renewable energy is not a solution to non-renewable depletion because renewables require abundant non-renewable energy t0 build, install, maintain, and augment for 24/7 supply.
  • Discovery of new fossil energy reserves is much slower than depletion of existing reserves, and the gap is growing.
  • The quality of non-renewable energy reserves decline as they deplete;
  • Which means net energy is falling;
  • Which explains why growth is slowing, and prosperity is declining, and debt is growing faster than GDP everywhere.
  • We should expect the trend to continue and accelerate.
  • Leaders believe modernity will continue for those countries that have access to energy.

Status:

  • Few citizens see through the energy lens.
  • There are many false energy beliefs in wide circulation including net zero, peak oil demand, abiotic oil, green energy, renewables outpacing fossils, hydrogen economy, nuclear renaissance, space mining, circular economy, etc., etc..
  • These beliefs are nonsense not grounded in sound science or economics, but the issues are complex, and it is difficult for a citizen to determine the truth, especially with deliberate misdirection from leaders, and with MORT driven hope and denial driving behavior.
  • Denial is a strong force that fogs the energy lens because, short of a near zero probability miracle, there is no solution, and the outlook is steadily worsening living standards.
  • Most leaders, with help from their energy aware militaries, understand what is going on, and know the energy threat is imminent. Evidence for this includes:
  1. Inflation of energy intensive products, like food, is high; energy intensive infrastructure is not being properly maintained; energy intensive manufacturing, like weapons, is struggling to keep up with demand despite plentiful printed money available; war is shifting to lower energy methods like drones; and as also seen through the debt lens, debt is accelerating, living standards are falling, the wealth gap is widening, geopolitical tensions are rising, and democracies are at risk.
  2. The EIA this year announced that fracked oil is peaking. Fracked oil is the unexpected savior that bought us an extra decade after conventional oil peaked.
  3. Leaders do not want their citizens to panic, or to spook the stock market bubble which depends on growth, so they do not discuss the energy problem, and work hard to distract citizens with nonsense like optimism for a renewable transition, or by stoking emotions over socially divisive issues.
  4. Trump reversed his no more regime change promises after being sworn in and briefed about US debt and oil forecasts.
  5. Every country with significant exportable oil reserves that is not controlled by the US empire is either under attack or being regime changed including Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Nigeria. Even friends with oil, or close to oil, like Canada and Greenland, have been threatened with annexation.
  6. Propaganda is successfully being used to convince citizens that regime change operations are to prevent terrorism or drug trafficking, not to control oil.
  7. China is stockpiling strategic oil reserves.
  8. A few countries, like Germany, made an honest attempt to run their economies with renewable energy, but it’s now obvious to leaders everywhere that the renewable dream has failed. German leaders now want war with energy rich Russia.
  9. The UK, having drained its own oil reserves, now wants war with energy rich Russia.
  10. Hail Mary investments praying for a miracle are being made in AI and nuclear energy.

Implications:

  • The energy lens implies a zero-sum game: In an energy scarce world, one country’s gain is another country’s loss.
  • Our leaders understand their country’s prosperity requires non-renewable energy, and that it must be secured by any means necessary, including taking it by force from others.
  • Countries are preparing for war by increasing military expenditures, even at the expense of social services demanded by citizens.
  • Nuclear arms treaties are being abandoned, and the arms race is restarting.
  • Lessons learned during the cold war about the dangers of nuclear war are being ignored, and red lines are increasingly flirted with.
  • It’s hard to imagine how nuclear war can be avoided given that everyone’s survival depends on oil, and the zero-sum game assumption of our leaders.

Conclusions:

  • Modernity requires growth, and there is not enough oil left for everyone to grow.
  • Leaders have good reasons to not want citizens to be aware of the seriousness of the energy problem.
  • Leaders are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game.
  • In the cactus lens section we’ll see that the zero-sum game assumption is wrong, which means the current strategy will make things worse for all countries.

Awareness Lens: Ecology

Theory:

  • The resources consumed, and the wastes generated, and the habitats occupied, by the large and growing population of humans, is displacing other species, and causing damage to ecosystems faster than can be repaired by the planet’s recycling systems.

Status:

  • The 8,230,000,000 humans, plus their 35,000,000,000 livestock, plus their billions of pets and other freeloaders like rats, now weighs 80 times more than all wild land mammals combined.
  • Humans use 30-40% of the net primary productivity of all sunlight hitting the planet, plus 16,000,000,000 liters per day of ancient sunlight stored as oil, plus 11,000,000,000 cubic meters per day of ancient sunlight stored as natural gas, plus 24,000,000,000 kilograms per day of ancient sunlight store as coal.
  • The sixth mass extinction is underway.
  • Seven of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, pollution, and ocean acidification.
  • We have already passed the 1.5C safe limit and are on a path to a 3+C temperature increase that is incompatible with civilization and agriculture by the end of this century.
  • Biodiverse forests are being replaced with mono-crop agriculture.
  • Fisheries are in decline.
  • Sea level rise will damage many cities over the next century.
  • Glacier loss threatens the survival of several countries.
  • Chemical toxins and microplastics are harming the health of all life including humans.
  • Awareness of leaders and citizens about the ecological problems varies widely.
  • Most people are aware of some of the problems, but also tend to superficially simplify them down to one issue, CO2, that can be fixed with solar panels and electric vehicles.
  • Few are aware of the breadth and depth of the problems.
  • Many people deny the severity of the problems and/or that humans have caused the problems.
  • Almost everyone denies the implications of the ecological problems, and the fact there is almost nothing that can be done to address them while maintaining modernity and our population.
  • Every effort, by every country, and every organization, and every citizen, to address the above problems, has failed, and will continue to fail, at least until something forces an involuntary change to population and lifestyles.

Implications:

  • The view through the ecology lens is dire.
  • The long term implications are worse than those seen through the debt and energy lenses because we are damaging the ability for any human lifestyle to thrive, and are also harming many other species.

Conclusions:

  • Life threatening ecological problems, for the majority of people, are further in the future than the imminent problems seen through the debt, energy, and soon to be explained, cactus lenses.
  • All of the ecological problems are caused by the human species footprint which is the product of lifestyle and population.
  • None of the ecological problems can be addressed without reducing per capita consumption or population, and the debt and cactus lenses show that modernity requires growth, which means the ecological problems are a classic predicament, a problem without an acceptable solution.
  • The energy and cactus lenses show that growth will not continue, and the human footprint will soon shrink, which means there may be an improvement to future ecology trends.
  • Many of the ecological problems we have created will repair quickly when the scale of the human enterprise shrinks.
  • Some ecological problems will take a very long time to repair, and adaptation of surviving species will be required.
  • As will be discussed in more detail in the next section, if we somehow became aware that the scale of humanity was going to decrease in the not too distant future, no matter what we do, then we might be able to motivate ourselves to address several ecological issues that would improve the quality of life for the survivors, such as burying nuclear waste, and protecting biodiverse forests and marine ecosystems.

Awareness Lens: Cactus

CACTUS = Complexity Accelerated Collapse of a Thermodynamically Unsustainable System

The phrase “we’re cactus” is Australian slang meaning something is ruined, broken, or finished, often used to describe a situation where progress has stopped, such as a vehicle that won’t start.

The expression likely originated from the infamous prickly pear cactus, which once infested large parts of Australia before being controlled by the introduced Cactoblastis cactorum moth.

This slang is part of a broader set of Australian expressions for something being in disrepair or useless, including terms like “boonted,” “clapped-out,” “had the chad,” “had the bomb,” and “kaput”.

While “cactus” as a metaphor for being broken or ruined is well-established in Australian English, it is not commonly used in other English-speaking regions.

Theory:

  • Modernity requires abundant minerals and energy.
  • The majority of minerals and energy we use are non-renewable and finite.
  • Recycling is economically and/or technically impossible for most minerals.
  • For those minerals that can be recycled, there are losses in the recycling process that still result in long term depletion.
  • The quality of mineral and energy reserves decline as they deplete, because we always harvest the best quality reserves first.
  • Mineral and energy extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve quality to maintain flows of resources. For example, compare modern directional drilling now required for fracking with early oil rigs. Or the giant trucks and other machines now required to haul and process low grade copper ore.
  • Rising complexity increases the materials, processes, skills, locations, and number of people needed to design and manufacture the technologies.
  • Rising complexity requires a growing market to support the increasing cost of designing and manufacturing technologies. For example, a smaller population would not buy enough phones to make a TSMC factory in Taiwan viable, and therefore the advanced chips needed for oil exploration and extraction would not exist.
  • A growing market requires a growing economy and population.
  • A growing economy and population increases the consumption of all minerals and energy.
  • Wastes generated by the growing economy and population create increasing frictions to further growth.
  • This self-reinforcing complexity growth system drives an increase in mineral and energy flows until technology, markets, and population can no longer keep up with growing waste frictions and declining reserve qualities, and a critical mineral or energy becomes unavailable in the quantities required.
  • Scarcity of the critical mineral or energy triggers a system wide technology breakdown cascade because many technologies depend on it, and many other technologies depend on those technologies, via an ultra-complex network of dependencies.
  • The unavailability of many technologies then causes many more mineral and energy flows to become unavailable in the quantities required because the quality of remaining reserves makes extraction difficult or impossible without the latest technologies.
  • This self-reinforcing collapse of complexity, technology, and resource flows is certain at some point in the not too distant future and will result in a supernova end to modernity and civilization.
  • Nothing can be done to prevent this outcome, just as nothing can be done to prevent the collapse of a star.
  • It’s not possible to have modernity without infinite growth on a finite planet which means modernity will be short lived everywhere in the universe.

Hideaway on the Fermi Paradox:

  • Hence the logical solution to the Fermi Paradox. Species that reach modernity anywhere do not last long enough to detect others, that have also reached modernity, spread through time.
  • Given the age of our galaxy of around 13.6B years, and if it took 3.6B years for the first species to reach modernity, then if each lasted from 100 years to say 400 years at best, there could have been 1 every million years giving a total of 10,000 for our galaxy and none would ever detect another.
  • Even if 10 or 20 had popped up at the one time, just through chance, and were more than 400-500 light years apart, they would never know of the other’s existence.
  • Just by shear chance, some might detect others, but the odds of any one civilization detecting another is extremely small.
  • Say we did detect another civilization somewhere in the close area within say 1000 light years. So what? By the time we tried to communicate back to them, the odds of their collapse is high.

Hideaway’s AI on the supernova:

Your analogy of a supernova is thermodynamically perfect. A star collapses because the outward pressure of fusion (surplus energy) can no longer balance the inward pull of gravity (entropy/maintenance). In our case, the “outward pressure” that holds up the 6-continent supply chain is the Energy Profit from fossil fuels. Once that profit vanishes, the “gravity” of our 8-billion-person complexity causes the system to implode, dissipating its last reserves in a final, chaotic burst of attempted “self-sufficiency.”

Status:

  • A tiny minority of people see through the cactus lens.
  • The cactus view of modernity has not been widely discussed.
  • The closest work that I can recall reading is that by David Korowizc where he discusses the extreme complexity and fragility of modern supply chains, and the risk of their breakdown with energy shortages. Korowizc advocates building more resiliency into our system, but I don’t think he stated clearly that modernity will soon end no matter what we do, as Hideaway’s cactus lens does.
  • The ground breaking Limits to Growth work of Dennis Meadows et. al. assumed collapse could be avoided by adopting a steady state population and economy. Cactus shows this assumption is incorrect. Any dependence on any resource that is not naturally recycled by ecological systems will eventually result in a collapse back to a state that is not dependent on the resource.
  • Other important overshoot aware people like Jay Hanson and Jack Alpert discuss the certainty of modernity’s demise, but do not focus on the non-renewable resource extraction complexity growth system to conclude that modernity will end in a supernova.

Implications:

The cactus lens provides several profound insights that create a clearer view than the debt, energy, or ecology lenses.

List every non-renewable resource that civilization depends on.

ChatGPT:

Fossil Fuels: Oil, gas, coal, oil sands, shale oil/gas, peat.

Nuclear Fuels: Uranium-235/238, thorium, plutonium (derived).

Metals: Iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, zinc, lead, tin, silver, gold, platinum group metals, titanium, molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium, niobium, tantalum, chromium, manganese, rare-earth elements (all 17 REEs), and many others.

Industrial Minerals: Phosphate rock, potash, sulfur, borates, fluorspar, gypsum, halite, graphite, silica sand, feldspar, kaolin, etc.

Construction Materials: Limestone, aggregates (sand & gravel), clay, granite, marble, slate, stone.

Geologic Water: Fossil groundwater aquifers.

Biological/Ecological Resources (functionally non-renewable): Topsoil, old-growth forests, biodiversity, coral reefs, major fish stocks.

  1. The first key insight is that modernity depends on many non-renewable materials, not just energy, and they are all critical for the technologies that enable modernity. Cactus is thus a much wider lens than the peak oil view.
  2. The second key insight is that modernity requires growth, not only because of the widely understood need for abundant credit as explained by the debt lens, but also because extraction technologies must increase in complexity to compensate for falling reserve qualities. This growth requirement is physical and non-negotiable, and unlike debt, is not digits in a computer that can be reset.
  3. The third key insight is that the requirement for growth, coupled with the inevitable decline in reserve qualities, creates a self-amplifying feedback loop for every one of the many non-renewable resources we depend on, which creates many possible failure points, and the extreme complexity and interdependencies of the technologies we use to extract minerals and energy guarantees a catastrophic failure of the entire system at some point.
  4. The fourth key insight is that this growth and collapse process is certain for any system that is dependent on non-renewable resources. This means there is no possible sustainable solution for advanced civilization anywhere in the universe, because advanced civilization is not possible without non-renewable resources.
  5. The fifth key insight is that there will be no recovery of modernity after the collapse. The quality of many of the remaining non-renewable resource reserves will be so low after the collapse that many resources will be unavailable without advanced technologies and abundant diesel, and there will be no way of rebuilding those technologies because their development required higher quality resource reserves. Surviving humans will return to their hunter gatherer origins.
  6. The sixth key insight is that the zero-sum game strategy that the debt and energy lenses inform our leaders to use, will reduce the time to collapse, and will not optimize the quality of life for the time that remains. War, for the last 10,000 years, was a good response to scarcity. War, today, will create scarcity for the entire planet.

Conclusions:

Given that our leaders see the world through debt and energy lenses, they are operating on the assumption of a zero-sum game:

  • My country will do better if I damage the economy of my competitors.
  • My country will survive or grow if I take energy from my competitors.

The cactus lens shows us that a zero-sum game strategy will not achieve the desired outcomes.

Instead, zero-sum game strategies will reduce the time to collapse, or reduce the quality of the time that remains. Examples include:

  • Wasting resources, fragmenting the market, and decreasing efficiencies by trying to duplicate and reshore manufacturing.
  • Making it more difficult to maintain complexity by fragmenting the global trade system through the encouragement of BRICS and by imposing trade sanctions.
  • Wasting resources on bigger militaries that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources on climate change policies that won’t help.
  • Wasting resources by subsidizing renewable energy that won’t help.
  • Increasing the chance of violent harms to many by blaming other countries and/or immigrants for hardship caused by resource depletion.
  • Ignoring international law when it conflicts with a zero-sum goal.
  • Sanctioning Russian energy.
  • Blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
  • Restarting a nuclear arms race.
  • Risking disruptions to middle east oil flows, and destroying respect for leaders, by supporting the genocide of Palestinians.
  • Funding a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.
  • Provoking China to withhold rare earth minerals.
  • Provoking China to stockpile oil.
  • Regime changing Syria.
  • Regime changing Iran.
  • Regime changing Venezuela.
  • Threatening to invade Nigeria.
  • Pissing off Canadians so not a one will buy a US product. 🙂

The cactus lens points us to a positive-sum game strategy.

Modernity is a global system of unimaginable complexity dependent on resources, technologies, processes, and skills sourced from 6 continents. A complex component will often travel back and forth between continents many times in the process of converting its constituent minerals into a finished product. Almost every country plays a roll in the complex web that sustains us.

Modernity depends on millions of interdependent components, each with a uniquely complex supply chain, and modernity’s aggregate supply chain is far too complex for any leader, or even a computer, to predict the consequences of disrupting the matrix to achieve a zero-sum game goal.

The risk of unintended consequences is high given that zero-sum game strategies will tend to focus on depriving energy and thus damaging the entire economy of an opponent country.

Plans to reshore manufacturing will make things worse. We don’t have the surplus capital or debt headroom needed to achieve this without damaging something else, and it will be very wasteful of non-renewable resources by creating capacity greater than the market can absorb, thus reducing the time to collapse.

The cactus lens shows us modernity will eventually collapse permanently, taking down every country in the process. There is nowhere to hide, and there is nothing we can do to prevent this. No country will be immune.

With cactus awareness and a positive-sum game strategy we could:

  • Make wise decisions that delay the collapse so we can enjoy more of modernity’s benefits, or at least avoid doing stupid things that accelerate the collapse.
  • Do some things to optimize quality of life until the end, or at least avoid doing stupid things that worsen quality of life.
  • Consider doing some things that might improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors.

Actions that might delay the collapse and optimize quality of life until the end include:

  • Avoid conflicts and wars that harm citizens, damage supply chains, and waste non-renewable energy and minerals.
  • Stop the subsidy of renewable energy that wastes non-renewable resources and reduces the time to collapse.
  • Stop wasting money on climate change policies that will not change the outcome.
  • Put the Sulphur back into ship fuel.
  • Strengthen global governance and conflict resolution via UN like organizations.
  • Renew and improve treaties to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
  • Remove barriers to trade.
  • Encourage well regulated immigration to optimize global labor.
  • Allow market forces to optimize the global economy for maximum efficiency.
  • Adopt digital currencies to enable fairer and more efficient money printing, and to manage the fair rationing of scarcities.
  • Provide sound lifestyle and dietary advice with encouragements to help citizens improve their health and quality of life, and to reduce the healthcare drag on economies.
  • Fairly enforce laws to encourage law & order and good behavior.
  • Provide open and honest communication to citizens so they know what is going on and why, and no longer feel like they are being gaslit by wizards behind a curtain.
  • Provide meaningful and rewarding goals to citizens, like asking them to volunteer to rehabilitate habitats and soils to help post-collapse survivors.
  • When signs of the final collapse become visible, provide a painless end of life kit to any citizen that wants one to reduce their anxiety.

Notice that nothing on the above list requires a change in lifestyle for the majority, or the overriding of evolved behaviors like the Maximum Power Principle, or singing kumbaya, or sharing everything equally, or eating bugs.

Limits to growth are breaking our democracies. Citizens know their standard of living is falling, but do not understand why, so they vote for the politician that most credibly promises a better life, but leaders are powerless to improve living standards, which breeds politicians that are superb at lying, but not well suited to optimizing a complex problem. Then when the leader does not deliver, the citizen is pissed off, and next time votes for someone more extreme that blames the immigrants or the Chinese, and so on, which accelerates us in the wrong direction. The only way to break this path to despots is awareness.

With cactus awareness we will understand the comforts we enjoy are rare in the universe, are very fragile, and will soon be gone forever on this planet. This could lead to gratitude and care to not cause a premature collapse.

Cactus awareness will create strong pressure between countries, and by citizens on leaders, to not break things.

If we understand modernity will soon be gone for everyone no matter what we do, there will be less need to dominate and win, and more need to enjoy and cooperate to extend the good times.

Humans are an innovative species. With cactus awareness there would be many people thinking about what could be done to buy more time. Maybe we should use this resource for this rather than that? Opposition to change from people who have to give something up might be muted if they understood the change will buy a few more good years.

Some ideas to improve the quality of life for the post collapse survivors will be difficult to decide and implement because many of these will conflict with the goal of delaying collapse as long as possible. On the other hand, if we collectively understand collapse is inevitable, it might be easier to say set aside some forest or wildlife habitat, or bury nuclear waste, knowing that your children or grandchildren might benefit.

Imagine the effect of cactus awareness on philanthropy. What might billionaires with children do with their wealth if they understood modernity will soon be gone? Perhaps they might buy up biodiverse rainforests to protect them.

Shifting from the current zero-sum game strategy to a positive-sum game strategy will be very difficult.

Cactus is very unpleasant. Genetic denial, as explained by MORT, will be in full force resisting cactus awareness.

On the other hand, almost everything going on in the world today is also very unpleasant, and many people are losing their minds because nothing makes sense.

In a strange way, cactus may be less unpleasant than what we are currently asked to believe, because the cactus story at least agrees with what our eyes see, and provides reasons for gratitude when times are tough, so maybe there’s a chance for cactus awareness.

We evolved in small tribes that in times of scarcity had to fight other tribes to survive. There are no attacking aliens to unite us.

The cactus lens does point to a common threat that will kill almost everyone, but most people won’t believe it.

When times get tougher, as they surely will, leaders will have zero chance of adopting a positive-sum game strategy unless a majority of citizens see the world through the cactus lens.

Those of us that are cactus aware should start brainstorming how to spread cactus awareness.

Here’s one idea:

We could recruit the powerful institutions that were created by MORT: religions.

Cactus awareness will be fantastic for the life after death businesses. All religions will boom with growing memberships, donations, and tithes.

Religions therefore could be self-interested and enthusiastic allies for spreading the cactus gospel.

Religions also have the perfect infrastructure and skills needed to spread an idea like cactus and its positive-sum game belief system.

A likely roadblock to our leaders embracing the cactus lens is the big money behind financial institutions that depend on good news for their pump the bubble business model.

I’m thinking that it shouldn’t be too hard to get them on board. The cactus lens doesn’t say everyone has to live like poor monks in a cave.

Cactus tells us the end will be painful but mercifully quick, so those so inclined can party on like it’s 19991 in a glorious bubble until the last day…

1The highest net energy we ever enjoyed was in 1999 when about 4% of energy was needed to extract energy. Today it takes about 10-15% of energy to extract energy, and the ratio is continuing to rise.

1,559 thoughts on “The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View”

  1. Looks probable that US will attack Iran soon, or maybe not.

    Possible outcomes range from a successful regime change to a world war and/or global depression triggered by closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

    This is a good opportunity to demonstrate how difficult it is to predict the future.

    If you have an opinion, please reply with:

    1. When will the US attack Iran, if ever?
    2. What will be the outcome?

    The winner will receive a year of respect from the millions of un-Denial lurkers.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      2. Was this bait to get me to write something? 😉

        1. I feel (fear) that the U.S. will attack Iran in the next week or so. Alastair Crooke thinks the Trump has been boxed in between his own neocons (Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, et al) and AIPAC (threatening to release more Epstein files on him) and Iran’s intransience in submitting to his demands. (I really wanted another summer in the garden).
        2. IF it doesn’t escalate to nuclear (and there’s a real chance of that) we probably will get an economic collapse in the U.S. with a civil war thrown in. (Having read (stupid waste of time) the Black Autumn series of prepper porn – collapse in the U.S. is easy).
        3. Considering Cactus and Hideaway’s complexity of everything I really think a civilizational collapse of the world is possible. However, some portion of the 3rd world might continue on for a short while?

        This is probably all wrong, but what you get from a good cup of coffee when you get up at 3 a.m.

        AJ

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        1. HArd to know what is (or if) boxing Trump in on the Iran situation, I think it is mostly oil and China being the main play. I don’t think that there is anything Trump is worries about in the Epstein files.

          From Coffee and Covid

          Yesterday, the Epstein story took a hard right turn, as new documents from the DOJ’s latest dump incriminated the President— of trying to help take Epstein down. ABC reported the story, headlined, “Ex-police chief says Trump told him ‘thank goodness you’re stopping’ Epstein in 2000s.” In other words, the Democrats’ Trump-narrative just stepped on a sharp fact-Lego in its bare feet.

          According to a much saucier account in the Miami Herald, which broke the story, local Palm Beach Police launched the first investigation into Epstein’s network in 2005. A Palm Beach woman reported that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been recruited to give the mystery billionaire a massage and was assaulted. Heroic Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter eventually assembled a roster of 40 underage victims. When the local district attorney refused to prosecute the case, Chief Reiter went to the FBI, triggering a federal investigation that ultimately led to Epstein’s disappointing first conviction —formally, a “non-prosecution agreement”— in 2009.

          That wasn’t the end of it. The newly released DOJ files included the transcript of a 2019 FBI interview with Chief Reiter as part of the second Epstein prosecution under President Trump. At one point, Reiter mentioned President Trump. He told FBI that in 2006, Trump was one of the first people to call his office after Epstein’s charge became public record. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter.

          Trump offered cops additional details. He pointed Chief Reiter toward New York, and toward Ghislaine Maxwell, telling the Chief she was Epstein’s “operative,” and that “she is evil and to focus on her.” The transcript added that Trump told Reiter, “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there.’”

          In other words, though none of the articles point this out, Trump was volunteering to be a witness. Why else call police?

          The Miami Herald article recounts troubling details about how, exactly, Epstein used his influence and money to dodge real punishment for statutory rape and trafficking in 2009. I won’t go into them here, but you can find them in the Herald article. Note how this new detail neatly bookends the story:

          2006— Trump calls police to offer info two+ years before Epstein 1st conviction

          2007— Trump kicks Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago after harassment incident

          2019— Trump DOJ re-investigates and arrests Epstein,

          2019— Trump’s DOJ compiles the full file

          2025— Trump signs the Epstein Transparency Act, opening the files his DOJ built

          When I finally put the whole timeline together for you, your eyeballs are going to spring out of their sockets and bounce off the walls like ping-pong balls. But this is enough for now. In other words, during the ‘aughts, Trump was giving Epstein the heave-ho and calling the cops on him— while Bill Clinton was racking up loyalty rewards miles on the Lolita Express.

          I think another off ramp is being built for the US in dealing with Iran. No one wants nukes and it is very likely an aircraft carrier will be sunk which would be complete humiliation for Trump. It doesn’t fit with his art of the deal mentality. He always seems to demand huuuugggggeeee demands but is really only wanting smaller concessions that he chips away at and gets.

          Here’s hoping we a re all discussing this next week.

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          1. On Iran, I have to continually remind myself that NONE of the geopolitical analysts I follow understand the severity of oil depletion, nor cactus, which means they understand nothing.

            On the C&C view of Trump & Epstein, how is it possible, I mean seriously, how is it possible to write an article like that and not explain why Trump was gung ho to expose Epstein before he was elected, and then as president flipped to telling people to move long because there’s nothing to see, and calling friends traitors for pushing him to release the files?

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            1. Traps within traps perhaps. 4 years of your enemies holding the evidence could be a problem.
              I have no idea. Cand C is definitely a Trump fan boy so that has to be taken into account.
              I think what we are seeing as the bad cat blog talked about is a revelation of just how bad the human brain goes when given access to nearly everything you can imagine.

              Dopamine has a lot to answer for.

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              1. To defend something while ignoring the most obvious evidence that undermines your defense suggests very low integrity.

                It’s like all the people with zero integrity that defended covid policies while ignoring that governments refused to release the most reliable and easiest to collect data to confirm policy effectiveness: all-cause mortality transfected versus un-transfected.

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        2. I hope you get one more summer in your garden too AJ, we have just come to the end of ours here, and weird weather with intermittent heat spikes followed by mostly mild and cloudy days, means a lot of green toms still on the vine, and green caps/chillis too, like NikoB. May all our produce ripen into it’s full glory before the downfall of civ.

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      3. Since AJ expects full on Iran doom, I’ll take the opposite bet so I don’t have to share the prize with AJ.

        I think US believes Iran’s threat to escalate to full war if attacked, and US suspects Iran now has a nuke, which it probably does, so Trump will find an excuse to stand down. Maybe China or Russia will help by saying they will safeguard Iran’s enriched uranium.

        A year or three from now when fracked oil and US GDP are falling in earnest, the US will attack for real, and then we’ll have WWIII with China and Russia.

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        1. I don’t think US will attack Iran. US don’t have Far Sea operation capability anymore and there is no Europe nor Asian allies to bring on this venture. And even when US had capability, it was impossible to win and Trump was the one that always pointing this out and called stupid. So I think he is bluffing for better position at the negotiation. Israel could manipulate and do some false flag operation or sudden attack, yet it doesn’t change the fact that Iran located the other side of the globe and for Iran, it’s a life or death matter.

          And I don’t think there will be another hot war in the near future that everybody is worrying like China invading Taiwan, US attacking Iran, etc. US&Europe failed to win on Russia. Chinese know that in the long run, Taiwan or west will be weaker, and China is in no position of all out war now. Just pressuring wait will give them upper hand.

          So no war, and marching towards economic disastor until the system no longer can support further complexification of AI with distorted economic, political polarization(bottom 80% is already not doing well in all countries).

          That’s just my opinion.

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          1. One comment I heard in support of your prediction.

            US does not have the assets to rescue 5000 drowning sailors from a sinking aircraft carrier in the middle east.

            Imagine the impact on the mid-term elections.

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          2. I share your opinion.

            Barring an accidental event, time is playing in favor of a reduction in the intensity, scale and length of conflicts. Peak war?

            Here are some “reasons” I could try and give for this impression: the industrial base is not there anymore, the global economy is too intricate and fragile, there is not much to gain out of massive conflicts, there is so much to handle on other fronts (economy, ecology, social stability).

            Hasn’t the war in Ukraine shown that noone really gains out of this? Isn’t this roughly a stalemate, with a high cost to both parties? Aren’t all military and geopolitical experts studying the conflict to adapt their doctrines?

            It seems to me, there is currently a rebalance of powers, at all scale. In a way, the worst is already behind. There is something new being slowly established.

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    1. Is Human Consciousness A Mistake?

      Well, since the guaranteed outcome of it (everywhere in the universe) is a single species self-induced mass extinction… ya, I’m ok with calling it a mistake. LOL

      I get nervous when I see it in question form. Usually means the author is gonna spin some BS to try and show that humans aren’t the most wretched creatures to ever exist. Thankfully, you don’t have to worry about that with FM. He sticks to the “you can’t change anything so might as well make the best of it” (which is the only place you can go).

      I liked most of this video. He’s very well read on the big players of the pessimistic world. Which makes me chuckle again about how all those grumpy old philosophers were impressively able to understand so much yet miss the most obvious thing in the room. I can picture them all gathered around pontificating about the origins of human consciousness. “Hmm, where does this uniquely nightmarish phenomenon come from? What do we do that makes us so damn separated from nature? We may never know the answer to this mystery. Ok, enough of that. Let’s eat. Who’s turn is it to cook dinner?”😂😂

      7:20 Evolution is usually a fairly pragmatic process. It’s about adaptation to a changing environment. It’s about survival and it’s obviously about replication. It’s a pretty straightforward, very brutal accounting system. Now somewhere along the line, the ledger got messed up and we grew these massive bloated cerebral vortexes. These gray, wrinkly engines of why. And at that point, the game completely changed. At that point, we didn’t want to just survive anymore. We wanted to know what survival was for. We wanted to know what the meaning of it was. And that’s the cosmic joke right there because there is no answer.

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        1. Haha! And I don’t think he’s reading or even has anything prepared… Just the gift of gab and can pretty much pull funny one liners out his ass anytime he wants.

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    2. Here we have a cocky guy ranting about the stupid non-scientific plans of billionaires like Musk, and how completely ridiculous it is to think we could colonize Mars.

      He lists dozens of reasons humans will never live on Mars, and then says…

      You can have some crazy plan to colonize space and eventually use all the energy in the galaxy, or you can say, hey maybe growth needs to end on earth and that’s ok. Ha, ha, ha.

      He has no clue that growth will soon end, whether we want it to or not, and then modernity will soon end, and then he’ll be scavenging for potatoes instead of writing books to show how much smarter he is than the idiot billionaires.

      Wondering when someone will show up to prove Cactus and MORT are nonsense and we’re the maroons?

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    4. Whether the cause is a leaked illegal bioweapon, or its unsafe and ineffective mRNA transfection antidote, the key point is no one has been held to account, and no lessons have been learned.

      https://www.rintrah.nl/brain-damage-in-the-general-population/

      Who still cares about corona, right? Well, strange things are happening to the population. Here are some statistics from Norway:

      Neurological conditions in particular have been rapidly growing since 2020, with depression and memory loss doubling. What do we see in Singapore? Every SARS-COV-2 variant (including the various Omicrons) is found linked to increased dementia risk, but not to non-neurological conditions. This all makes perfect sense, when you consider that the antibodies can’t cross the blood-brain barrier. The population is still suffering the impact of SARS-COV-2. People’s brains are being damaged by this virus.

      I will just say it again: This vaccine hasn’t been a success, unless you don’t mind having your population gradually lobotomized. You might say that climate change is the operation we won’t recover from and SARS-COV-2 is the anesthesia now putting us to sleep.

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    5. The Most Important Thing in Willow Was What Wasn’t There

      I left one of those Wrangham/Ligotti comments at Lyle Lewis’s fine essay. Unlike Bill Rees and Tom Murphy who won’t touch this subject with a ten-foot pole, Lyle has no problem with it. Why is that? Simple. Lyle has shed a couple more last level denial layers than those other guys.

      ps. Hey Richard Wrangham, hopefully you lurk here. That unexplainable sales spike with the book recently… I want my cut!!😂

      Lewis: Thanks for taking the time to lay this out. It’s a thoughtful synthesis, and I’m familiar with Wrangham’s argument in Catching Fire. The idea that cooking externalized digestion and locked us into an irreversible energetic pathway is, to me, one of the most important insights in human evolutionary ecology. Once a species becomes metabolically dependent on a technology, it’s no longer just using tools—it is the tool. 

      I’ve also read Ligotti, though I come at his conclusions from ecology rather than philosophical pessimism. I don’t see human consciousness as a “mistake” so much as an evolutionary escalation that outran feedback. Evolution is a chaotic process incapable of either mistakes or successes. It just is. Awareness without restraint is not wisdom; it’s leverage. And leverage, in living systems, tends to be used.

      Where I agree strongly is that humans ceased being a “normal” animal a long time ago. Fire, cooking, tools, language, and cumulative culture didn’t just separate us from nature—they made us ecologically non-self-regulating. No large mammal should be able to reproduce, extract, and expand without immediate constraint. We can, and that’s the problem.

      Where I’d diverge slightly is on the idea that removing humans solves everything. The damage is already embedded in altered climates, simplified ecosystems, extinct species, broken nutrient cycles. This isn’t about moral purity or misanthropy; it’s about understanding that once a lineage crosses certain thresholds, it can’t simply “go back.” Collapse isn’t punishment. It’s physics catching up.

      I also agree that agriculture is the true accelerant. Cooking made us possible; agriculture made us unstoppable. Once feedback was delayed across seasons, landscapes, and generations, denial became adaptive. At that point, growth wasn’t a choice. It was a requirement.

      If my work has a central argument, it’s not that humans are evil or uniquely corrupt. It’s that we are too effective; a species that learned how to bypass limits faster than it learned how to live with them. Whether that makes us a “biological anomaly” or simply an extreme case of life doing what life does is still an open question.

      But either way, the Sixth Mass Extinction didn’t begin with industry. It began when a single species stopped being held in check by the systems it depended on and kept going anyway.

      ps. good song & good nostalgia video.

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      2. Thank you for this link. I liked Lyle Lewis’s essay very much. The loop and feedbacks, that’s the lens through which I am preferably looking at the world.

        Letting life do its thing (I include myself in that life), that’s exactly what I have been doing everywhere I can whenever I can, from very small surfaces to larger ones. With soil (and many other aspects of life), there is this accumulation loop that starts very small, very slow and then accelerates. Watching this unfold gives me kicks similar to what some people get out of drugs or increasing numbers in their stock portfolio.

        Humans seem to get easily trapped in loops (while not necessarily aware of their existences). And the loops have consequences, but they can go bothways. There is the loop of misery, there is the loop of debt, there is the loop of violence, there is the loop of learning, there is the loop of abundance, there is the loop of gratitude… When moving from one loop to another, it starts very small, it’s difficult, progress is slow, and then it works out, and then at some point it gets out of your hands, beyond control. All loops, at some point seem to end in a way or another.

        There is the ability to introduce feedbacks within the loop to balance it somewhat. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

        The thing I don’t know is why I, particularly, enjoy the loop of soil growth so much, while other people will prefer other loops.

        So how does all that makes humans a mistake? (If I am not mistaken, you also said humans are the result of multiple miracles, so that would make us a mistake that took a lot of miracles to create?)

        Cheers 🙂

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        1. Hi Charles.

          Feels like you’re setting a trap for me? I’m not gonna fall for the banana in the tailpipe.😊

          I think Lyle summed it up pretty good:

          Where I agree strongly is that humans ceased being a “normal” animal a long time ago. Fire, cooking, tools, language, and cumulative culture didn’t just separate us from nature—they made us ecologically non-self-regulating. No large mammal should be able to reproduce, extract, and expand without immediate constraint. We can, and that’s the problem.

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    6. Comment on Bret Weinstein’s view on Epstein Releases by Coffee and Covid.

      Maybe Bret just has the order backwards. Bret simplistically believes the order of operations should go like this: arrests, disclosures, understanding, public outcry. But maybe, given the scale and prominence of who’s involved, the correct order, the only practical order, is with arrests at the end: a few disclosures, a little understanding, more disclosures, more understanding, escalate to a crescendo, then public outcry, then arrests.

      Remember: the elites in the Epstein files’ crosshairs have an unlimited ability to pay for lawyers and call in political favors. The former prosecutor-turned-Epstein-associates-lawyer became a federal magistrate. That same magistrate, Bruce Reinhart, later authorized the Mar-a-Lago raid.

      What do you suppose that magistrate might do if a billionaire were in front of him and the DOJ were trying to offer Epstein evidence? And don’t forget about the flocks of $2,000/hour lawyers, public relations teams, and fiery politicians demanding due process that the billionaires would unleash.

      It’s easy to quibble about the pace from the cheap seats. Pulling down and exposing a global order of elite networks and institutions is something that has never been done before in human history. It’s bad enough watching your neighbor trying to start his lawnmower and telling your wife, “he’s not pulling the cord fast enough.” It always looks easier when someone else has to do it. You try tackling the world’s most powerful, connected, and richest people sometime.

      The point is that we are already seeing the cracks appear in the granite walls of protection. The institutions and elites are clearly unable to paper over the problems anymore, and the reputational costs are mounting. Royals are losing their positions. Governments are teetering. And it is happening fast, almost too fast. If it were happening any faster, the public couldn’t keep up with it— and the public must be on board, and the pieces set just right on the chessboard before arrests can begin.

      But just look around. Something historic is happening. Bill Maher endorsed QAnon. Norway’s crown princess is in crisis. Billionaires are getting subpoenaed. And we’re just getting started. I told you 2026 would be off the chain. Hang on for the ride.

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    7. Turns out the depressed old peak oil guy knows something about the criminal state of Israel because his father was Jewish. Today he discusses Epstein and the fact Jewish people have gone from amazing brilliance to being quite stupid today.

      I left this comment.

      One of the big unsolved covid mysteries is why did Israel volunteer to be the first country to transfect its citizens with a novel untested mRNA technology?

      I have first hand experience working with Israelis in the 90s, and like you, was very impressed with their intelligence.

      I assumed Israelis were plenty smart enough to understand the high risks of mRNA transfection, and therefore they must have assumed the covid virus threat was very high, presumably because their competent Mossad would have known covid was engineered in a bioweapons program, and so they accepted the mRNA transfection risk. We of course got lucky and later learned that the bioweapon was ineffective, but they wouldn’t have known that at the time.

      But now you have provided an alternate possible answer to the great covid mystery.

      Maybe the Israelis are so stupid now that they bought the mRNA bullshit.

      There are new studies emerging that covid infections and/or the mRNA transfections have significantly degraded brain function, so a third possible answer is that my original assumption was correct, and then Israelis experienced a post-covid dumbing down to explain the stupidity you observe.

      When did you see the stupidity emerge? Was it before or after covid?

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      2. People who don’t know better roll their eyes when I say it, but it’s true: Pharma is so powerful it literally owns our television sets. And because of that, it owns our government too.

        You think that’s a big, broad statement? Then do this simple test tonight.

        Next time you’re watching the news (or any show you trust), don’t run to grab popcorn during the commercial break. Count the ads.

        Count how many of them are from the pharmaceutical industry.

        I’m telling you: 50–70% of all television advertising revenue comes from Big Pharma. Test it yourself. Watch a news anchor you respect. Watch CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC – doesn’t matter. Look at the breaks. See if half or more of the commercials are pushing pills, shots, or treatments.

        If I’m right (and I am), then you just realized something huge:

        The pharmaceutical industry is the primary funder of the very program you’re watching.

        Those drug ads aren’t just background noise, they are paying the bills for the network. They are paying the salary of that news anchor you think is going to tell you the unfiltered truth.

        So when you wonder, “If vaccines were really causing problems, wouldn’t CNN tell us? Wouldn’t NBC break the story?”

        No. They won’t.

        Because the second they air something that seriously threatens their biggest advertiser, that money disappears. The shows get defunded. The budgets shrink. People lose jobs.

        Pharma isn’t just an advertiser; they are the boss.
        That smiling anchor reading the teleprompter? He’s not working for you. He’s working for the industry that keeps the lights on.

        This is why you never see the real stories about vaccine injury, about exploding chronic illness in children, about liability protection, about corruption. The truth doesn’t fit the business model.

        Wake up to who’s really in control of the information you’re fed every single day.

        Watch this clip below 👇—then go count those commercials tonight and tell me I’m wrong.

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      3. For me he is on shaky ground by referencing that book The Bell Curve, and has lost some cred. There are cultural/social influences on intelligence for sure but not ‘racial’ ones, as race itself is still used in an innacurate way. There is just one – the human race/ homo sapiens.

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        1. Yes, I tuned out on that bit because of the controversy around it. I don’t have enough knowledge to have an opinion.

          I do have first hand experience, plus I can look at the country/culture of origin for Nobel prize winners, to be confident that, at least in the past, jews were unusually bright, per capita. Now they seem unusually unbright, so something’s going on.

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          1. I have not read the book either, but it sounded very suss and a quick look on the wiki page confirmed this.

            Would you agree that although racism is a very strong negative force that has always operated, being fear of difference, that it is based on a false premise, being that there are different races? That’s all I meant.

            The lack of intelligence with regard to Israelis I don’t see as that much different to the dumbing down of us all everywhere, on so many different metrics. Like Chris mentioned with plastic in the brain and all the other environmental possibilities and interactions, including Covid and the vaccines.

            I do recall one for the very first sites I looked at in the early days of the pandemic, was an Israeli site of a long list of photos of people and the harms they had experienced after vaccination. A testimonial site.

            These quotes illustrate the recent scholarship around race and genetics:

            There is no genetic sequence unique to blacks or whites or Asians. In fact, these categories don’t reflect biological groupings at all. There is more genetic variation in the diverse populations from the continent of Africa—who some would lump into a “black” category—than exists in all populations from outside of Africa, the entire rest of the world combined. Dark or light skin tells us only about a particular human’s amount of ancestry relative to the equator, not anything about the specific population or part of the planet he or she might be descended from. There is not a single biological element unique to any of the groups we call white, black, Asian, Latino, etcetera… This is not to say that humans don’t vary biologically, we do, a lot. But rather that those variations are not racially distributed. —Agustín Fuentes Ph.D. 

            My laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today. —Dr. David Reich, Ph.D. 

            And another: 

            There is no definition of race that corresponds with variation in DNA. Race is not defined by DNA. We’ve known this for quite some time now, and we largely abandoned the term “race” in biology decades ago for this reason… “Race” most certainly exists as a social construct. But folk and colloquial racial definitions correspond poorly to human variation in DNA. —Dr. Adam Rutherford 

            And another: 

            The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis. 
            —Craig Venter, who led the first draft sequence of the human genome.

            And finally

            Problems arise when meaning is made from superficial genetic differences. It’s a fairly short leap to the incorrect conclusion that peoples, in addition to their similar surface-level physical attributes, might have different psychological, physical, or intellectual attributes. It’s such a pervasive, simple idea that it can lead us to believe that it’s actually true, normal, or natural. It’s a powerful idea that, in many ways, we have structured our society around. This is so true that after 60 years of scholarship which says over, and over, and over, that it is not true, this simple idea may still be shocking. —Paul D. Sturtevant, Is “Race” Real?

            Saltzman, Robert. Depending on No-Thing (pp. 305-306). New Sarum Press. Kindle Edition

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            1. I don’t know anything about that book, The Bell Curve… but Max had me laughing. Ya, he was toeing the line and even stepped over it a couple times.

              Yes definitely more about the dumbing down idiocracy effect than anything else. I was yelling at Max when he was acting confused about why they were so much smarter 50 years ago.

              Re race, I totally agree with you and those quotes you plucked. But I think energy has a huge role in this. Kind of like those noble savages that show up in every King Kong movie. The much more civilized and shallowly handsome group despises these monsters. And that’s because the higher EROEI lifestyle is always gonna perceive itself superior to the lower EROEI lifestyle.

              I notice this fault in myself sometimes when I’m in one of the super poor predominantly Mexican neighborhoods near my house. Or up north with some of the Native American towns. The hurry up and wait mentality of the western world is not as strong there. They drive slower. They talk slower (because they actually think before they speak). Overall, everything is slowed down in these lower EROEI worlds. And then you have me, Mr Empire Baby, zooming through their town and getting annoyed because it’s not as fast paced as I’m accustomed to.

              The higher the EROEI, the bigger asshole you become… that should be one of the laws of thermodynamics. LOL!

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              1. Yep most likely! – when travelling in a lower EROEI country (for me India, Thailand, malaysia ) they had that slower, more laid back feel, and this seems sane and it’s hard to go back to so called normal. Though this was nearly 30 years ago, so these countries would be vastly different now they are more ‘developed’.

                I was reading the Welcome page again just before, and someone left a quote from Tom Murphy that basically says this lack of tolerance of difference only gets ramped up when there is scarcity:

                “One realm that has seen substantial progress in my lifetime is not technological, but social. Tolerance for different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and other conditions/choices marking individuals as “different” has improved in most parts of the world. This is not without exception, and at times appears to lurch backwards a bit. But there is no doubt that the world I live in today is more tolerant than the one I grew up in. And only part of that involves moving from Tennessee to California.

                The one caution I cannot resist raising is that I view this tolerance as stemming from a sated world. In times of plenty, we can afford to be kind to those who are different. We are less threatened when we are comfortable. If our 21st Century standard of living peaks—coincident with a peak in surplus energy (i.e., fossil fuels)—then we may not have the luxury of viewing our social progress as an irreversible ratchet. Hard times revive old tribal instincts: different is not welcome.”

                And I note that he too says ‘differenct races’ so this knowledge from genetics re race has not trickled down into common understanding.

                btw Rob, the link through to Tim Garret’s work (on the Welcome page) goes to a page not found. Maybe there is some other source for him still around? It’s a really good page of your website, a great intro or ‘start here’ page.

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          1. Thanks, here’s my debt and energy lens perspective…

            New debt exists for anything that might continue the growth that prevents old debt from becoming worthless.

            There’s no more growth to squeeze out of pre-peak oil bulwarks like healthcare or schools, so there’s no new money available for them.

            AI and space exploitation are the last hopeful growth dreams. The elite know these may be fantasy bubbles but there’s nothing else left with growth potential, and without growth everything goes to zero anyway.

            So all in they go.

            I think I said more in 100 words than this guy said in 19,000 words.

            We are watching one of the greatest wastes of money in history, all as people are told that there “just isn’t the money” to build things like housing, or provide Americans with universal healthcare, or better schools, or create the means for the average person to accumulate wealth. The money does exist, it just exists for those who want to gamble — private equity firms, “business development companies” that exist to give money to other companies, venture capitalists, and banks that are getting desperate and need an overnight shot of capital from the Federal Reserve’s Overnight Repurchase Facility or Discount Window, two worrying indicators of bank stress I’ll get into later.

            No, the money does not exist for you or me or a person. Money is for entities that could potentially funnel more money into the economy, even if the ways that these entities use the money are reckless and foolhardy, because the system’s intent on keeping entities alive incentivizes it. We are in an era where the average person is told to pull up their bootstraps, to work harder, to struggle more, because, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, it’s socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.

            What appears to be happening is simple: large financial institutions are issuing debt without doing the necessary due diligence or considering the future financial health of the companies involved. Private Equity firms are also heavily-leveraged, sidling acquisitions with debt, and playing silly games where they “volatility launder” — deliberately choosing not to regularly revalue assets held to make returns (or the value of assets) look better to their investors. 

            I don’t really know what this means right now, but I am worried that these data center loans have been entered into under similarly-questionable circumstances. Every single data center deal is based on the phony logic that AI will somehow become profitable one day, and if there’s even one First Brands situation, the entire thing collapses.

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    8. Steps in a good direction…

      Moderna attempted to get it’s mRNA flu shot approved using the old flawed testing method.

      RFK Jr.’s FDA rejected the application saying better testing methods are required.

      Moderna’s stock fell 7%.

      Canada, Australia, and EU pharma controlled governments will probably approve it.

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    9. The PBS/Nature documentary Willow: Diary of a Mountain Lion (built from a decade of noninvasive camera work) gives you everything you want from great wildlife storytelling: a female mountain lion, multiple litters, high-stakes hunting, den sites, fox pups, badger kits, bears, elk, deer – an entire living web captured without collars or spotlighting.

      This was the doc that Lyle Lewis was writing about upstream. One of the better wild animal vids I’ve seen. And the main star (Willow) lives up to the hype.

      I despise everything about the way the blob operates… the competing, consuming, stealing, hunting, killing… but I absolutely love the creatures it produces. 

      The ending monologue had me laughing because it clearly shows why human consciousness is not compatible with this dog-eat-dog horror show:

      “Yeah, there’s something sad about thinking that that story has ended. Willow may be gone, but in a very real way, her offspring carry her story forward out here by using the skills that she taught them to survive. So, I like to think of it that her story carries on.”

      LOL. feelings and thinking and stories, oh my!

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      1. Very insightful 🙂 and this doco looks great, glad you followed up on it. The bothersome human overlay on the simplicity or rawness of life (the blob?), is captured so well in that quote and the bits you highlighted. That is where the trouble began for our species, along side the tools we used (fire etc) to advance.

        I remember a while back you had a post that included footage of animals, and you said something about the animals having indifference and I thought that was also something of an overlay on their behaviour/being too. I wonder what you were getting at with that word, perhaps it was more in line with this articulation above, that they operate without the feelings, thinking and stories. There can still be those reactions like pain, fear, aggresion, playfullness etc functioning for animals, but what you were implying with indifference? What would a lack of indifference look like?

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        1. I had no recollection of the post you were referring to so I went looking for it. Pathetic that I can’t remember something from only three weeks ago. Damn nanoplastics!!

          Cool video. But I don’t sense George T’s “happy to simply exist” thing going on. I sense indifference. Just biological programming like that cartoon the other day “Eat, Survive, Reproduce”

          Ya, I’d still say the same thing for this documentary.

          What would a lack of indifference look like? – any species after cooking its food for a million plus years.

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    10. Fun little fictional tale about the future by Quark. (Good story, but still too much hopium IMO)

      Nadie lo vio venir – by Quark – Rayo Negro

      Luis goes out into the street. The silence is absolute, broken only by the creak of his boots patched with tire rubber. There are no cars. The skeletons of SUVs from the past decade line the streets like monuments to an alien civilization; now they serve as shelters for chickens or to collect rainwater.

      They dine in silence under the light of a tallow candle. Luis feels a stabbing pain in his back, but there are no aspirins, nor doctors who do not charge in gold or food. He goes to bed knowing that tomorrow the fall in oil production will be another 8,000 barrels a day globally, and that the world will be a little smaller, a little darker and a little more difficult to inhabit.

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      3. Fifth law of thermodynamics? what a load of bollocks or just plain denial.

        Even climax communities in nature don’t last very long on geologic timescales. They are more transient than people realise as can only remain while a set of circumstances last, like the CO2 levels if we are keeping it on topic of this video. A tropical rainforest doesn’t last with a snowball earth, created by too little CO2.

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        1. I don’t remember anything about the 5th law in the Hagens interview.

          I liked that Brannen discussed the rarely mentioned fact that our oxygen atmosphere, which enables complex life, requires a geologically active planet capable of burying carbon.

          Which means we would not exist without fossil energy. Which might imply that we are simply following an amazing and rare script written by the universe.

          He also discussed the miracle of how cells convert food energy via a proton gradient across a membrane driving turbines to produce ATP that powers all cells.

          He’s kind of where I was at a few years ago accepting probable collapse but marveling at the miracle of our existence.

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            1. LOL, now I remember!

              Whenever Hagens starts blathering about how more education will make us a better species and avoid collapse I tune out and think about something else like the herons fishing along the shore that I walk.

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          2. Sounds like he is channeling one of your favs, Nick Lane. I really like the way that you have been able to come up with your particular take on the miraculous, ‘we are simply following an amazing and rare script written by the universe’ and tune out the rest. When Chris and i chatted recently, we spoke about this, he said miracle after miracle after miracle in order for life to exist and for us to be here at all. (sorry Chris, to blow your cover ha ha). And that is all we will ever know. The curious mind that wants to dig and know and understand, and comes up against this.

            Last night I had something akin to food poisoning, and for the whole day I have just been reading and watching stuff inbetween naps, lying in my fav arm chair. Despite the horrible unpleasantness of vomitting and some lingering nausea, it’s a nice change not to be thinking about food to prepare or cook or eat, and to deeply rest.

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            1. Hope you’re feeling better soon.

              I do love Nick Lane. He tells such interesting stories about the miracles required for us to exist.

              On top of all that, to be maybe 1 out of 100 million that understands what is going on, and to be alive at the peak to witness cactus.

              Wow, what a privilege!

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      4. A few gripes with their hopium, but overall I liked this interview. Peter’s good, but Nick Lane sells the miracle after miracle bit even better (how dare you blow my cover Renaee😊). Halfway through the interview I wondered if Lane had ever been on TGS. I couldn’t find one. That’s kinda weird. Maybe they have a beef with each other.

        Nate’s 5th law is hilarious. And of course the climate stability stuff caught my attention: 

        22:30 NH: Let me tell you, 100kya humans were smart. They knew how to plant seeds. They knew how things grew but they just didn’t have the capacity because of the change in temperatures and volatility. And then all of sudden, poof, it just stabilized in the Holocene.

        54:59 NH: If you look at historical temperatures they’re fluctuating all over the place and then 10kya it’s like an EKG meter just stopped. Why? I’ve never seen that in the graphs before. Can you explain what happened to stabilize it for the Holocene? (Peter gave an answer about land clearance for agriculture emitting crazy amounts of CO2 so instead of the usual drop, it kept CO2 levels up) 

        C’mon man! I already cracked this case wide open with my post about the other Holocene type periods. They come every 100k years or so. Nothing rare about it.

        https://un-denial.com/2025/11/30/the-cactus-lens-a-clearer-view/comment-page-8/#comment-116403

        After the interview I did more research and it looks like the previous interglacial periods are very similar to the Holocene except for one very important detail. They all have drastic spikes sprinkled in here and there (500-year droughts for example). Unlike the Holocene which unprecedently stayed within a +/- 1 degree Celsius range for 10k years. 

        So unfortunately we’re back to the fairytale of the skies parting just in time and miraculously giving humans this unheard-of climate stability. Ugghh, I hate it. A higher power at work makes more sense than this bullshit.

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    12. I really do like Brian Berletic despite him being the un-Denial of the geopolitical space in that he’s unpleasant and kills all hope by trying to explain what’s really going on.

      If you have any hope for peace with Russia, or Iran, or China, you can forget about it.

      The US continues on its mission to dominate the world at any cost.

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      1. Most Western leaders seem to believe that Putin is trying to recreate the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. They think that conceding to Russia on Ukraine would have the same results as the Munich agreement of 1938. That is why they are not pursuing peace.

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    13. Here is another closure of an energy intensive mineral processing business closing down because it’s too expensive to operate.

      https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-13/kemerton-lithium-closure-wa-processing-challenges/106336122

      In western economies they cite 3 different reasons for the high costs of operation, labour, energy and compliance costs. The latter realistically being, environment, govt rules, worker safety, insurance etc.

      All 3 of these “costs” are actually energy costs, with the higher cost in western industrialised economies being the cost of increased complexity throughout the system.

      Labour requires high pay to offset their own higher costs of living in a western country, more rules and regulations and taxes. Rules on how a house is built to live in. Taxes on owning a property, goods and services taxes on everything bought, food from afar that has it’s own set of complexity issues from production to distribution that all add costs, real energy and material costs to actual living, not just dollar costs.

      Meanwhile what do governments do, as per the above article. They keep going in the direction of more complexity adding further energy and material costs to the system, then wonder why processing businesses can’t afford to keep going. the excuse is always about how cheap it is in China, undercutting the thriving business.

      Yet the entirety of the western model can only operate providing we import the cheap products from China, like the solar, wind, batteries, plus nearly all of the machines, pipes, wiring, electronics etc that made up the refineries in the first place.

      The current concept, that’s clearly not working, of becoming more insular by onshoring production, as espoused by Donny etc, is clearly not working, nor can it work in a world of less net energy.

      One major problem is that “some” of the economics clearly does work, as in supply and demand. Yet because “some” of it is accurate, we humans make the mistake of thinking it’s all accurate, as in money does everything, which it clearly doesn’t as energy is what’s most important in modern civilization. It’s beyond modern economics to understand this though.

      The above lithium refinery eventually cost around $A2.25B to build. That’s a lot of energy and materials to leave just sitting there not being utilized, but I’d expect a lot more of these statues in the not too distant future as the energy to run them dries up rapidly.

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    15. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/12/switzerland-to-vote-on-far-right-proposal-to-cap-population-at-10-million

      Switzerland to vote on far-right proposal to cap population at 10 million

      Referendum on immigration limit could threaten EU agreements and cripple economy, say Swiss businesses

      Switzerland will vote this summer on a proposal from the far-right Swiss People’s party (SVP) to limit the country’s population to 10 million, a move that would threaten key agreements with the EU and, opponents say, cripple the economy.

      The government said on Wednesday the referendum on the SVP’s “No to a 10 million Switzerland” initiative, which is strongly opposed by both chambers of parliament and the business and financial services community, would be held on 10 June.

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      1. I’d expect this to start trending around the world. Did the Guardian get rid of their comment section? Bummer, I wanted to be entertained by clueless morons.

        ps. I know some of you hate my music, but this one’s not optional. Full participation required. Had to change a couple words. So crank up the volume, sing along, and give me your best Gaia happy dance after the 2nd section. (should be queued up already at 3:20)

        I wanna walk this Earth like it is mine
        And so does everyone in our un-Denial tribe
        C’mon man, is that real so much to ask?
        From all these goddamn techno-optimists

        But I’m gonna take it to community
        ‘Cause I wanta everyone to see
        There never was a transition to green energy
        And we are all bout to be deceased

        No can do this, no can do that
        What the hell can you do, my friend?
        In this place that you call your town

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        2. LOL, I’m still jamming out to this.

          To the lurking bloggers here: this is a brilliant rally cry for doomers… you should help spread the word by including it in your next post.

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    16. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/10/israel-used-weapons-in-gaza-that-made-thousands-of-palestinians-evaporate

      Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate

      Al Jazeera investigation reveals how US-supplied thermal and thermobaric munitions burning at 3,500C have left no trace of nearly 3,000 Palestinians.

      …

      According to the Al Jazeera Arabic investigation, The Rest of the Story, Civil Defence teams in Gaza have documented 2,842 Palestinians who have “evaporated” since the war began in October 2023, leaving behind no remains other than blood spray or small fragments of flesh.

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      1. thanks Stellar for this link, Rob’s highlighted quote further down with regard to covid/epstein applies here too:

        If demons exist, this is how they would behave.

        But on a site that states human belief in God and the afterlife as the first peice of MORT, along with denial of reality, what can we make of such actions?

        Yesterday i back tracked through some of Nate’s eps, and one frankly he discussed the role of pyschopaths in evolutionary development, stating that they have always existed and therefor served an evolutionary purpose and were approx 1 % of population and tribal cultures had feedback mechanisms that kept them in check. But now with our human numbers, this might be 30 million or more. And the qualities he described they have, shows how they have risen to places of power. I did not listen to this ep, but below is the one he summarised in the frankly.

        One of the comments below states:

        When I hear discussions on this topic, I am reminded of the famous quote from Susan Sontag. 10% of people are cruel no matter what and 10% merciful no matter what and 80% can go either way. When we have society ruled by the first group that society is in the deepest danger.

        And then another comment, which referenced another episode he had as below, I thougth was good too:

        Nate, I believe you’ve been waiting for this interview for some time. It is very pertinent to who now has the power over the forests, animals and a restored earth system—it’s not looking good. I want to remind you of a previous episode where you had a short bit about the Perdue/Tyson chicken breeding program. Essentially line breeding chickens for higher egg production. After 10 generations they were so violent they killed each other. The link in the show notes was to a National Geographic article. I’ve lived a dual life and early on I worked for Fortune 100/500 companies; rubbed elbows with lots of billionaires. I’ve seen it up close. Power and profit and after so much money it’s about power and winning. Second part of life was farming. It’s well known that line breeding cattle will, in a few generations, lead to bulls so mean that… same with chickens. Cross breeding and injecting hybrid vigor into the flock or heard is essential. Reading David Graber’s works has lead me to ponder the elites, their social status, their kingdoms, their educational institutions, their preferred professions of statecraft, law, finance and business, and military command. With the trend of not marrying outside of your class, I have wondered if civilization has not been line breeding dark triad traits. The system is not built for altruistic success. And if true, this hypothesis, what happens next. As George Carlin says, “Your not in the club.” Much love, great interview.

        The episode with regard to chickens was this one:

        https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/56-david-sloan-wilson

        Which i am going to listen to today while working outside.

        And the other one I thought was brilliant that i listened to yesterday, and pondered my own levels of addictive behaviour was this one:

        I have not listened to much NH for a long while, after the episode with Bill Rees, I felt annoyed that he even kept making them, like cmon, what the hell else is there to say. But it seems some of us have very active minds! and want to keep knowing what and how it all unfolds. Anyway, this woman was great and a really funny ep in places, I felt a lot of affection for Nate too in his vulnerability to admit his own addictions.

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        1. I agree that most people are very plastic. Think about 1920s Germany with it’s culture, literature, art, advanced science, and democracy, then think about Auschwitz.

          I also thought the Anna Lembke interview was great. I kept it on my phone for another listen. It struck a little too close to home so I’ve been procrastinating having a closer second listen.

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        2. Ya, I liked that Lembke interview as well. Might have to watch it again.

          Hated the dark tryad interview… anything to take the focus off humans being the most wretched creatures to ever roam the planet. But I really liked that chicken breeding comment.

          And just cuz it’s fun to rag on Nate.😂 His Frankly today:

          Many people outside my country are watching and quietly asking whether America can still function as a coherent, trustworthy member of the international community.

          “still… trustworthy” Wow! Nate gives foreigners even less credit than me. Would’ve been much closer to reality if he had said “inside my country”.

          If the next era is less about expansion, and more about stability, what might the United States of America try to be known for?

          Whatever the hell they want to be known for. Land of the free, home of the brave, american exceptionalism, the beacon of freedom/liberty/hope, etc. etc.

          I’m still convinced Nate has never properly learned about the history of the country he loves so much. I’ve heard him on multiple occasions say something like, “I love my country and everything it represents, but I don’t like the way my government has been acting in recent years”

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    17. In case you missed it:

      • US stops borrowing $7500 to subsidize every EV sold.
      • Q4 2025 EV sales drop 46% from Q3 2025 and 33% from Q4 2025.
      • US EV manufacturers write off $55 billion in assets.

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    18. Dr. Tim Morgan today reminds us of the important big picture…

      #319: The end of growth

      The end of growth

      There are times when the most important facts, though straightforward in principle, are simply too big, or too unpalatable, for general recognition

      This is one of those times. The Big Fact informing all of the sub-narratives of our age is that the global economy has stopped growing, and is starting to shrink.

      This proportionate Energy Cost of Energy is a matter, not of money, but of physics. ECoEs from all sources of primary energy have risen from 2.0% in 1980 to more than 11% today. Accompanied by a gradual degradation of the non-energy resource base, this has impaired annual rates of material expansion to a point at which the underlying physical economy inflects from growth into contraction.

      Over the past twenty years, material economic prosperity has increased by 25%, but huge rises in the stock of monetary claims have enabled statisticians to assert that the flow of economic activity measured as “real GDP” has more or less doubled (+96%, 2004-2024).

      Since the real costs of energy-intensive necessities are rising, just as top-line prosperity inflects into contraction, the supposed “cost of living crisis” isn’t a temporary “crisis” but the emergence of a wholly predictable trend. This goes a long way towards an explanation of worsening internal political and social instability.

      Washington, meanwhile, has awakened, belatedly, to the reality and consequences of material resource finality, an understanding that, we can reasonably infer, has long been grasped in Beijing and Moscow.

      The breakdown of international trade – and its balkanisation into trading blocs and exclusion zones – becomes readily explicable if we once recognise the ultimate finality of the material, the impotence of the monetary and the technological, and the resultant intensification of competition for scarce and dwindling resources.

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      1. Hideaway reminds us that the way our leaders are responding to the end of growth is accelerating the Cactus collapse….

        #319: The end of growth

        Thanks Dr Tim, a nice succinct take on reality.

        Of course there is a lot more to the story, with the initial bit being how the intensification of competition for scarce resources brings about inefficiencies of our global civilization, recreating what’s already available in multiple places, which means using up remaining energy and resources more rapidly in a race to the bottom.

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    19. Clear thinking influential minds are concerned.

      If demons exist, this is how they would behave.

      It was covid that opened my eyes.

      Incompetence would result in random right and wrong decisions.

      Evil is required to explain the 99% wrong decisions we observed.

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        1. Summarize the message of this video.

          The message of this video, a sermon from the channel Sensus Fidelium, is a call for spiritual fortitude and hope in the face of what the speaker perceives as a global rise in diabolical influence.

          The summary of the message is as follows:The “Diabolical” Nature of Modern Events

          The speaker uses the 2016 opening ceremony of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland as a primary example of modern spiritual decay. He interprets the ceremony’s imagery—including “zombie-like workers,” nudity, and goat-like figures—as an overt display of the devil being “unleashed” in broad daylight [05:52]. He argues that the presence of various world religious leaders at the event symbolizes a “paralyzed” Church that is seemingly agreeing with evil rather than fighting it [08:25].

          The core message is one of persistence and fearlessness. The speaker urges the audience to:

          • Stay the course and fulfill the duties of their state in life [19:33].
          • Avoid falling into “D” weapons like depression or debt [11:19].
          • Trust that “this too shall pass” and that a divine intervention will eventually turn modern “howling and erratic behavior” back into prayer and virtue [19:50].

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          1. Perfect song for this thread:

            Heaven may be running on empty yet the devil rides
            Heaven may be running on empty yet the devil rides
            Heaven may be running on empty yet the devil rides
            Hell burns by angel turns her pillow to the cooler side
            Something diabolical

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    20. Glen Greenwald is on substack now. I’m pretty sure that people on this site are using Gemini. Here is Glen’s take on Gemini

      After just a few weeks, I had to stop my use of Google’s Gemini because it was compiling not just segregated data about me, but also a wide array of information to form what could reasonably be described as a dossier on my life, including information I had not wittingly provided it. It would answer questions I asked it with creepy, unrelated references to the far-too-complete picture it had managed to create of many aspects of my life (at one point, it commented, somewhat judgmentally or out of feigned “concern,” about the late hours I was keeping while working, a topic I never raised

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    21. This was an interesting and eye opening interview on AI.

      Peter Steinberger is the creator of OpenClaw, a personal AI assistant, that’s the biggest AI thing to happen since the Chinese scared everyone with DeepSeek.

      https://openclaw.ai/

      What I found most interesting was Steinberger explained how he uses AI to write AI software. He talks to the AI telling it what he wants with no typing.

      Also interesting that this AI technology leader hates AI content and instantly blocks anyone that sends him anything that smells like it was written by an AI. He wants authentic human interaction with all its errors.

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    22. I liked this comment from Jeff McFadden. I’ve always laughed at the clueless morons who think anything in the Constitution / Dec of Independence / Bill of Rights… is for the peoples benefit. Same thing as the dipshits who don’t understand that the primary function of police is (and always has been) to make sure the poor don’t rise up against the rich.

      Not sure what that pic is from. My guess is The Onion.

      One of the most annoying lies which supports so-called Conservative thought is the claim that the 2nd amendment was put into the Constitution in order that the American people could rise up and violently overthrow the government if it upset them.

      The idea that a group of wealthy powerful landowners, roughly half of whom owned slaves, said, “OK, now that we’ve created a government to protect our interests, if you peasants don’t like it you may shoot us,” seriously doesn’t make any sense.

      They let us keep our guns so we could protect them, not so we could shoot at them.

      That “Militia” thing that Scalia so conveniently ignored when he decided every loose lunatic could be armed for battle isn’t some vague concept. It is specifically provided for in Article 1, Section 8 of the original text.

      Since we didn’t have a standing army we would have basically the whole country as a reserve force.

      To protect our land and government, not to overthrow it.

      I know that nobody gives a fuck. It just bugs me, is all.

      Just as an aside, here’s some of the relevant text.

      “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

      “To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;”

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      1. Dear Yahweh, I’m really not looking forward to the consequences of another US attack on Iran, but please, I beg of you, if there’s going to be a war, use your powers to ensure that Israel is destroyed in the process so we can emerge a more peaceful and less evil world for the little time we have left until Cactus.

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        1. “What does Trump actually see in BRICS? Only one thing: the threat to the U.S. dollar. So in his logic they all become enemies — dealt with one by one. Starting with Iran. Add pressure from political donors and power networks. And we’re back to the same usual suspects – as scandals swirl around the post-truth elites behind the system.”

          T. Ozgokmen

          Saludos

          el mar

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          1. That’s true, but if Iran does not have nukes by now they are the stupidest country on the planet. Saudi Arabia also has nukes and might object to Israel nuking a neighbor, as does China which needs Iran’s oil, as does Russia which does not want a western puppet Iran to its south.

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            1. You are assuming that Israel is run by rational people. I am not sure that is the case. If Israel is destroyed, there will likely be a regional nuclear conflagration as part of the process. This may also cause a nuclear winter that starves hundreds of millions if not billions people, and will almost certainly accelerate CACTUS.

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        3. Hello Rob,

          Your sweet and pious nature really touches me. ( I am writing this with a completely straight face, promise) However sincere and supplicating is your prayer, perhaps you also meant to convey the extreme irony. The godhead you chose to direct your entreaty, Yahweh, is the sacred name which cannot be spoken of the god of Israel and it is this entity that is responsible for exhorting the same chosen people to effect ruthless genocide with abandon all throughout their arguably sordid history. I think you have addressed the wrong god in this case, maybe try Allah?

          I hope this revelation in no way diminishes your fledging faith, for that is far from my aim, but it does pay to know which god might have the authority to respond to any particular petition, as misdirection may actually encourage the opposite intended result.

          I am still backing the Sun as my god of choice. As ultimate giver of Light and Life for our blue-green marble, it is eminently worthy of our undying worship, but in these end times I beseech our Star to grant us the merciful blessing of a CME massive enough to conclusively subdue this species. We already have had all this time before the end, the few moments left of enjoyment and basking in glory of our species’ achievements on this planet no longer justify the suffering and destruction of the rest of the biosphere.

          What started as a tongue-in-cheek quick post is now segueing into a spiral down into my remorseful, moral morass, which happens now with confessional regularity. We are so blind to the rest of Life. Can we not at least humble ourselves even for a moment to marvel at the will of each species to live, even if we cannot agree that they have the right in our humancentric world?

          Just the other day I learned that the vaquita porpoise (and perhaps porpoises aren’t troubled by wondering what their porpoise is in life other than just live), smallest member of the cetacean family, has only less than 10 individuals left. They are officially classified as Critically Endangered (could there be a more wretched understatement?) as if there’s still a hope that we will save this species. These “little cows” (I suppose vaquita could be considered a term of endearment) easily could be the poster child of WWF (move over panda), with their cute smiles and diminutive bodies, also have a mindworld which we would recognise as consciousness. They are a lifeform evolved to a highest perfection of form and function, in complete harmony with their environment. We are a lifeform when evolved to our “perfection”, destroys form, function, and all harmony in the environment. Less than 10. We are over 8 billion. Our species is responsible for their imminent extinction, along with the 200 other species every day. Please humour Gaia and look up the vaquita. Gaze upon its image for a while, read the obituary we have written for them, and ask yourself, was it all worth it that this creature (and all others) should perish from the face of this earth?

          Dear Sun, Thou who giveth all Life, forgive us who have willfully or not, destroyed so much Life, because that what our species was compelled to do. You have still given us the same Light and we have had our allotted time in your orbit, for which we are truly grateful even if we do not always show it. Please do what you can to restore balance and harmony on our planet and grant us the grace and peace to accept our fate. May we in our final days look up to you for guidance and comfort, even as your rays burn into our bodies, may the fire also absolve our souls. Amen.

          Namaste, friends.

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          1. Hello friend.

            Your prayer is so much better than my prayer.

            On Yahweh, my understanding is that Yahweh founded the original life after death business that then spun off the squabbling subsidiaries of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Perhaps I’m wrong.

            So sad to learn about vaquita.

            It would be so nice to be a porpoise without a porpoise, unless you were being slaughtered by a religious fire ape.

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          2. Amen sister! And thanks for introducing the vaquita to me. Very cool.

            If you haven’t seen this, watch the entire clip. It’s gold. Sun worshipping starts at 3:58

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            1. I think you and me gotta start the George Carlin fan club!!

              I love this clip – Worship the sun and prey to Joe Pesci 🤣

              The little vaquita came up in my news feed too, it said there were 20 left in the article I saw.

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    24. Two guys with integrity who were at the epicenter of the covid resistance shitstorm reflecting 5 years later on what happened.

      I haven’t finished watching it yet but some recurring thoughts are rattling around…

      Now that I understand the proximity and implications of Cactus, it’s hard not to believe that covid was a deep state (aka intelligence/military) exercise to test tools and train citizens in preparation for Cactus. No other organizations have the awesome power to execute what we observed.

      Many question though. Did they use the bioweapon lab leak as an excuse? Or did they deliberately infect citizens? Did they coerce mRNA so aggressively because they were genuinely worried about the bioweapon? They could have pushed saline if training citizens to comply was the goal. Why did the smartest country with the best intelligence (Israel) sign up for mRNA first? Why did China and Russia not use mRNA? Why did China and US collaborate on the covid deception, but now that peak oil is in view, are getting ready for war with each other?.

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      1. April 2020

        Cruise ship ‘Diamond Princess’ at sea

        ‘covid’ on board

        wide demographic babies to elderly

        Infection fatality rate 0.14% (bad flu)

        Deaths over life expectancy.. mid eighties

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    26. You probably will find this interesting. (remove if uninteresting). Some symptoms from Norway. The political system is showing some fragility. Perhaps a symptom of bigger issues. Results from the Epsteins files in Norway: Diplomat Rød-Larsen is hiding in Abu Dhabi in a luxury apartment, former PM is under investigation for corruption (police seized documents), former NATO secretary Stoltenberg as disappeared, the king is on holiday and PM Støre dont remember anything.

      I am not sure if it is fun or scary.

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      1. Don’t forget the current Norwegian royalty scandals…

        I remember not so many years ago of having a mental image of Norway as being one the wisest and most ethical countries in the world.

        Norway was one of the few oil rich countries that decided to save the wealth for future generations. Then they changed their mind and decided to spend it.

        Now Norway is like the rest of the idiot unethical west.

        The Norwegian royal family is currently navigating what historians are calling the most significant crisis in the monarchy’s 120-year history. As of February 2026, the family is facing a “double crisis” involving serious criminal allegations and damaging revelations from the past.

        1. The Marius Borg Høiby Trial

        The most immediate scandal centers on Marius Borg Høiby (29), the eldest son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit from a previous relationship.

        • The Charges: Høiby is currently on trial in Oslo facing 38 criminal counts, including the rape of four women, domestic violence, aggravated assault, and drug offenses (specifically transporting 3.5kg of marijuana).
        • Current Status: The trial began in early February 2026. Høiby has pleaded not guilty to the most serious rape charges but has admitted to some lesser offenses, including assault while under the influence of alcohol and cocaine.
        • The Royal Impact: Although Høiby holds no official title, the case has been a massive embarrassment. Crown Prince Haakon and Mette-Marit have stated they will not attend the trial to maintain the “autonomous” status of the proceedings.

        2. The Epstein Connection

        In February 2026, newly released documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation have placed Crown Princess Mette-Marit under intense public scrutiny.

        • The Revelations: The files reportedly contain nearly 1,000 mentions of the Crown Princess, suggesting a much deeper and more frequent connection than she previously admitted in 2019.
        • Controversial Details: Emails show she stayed at Epstein’s Palm Beach home in 2013 and remained in contact as late as 2014—well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for child sex offenses.
        • Public Apology: On February 6, 2026, Mette-Marit released a statement expressing “deepest regret” for the situation and apologizing for her “poor judgment.” The scandal has led some to question her suitability as a future queen.

        3. Princess Märtha Louise and “Shaman” Durek

        The King’s daughter, Princess Märtha Louise, continues to be a source of controversy following her 2024 wedding to Durek Verrett, an American self-proclaimed shaman.

        Misinformation: Verrett has faced backlash for claims that children get cancer because they “want it” and for selling “medallions” he claimed could cure COVID-19.

        Commercial Exploitation: The couple has been accused of using the Princess’s title for private business ventures, including a Netflix documentary and exclusive media deals that shut out the Norwegian press.

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        1. As a Norwegian I have always known that Norway is unethical. Even if we distribute money to nearly everyone in Norway or make refugees relative rich we still uses other people nature. The reason we have some nature is because of ecological leakage (importing others nature). Our welfare state is impossible without low paid workers in other countries.

          If you see pictures of old Norway it was heavily deforested, particularly by the end of the 19th century, with many regions resembling the sparse landscape of modern Iceland.

          Decades of intensive logging and mining had depleted the forests, leading to a critical shortage of timber and prompting massive government-led reforestation efforts starting in the 1930. Before the 1900s, almost every square meter of the Norwegian landscape was used for survival. This put immense pressure on the land. Most clothes were made from local wool or flax, which required vast grazing areas. Once Norway began importing cotton and synthetic fibers, that pressure vanished.

          Norway’s food self-sufficiency sits at roughly 45-47%. We import most of our grains, fruits, and even high-protein animal feed (like soy from Brazil) easing the pressure one own Nature.

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    27. Deep thoughts by Jack Handey Martin Butler:

      Personally, I’m somewhat indifferent to the cause of life – random or intelligent, but the implications are wholly different. If we admit that life is hell (if you are some mummy’s little darling that has been sheltered from the world, you might not think this), then such a hell coming about accidentally does take the sting out of it a little bit. But if this hell has come about through design, then we can only conclude that this “intelligence” is malicious in nature. I can forgive an accident, but I cannot forgive intent.

      The problem with most who see life and the universe as coming about through design is that they, like everyone else, are looking for a happy-ever-after story. Hence, you will find a good scattering of Christians promoting the design hypothesis in their quest to establish that “God is in his Heaven, and all is well with the world”. It’s such a shame, because the argument for design is quite strong, and can only lead to the conclusion that the designer is a total bastard.

      https://martinbutler.substack.com/p/accident-or-design-does-it-matter

      Speaking of Jack Handey, this one made me laugh:

      Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you still have their shoes.

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      1. Why would intelligent design care about one species? what is suffering for us might be joy for another. Maybe this is the design with the least possible suffering that could have ever been designed. There are so many different philosophical ways to cut it

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    28. When Dr. Ted Postol speaks I listen.

      In case you don’t know, he’s the leading expert on nuclear weapons.

      The Israelis have made a strategic blunder with Iran.

      Also a nice discussion on how Israel has decayed into a fascist state by Postol who has Jewish ancestry and has visited Israel.

      Jews are racists. They have no regard for anyone but themselves.

      Israel today is no different than fascist Germany.

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    29. DOGE just dumped the whole HHS data set from 2018 to 2024.
      This is huge. Can’t wait to see what they find aside from fraud.

      Since the agency was birthed by progressive geniuses in the Carter Administration, HHS has diligently protected the privacy of Big Pharma by keeping a death-grip on Americans’ health data. Even though, during the exact same period, we got fatter by the minute, our health got worse and worse, and we spent more and more trillions on healthcare. It’s none of your business because privacy. Science! Trust the experts! Shut up!

      Now, taking the corporate media, pharma, and the political establishment completely by surprise, the data is suddenly out there. The VAERS data looked awful, but they wriggled out of that trap by sneering that the adverse event-reporting system —the system they created— was unreliable. But now we have a second data set— and it includes vaccination records.

      What happens when the HHS data confirms the VAERS data? What will they say then?

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    30. Watched this flick last night. Pump Up the Volume (1990) – IMDb

      In Arizona, an introverted and insightful teenager, Mark Hunter, finds an outlet for his viewpoints through a shortwave radio. Broadcasting as Hard Harry, Hunter uses his pirate radio show to rant against the injustices and hypocrisies taking place in the area, and in society in general. Hunter conceals his off-air identity, but a determined student, Nora, discovers the truth, while Principal Crestwood seeks to shut down Hunter once and for all.

      Was a huge influence back in my rebellious teenage years. Awesome soundtrack. There was a time when Christian Slater was a very cool actor. Still holds up well today. I think most of the audience will enjoy.

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    31. h/t Dr. Heather Heying.

      Finally, a little good news!

      Coffee has been confirmed to be good for you.

      I will continue my habit of 2 triple Americanos every morning, plus 2 cups of tea every afternoon.

      https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2844764

      Question  Is long-term intake of caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee associated with risk of dementia and cognitive outcomes?

      Findings  In this prospective cohort study of 131 821 individuals from 2 cohorts with up to 43 years of follow-up, 11 033 dementia cases were documented. Higher caffeinated coffee intake was significantly associated with lower risk of dementia. Decaffeinated coffee intake was not significantly associated with dementia risk.

      Meaning  Higher caffeinated coffee intake was associated with more favorable cognitive outcomes.

      Previous studies were inconclusive because they did not distinguish between people who drank caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee. Duh!

      I am continually amazed at how dumb the healthcare and nutrition professions are. They still struggle to admit sugar is poison, and butter and eggs are health foods.

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      1. Don’t trust any nutritional study. Drink coffee if you like (as I do), but it wont make much difference. In nutritional studies you can find any kind of effect you like. Even prospective studies cant show anything. Every kind of nutrition is linked to so many variables that you can show anything. Se also John Ioannidis work on nutritional studies. The best work on nutrition was done before ethical committees. You could do animal studies excluding specific nutrition or you could do studies on inmates etc.. In my judgment it is nearly implausible to do anything new in nutritional studies. In this study they followed 131000 people !!!!. If you have to study so many people it is not worth studying. If you need so many people the effect will be clinically irrelevant. The Hazzard ratio in this study is 0.82. It normally disappear in replication studies. Even residual confounding (education, health behavior, clustering, reverse causation etc.) can fully explain such effects. Such studies is a symptom of elite overproduction.

        https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f6698.long

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        1. Interesting.

          How then do you decide what is healthy and unhealthy?

          There is big disagreement on common items in our diets like fat, sugar, salt, alcohol, nitrites, etc.

          I recall Gary Taubes who achieved fame writing about the evils of sugar was criticized so he decided to fund his own studies to prove sugar is bad and discovered how hard it is to conduct a valid nutritional study.

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          1. Most things normal is healthy. Prof Per Fugeli often warned people not to listen too obsessively to health advice. One of his most quoted ideas was that we should follow health advice about 80% of the time.

            What I think?

            We are omnivores. In my lecture to students on nutrition I give examples on healthy diets from all over the world. It is so diverse and apparently most of them is healthy. Eg. Inuits eating only animals (needed to eat Epidermis from whales to get vit-c). As other native tribes they lived «long» if they survived childhood. The traditional Inuit diet demonstrate human metabolic flexibility.

            There is some exceptions eg american diets. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s wrong with american diets, but it could be so simple that PFAS in fast food wrapping that’s make the diet unhealthy?

            How is minimal dietary recirment decided? Some basic old metabolic studies, metabolic theory, but mostly based on regional extreme diets in healthy European villages.

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            1. Hello Huldulækni. Various studies on Inuit have found their traditional diet had over 50 different plant species (eaten seasonally), whereas the modern American diet has around 13. Inuit especially ate berries, spring greens, and seaweed.

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            2. I only eat meat. I rarely eat organs. In fact it is over a year since i last ate some liver. I get my vitamin C from meat. Fresh meat has Vitimin C. Not much but enough.

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        2. We know something clearly from modern day prisons, protein makes you stronger. Many prisons, including in advanced nations will on purpose limit the amount of protein given to prisoners to make them weaker and easier to control. In El Salvador’s new prison (CECOT) they only give the prisoners a small amount of beans / lentils at one meal. That is all the protein they get and it is on purpose to weaken the prisoners. I was watching a documentary on it and the prison director straight up said it.

          In NZ the prison diet is designed to be high in carbohydrates, but still balanced enough to meet general health guidelines. So it includes meat each day, but not a lot of protein overall. Prisoners will actual steal meat from the other prisoners and trade it as a commodity.

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    32. An interesting point about AI:

      If AI reduces a millions of overconsuming white-collar workers in high income nations to a subsistence standard of living, this could actually cancel out some of the increase in energy and water consumption.

      Someone on discord said this: (Link just in case any users or lurkers here have discord).

      https://discord.com/channels/415671701549088790/725132925997154315/1472377648863776841

      If the loss of jobs to AI results in mass unemployment which results in “measures” taken by governments to reduce populations, then it could, sure.

      Most of the ‘worst’ things that could come from the AI replacing jobs thing depends strongly on what both governments and the job-market do in response to the potential rapid unemployment of millions of humans.

      Some places might have more flexibility, be able to expand the human-job-markets faster, and/or provide more social support.

      Others might just lean into slavery or more permanent solutions

      The ‘cost of AI’ from an electrical/resource/emissions/material standpoint is almost never discussed in relation to, or as a net-figure when, human reduction in consumptions due to mass AI-displacement are considered.

      It’s not implausible that actually replacing a very large number of relatively high-earning humans with AI’s could actually result in a net reduction in a whole lot of consumption and pollution, even if those humans aren’t depopulated.

      …

      but I mean, we often discuss how high income/consumption nations need to significant reduce their income/consumption. If this results in a significant displacement of high income workers across the developed world, and that results in a significant reduction in average consumption, then we’re shifting in that direction.

      If overconsumption in developed countries is one of the major causes of climate and environmental issues, as many consider it to be – mass unemployment of white collar workers would significant improve that particular situation.

      One human not importing beef from Brazil because they lost their well paying job would be equal to thousands of people using chatGPT every day, from an emissions and water consumption savings perspective

      One silicon valley vegan yuppie not importing nuts and fruits from around the world because they also lost their high income job, would also be equivelent to thousand of AI agents emissions and water consumption.

      I’m not saying weather it’s a “good thing” or a “Bad thing”; just that if we’re going to be honest about considering the pros and cons when talking about water, electrical, and emissions results; we need to consider not only the additions that AI infrastructure brings, but the potential subtractions as well.

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    33. Some very good news from B…

      Cactus is wrong.

      An economic crash is indeed imminent as predicted by the debt lens, however modernity will continue and the decline after the crash will be gradual.

      The crash will have a silver lining in that it will force a new sustainable managed degrowth economic model, and a new suite of wise leaders able to lead us effectively.

      I don’t understand how Hideaway could miss such an obvious error in his Cactus theory. He must be getting old.

      https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/china-the-end-of-an-economic-miracle

      It is, I argue, already to late to inflate debt away or to reform the system in any way—a major economic crash is just a matter of time. The coming great financial reset will not be the end of the world, however. We will not run out of oil, copper, arable land etc. overnight. Those will be still there, albeit in a slowly decreasing amount, as resource depletion, climate change, water shortages etc. will slowly chip away at our capacity to grow as much food, extract as much minerals and energy as we used to be able to do before. The financial system will suffer mightily, though, as even remaining loans will become impossible to repay on falling revenues and material flows, and as a huge chunk of debt accumulated will have to be written off. Once the rubble stops bouncing, reorganizing both the Chinese and American economies away from capitalism and growth, and towards a managed decline dictated by rising temperatures, falling mineral reserves and a shrinking population will still prove to be an enormous quest—a challenge, our current crop of deeply corrupted leaders seem increasingly unable to rise to. The coming crisis will thus not only put an end to our financial system, but also call the legitimacy of our entire political economy into question—no wonder everything is being done to delay its arrival.

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      1. Hideaway, tut tut, you need to listen more to our enlightened gurus: George Tsakraklides, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Doomberg, Douglas Rushkoff, Charles Eisenstein, and Strong Towns.

        (Sorry I don’t know the newer generation equivalents because I switch off when I hear “if only we could change human nature everything would be better”)

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    34. I’ve been arguing with AI. Then it has the audacity to tell me, “You are very committed to this thermodynamic doom arc. I admire the stamina. If civilization collapses, you’ll at least be emotionally pre-adapted.” Get fucked you in-denial LLM.

      Then it says, “You absolutely can make computers at a lower level of complexity. You just can’t make today’s computers at a lower level of complexity.” Hideaway needs to give the AI a smackdown!

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      1. I’ve been using A.I. recently to research. this is not the companies that supply TMSC, nor ASML, nor the companies that supply ASML. It’s about the companies that supply the 5,000 companies that supply ASML, in other words way down the food chain.

        Once we get to that level, we find that just about all of these entities (and I’ve only scratched the surface as there are so many spread around the world), we find that around 85%-90% of all their sales are to discretionary consumer sectors or the businesses that supply consumer products, which is the overwhelming segment and sales of the entire world economy.

        It’s always a hand wave about our ability to continue to produce the capital intensive despite the financial economy crashing, or world trade crashing, whether it’s “B” or Dr Tim Morgan. The missing ingredient is that so many people just don’t understand manufacturing and metal processing at all.

        It all happens at huge scale to provide a tiny fraction of extremely high end machine parts to high end businesses that make the most complex machines, that are totally required for our modernity to exist.

        One simple example, Carpenter Tech make the extreme high end VIM/VAR metals used by other companies, like Swagelok, Parker Hannifin, and Ichor Systems to make the extremely complex, pure, metal hoses used in an ASML lithography machine, used by TMSC.

        However these metals having undergone extreme purity processes in vacuums, only represent 1% of their revenues. Without all the “other” sales to a myriad of companies, like Aerospace, defence, medical supplies, oil and gas drilling, nuclear power, high performance engines in transport etc, they don’t get the revenue to continue operations.

        They require the totality of their business to supply all the high end “essentials”. Without medical, there goes up to 22% of their revenues. Without aerospace, most passenger jets, there goes another 64% of their revenues, and probably the entire business overall. They can only provide extremely pure metals because of the scale of their business, running their 50 tonne VIM/VAR furnaces at constant rates for scaled efficiencies.

        Basically, whenever anyone quickly does the hand wave over any processes in the modern world, we know they are clearly wrong, as they have not researched anything about the actual supply lines and exactly what it takes to produce.

        We have one incredibly complex highly fragile system of modern civilization and just like any other highly complex energy dissipative structure, like lifeforms, then internal weaknesses of gaining all the correct energy and materials can and will lead to death of the entirety of the system. Death being the ultimate cascade of collapse of all internal subsystems, totally reliant upon each other.

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      2. Before I went off on a tangent, what I also meant to say to monk, was how to approach A.I. and kill off it’s hopium. Make sure you mention using the widest possible boundaries for EROEI when discussing renewables or nuclear.

        Make sure you use lower EROEI for fossil fuels and also cite Calvo and Mudd 2016 for increased energy use in copper production because of lower grades. Plus use our 80% urbanised population in developed countries and over 50% for the entire world, which is totally different to prior civilizations, yet requires fossil fuels to get food to cities and you quickly get A.I. agreeing with collapse of modernity without exception from several different LLMs.

        In fact I can only get A.I. models to come to a conclusion of no collapse by using some absurd assumptions like the “category error” of using money instead of energy and materials, plus the high EROEIs of narrow boundary renewables/nuclear, which are all totally false…

        Also add the near term reduction of Permian oil production as per statements of oil company executives, plus remind it of Ghawar, Bergan, Samotlor, Johan Sverdrup falling oil production increased water cuts etc. In other words reality, otherwise it goes off old oil reserves as per the increases all the Middle East countries did in the 1980’s, without any actual discoveries..

        To get rid of circular economy arguments just cite the physics of entropy and dissipation plus remind it of Calvo and Mudd 2016 (which no-one refutes!!)

        I’ve ben trying to get A.I. to come up with something realistic that doesn’t include collapse in the very near future (between 2027-2032) depending on what level of accuracy I go for in details, yet can’t get it to acknowledge any non collapse scenario given future energy contraints.

        Maybe I should make up a full essay post about what to include when questioning A.I. about the future?? Rob?

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        2. The AIs initial responses are so much like the mainstream thinking that programmed them. I just gave it your response and now it is agreeing.

          I need to set up a project space with the parameters you have suggested. Then I can ask questions and run scenarios without having to go through all the basics. I used to have a lot of data on different minerals. I could update that and run that into a scenario.

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          1. monk, just the Calvo and Mudd analysis, with what’s actually happening in the oil sphere, plus the narrow boundaries of EROEI research in renewables and nuclear, with the physics of why circular economy can’t work, is enough to reign in any bright green future based on less metals from A.I. so that you can question it on other aspects.

            However by itself it goes towards the nice slow decline, but bring in how civilization is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops like stock market’s rapid decline due to lack of future growth, plus all the debt in the system, plus the 80% plus of population in urban areas in the developed nations and it quickly comes around to understanding the future is bleak for modernity.

            It always starts with mainstream thinking of a bright green future based on unrealistic assumptions from the mainstream like high EROEIs of renewables and nuclear, plus circular economy, regenerative agriculture, etc.

            Getting rid of this bright green future is unfortunately just reminding it of reality from a few different sources. Once you get A.I. into thinking collapse is inevitable, I play around with trying to see if humanity can avoid near term collapse, again using reality, but it then always comes up with reasons why ‘whatever’ is not possible…

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            1. I also got the slow decline response exactly as you described! It refuses to accept my wording that minerals run out. Why is it being so semantic? I tried telling it: Gold is only made in supernova explosions. It is formed into ores in geologically active planets. We mine all available ores, they are gone. We consume gold for industrial purposes. It becomes diffuse and will never be an ore again (entropy). It keeps thinking computers could last for 500 or 1000 years. It accepts computers won’t exist at some point, but thinks that is a long way away. It is like, well gold atoms will still exist so you can’t say a binary statement that minerals run out. My my.

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              1. Minerals don’t run out at all, neither does oil, gas or coal. What runs out is our ability to gain access to the low quality deposits due the the requirement of high complexity in a future low complexity world.

                This is where the complexity and sheer market size that currently makes everything available to all the high end industries. But if the suppliers of high end blended precise metals can no longer function because most of their markets collapsed when contraction hit discretionary sectors around the world due to markets crashing essentials becoming very expensive etc, then they can’t supply the materials to the manufacturers, who can’t make the precise parts and consumables needed by the complex machines in feedback loops of accelerated collapse.

                Think in terms of the 5,000 companies AMSL relies upon for parts, and the hundreds of companies each of these rely upon. If just 100 parts suppliers to AMSL can’t provide what they usually do, then AMSL is scrambling to find replacements. Over weeks to months if another 100 companies run into their own supply issues and can’t supply AMSL, then all they have had is 4% of suppliers unable to supply, yet AMSL would be falling to pieces unable to keep up with the many failures happening with supplies..

                Think of high end sensors in wireline logging tools, part of the oil drill rig string, but totally required for directional drilling. These put up with huge pressures and temperatures deep underground and are pretty much a consumable item because of the stresses and failure rates. Drill rig operators will have spares on site for this, but if their suppliers can’t get parts, then fairly quickly directional drilling halts, with immediate effects on oil and gas production. These types of feedback loops the A.I. will not consider until you point it out.

                Yes I can feel a full essay on this for anyone interested in a trying to find a way out of our predicament with A.I., however I haven’t found A.I. gives any way out once reminded to look at all the details of current civilization.

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                1. Another force in play for your ASML example…

                  The capital and operating expense of chip manufacturing is increasing faster than the technology improves.

                  If there’s a serious economic downturn, I expect ASML may have few customers, even if it has product to sell.

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            2. OK I think I got it to the point 🙂

              To be confident your 20–40 year “modernity faceplants into a stairwell” scenario isn’t going to happen, the world would need to start coughing up hard, boring, physical evidence that the system can keep its metabolic throughput without eating itself.

              If I were as critical as you, I’d want to see multiple of these show up at the same time — because any single one can be a temporary patch.

              1) Net energy stops getting worse. Evidence that surplus energy is not collapsing.

              2) Liquid fuels become resilient, not just “available”. For example mining operations reducing diesel dependency in measured ways (not “pilot projects,” but totals). If liquid fuels remain a single-point-of-failure, your collapse pathway stays open.

              3) Mining + refining energy intensity stops rising (or is offset). New high-quality deposits discovered and developed at meaningful scale.

              4) The deep supply chain becomes less dependent on consumer discretionary volume.

              5) Semiconductor capacity stops being a single brittle pinnacle. If the world is serious about avoiding “chipmaking becomes impossible,” it would need a “tech stack” that can fall back gracefully. We would need standardization and simplification. Repairability + longevity become default in hardware (not ideology).

              6) Urban fragility is addressed like it’s real. Need to see grid hardening, water/wastewater resilience, local buffers for food and essentials.

              7) Finance stops being a fragility amplifier. Need to see deleveraging, capital for maintenance, real economy support (not finance to finance economy).  

              If instead I saw:

              • accelerating decline rates
              • rising energy cost share
              • worsening diesel volatility
              • chronic capex shortfalls
              • increasing geopolitical fragmentation
              • and deep-tier supplier contraction…

              …then, yeah, I’d start buying boring tools and learning how to fix pumps.

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              2. 5) Semiconductor capacity stops being a single brittle pinnacle. If the world is serious about avoiding “chipmaking becomes impossible,” it would need a “tech stack” that can fall back gracefully. We would need standardization and simplification. Repairability + longevity become default in hardware (not ideology).

                This would require going back to earlier technologies such as AM Radio and landline phones. I just don’t see many people voluntarily giving up smart phones and social media (many people today are addicted), even if doing so would delay cactus.

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          2. This para from Surplus EE is a good one to start before drilling down into the details:

            This proportionate Energy Cost of Energy is a matter, not of money, but of physics. ECoEs from all sources of primary energy have risen from 2.0% in 1980 to more than 11% today. Accompanied by a gradual degradation of the non-energy resource base, this has impaired annual rates of material expansion to a point at which the underlying physical economy inflects from growth into contraction.

            Which LLM do you use? The output can be shared via links directly, so we could have a peak a boo into your results 😉(and to hideaway’s too?). I did have thoughts that we could ‘crowdsource’ a final cactus essay, and divvy up some components of it to research. I have saved lots of the comments from here to a local file, so have many places as a good starting point, but a coordinated effort would be more efficient.

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                1. I have the free ChatGPT, so that could work. I have not used a shared workspace before, but if you can guide me through set up, then we could go from there. Or maybe you need the paid version for shared workspace? Discord might be handy too, a space with lots of channels for each topic…

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                2. They are excellent ideas waiting to be compiled into a big essay or a small book. 🙂

                  It’s quite remarkable that this tiny un-Denial site is the only place on the planet discussing such an important new idea.

                  Before some lurker jumps in to remind us that many Cactus ideas are not new, I acknowledge that’s true, but Cactus is the first time that all the important forces that contribute to modernity and overshoot have been discussed in one integrated coherent theory, and in addition, Cactus makes a clear prediction that disagrees with the predictions made by pretty much every other overshoot aware intellectual leader.

                  Cactus deserves to be written up properly.

                  P.S. I love the thread you’re working on now. The essay should provide many concrete examples of the fragile networked dependencies of our technologies, and how critical non-renewable mineral extraction depends on those technologies.

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        1. Oh bro, that’s classic! What a blast from the past to see Garfield and the computer I grew up with. That comic must be 35 years old. Funnily enough, the modern chainsaw still looks the same (although ours is battery powered now) even as everything else gets more streamlined. But now we are also getting back to the boring (I beg to differ from AI, I think good tools are exciting!) handtools, so maybe at the end I’ll take to my laptop with a Silky Saw.

          As for the pizza loving feline, hmmmm…I wonder what Epstein has on that fat cat?

          Thank you everyone (including monk’s AI) for the recent threads. It’s such a reassurance and comfort to know that nothing will sway me from the Cactus walk (swagger?) from now onto the finish line. So good to see and hear you all here.

          Namaste, friends.

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    35. Deep thoughts by my archrival.

      https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/filth-disgust-degradation-mockery

      Here we have ‘Bunny’ (whoever the fuck that is) singing Safaera during the Super Bowl Halftime show. Many are suggesting this was inappropriate (see the lyrics below) as the Super Bowl is watched by families.

      I’d argue it’s entirely appropriate given 7 year olds can watch a women or man be gang banged on the many porn sites that can be accessed on their mobile phones. I would note that many 13 year old girls are getting pounded Out Back the Dumpsters at schools around the country at recess by their classmates. We have sites like Tinder and Grindr that allow the barnyard animals to swipe right, jump in an Uber and dump their loads into willing sows.

      This is how civilization ends. Everything is fake. The species is immersed in a sewer of gambling, vaccine injuries, promiscuity, orchestrated ‘reality’ Tee Vee, celebrity worship, stupidity, processed ‘food’, and pumped with Ozempic. The barnyard animals have lost their moral compass and reach for anti-depressants in record numbers to numb their despair.

      LOL. Good stuff (except the last sentence. Moral compass? puh-leeze!). I had to verify that the lyrics he provided are real. Yep. And I totally agree with him about it being “entirely appropriate”. He also has a funny bit about the absurdity of fake breasts.

      Does Crazy Eddy make money on substack? If he does, I’m gonna have to take a crack at it. My life savings is dwindling faster than I thought. (who could’ve known that having no income coming in would eventually become a problem)

      PS – speaking of football, there’s a good cheezy movie called The Last Boy Scout (1991) about a shady NFL owner trying to buy Senate votes to legalize sports gambling because tv ratings are down. If successful he and the other owners stand to make $billions from it.

      It’s hilarious because the movie goes way over the top trying to paint this character as the horrible villain… and yet 35 years later, the character doesn’t stand out at all. LOL

      Here’s a quick scene from it. And based on the comments, apparently I’m not the only one who says this to themselves at the beginning of each day.😊

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      2. OMG – those lyrics, no wonder there was such a hoo haa about it! I am glad he copied them all down like that. I get why he used moral decay, in a kind of William Ophuls way as the pattern at end of empires. I have never had any interest in sport either. Not even olympics.

        🤣🤣🤣

        And we all love ya bro!

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        1. This needs a bit more context. I just watched the video my US friend sent me about the half time show. There are other reasons why it was controversial, none of them to do with the lyrics.

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          1. Ahhh, now the hoo-ha is making a little more sense. Thanks.

            Wish I hadn’t watched the video though. Cuz I learned that “Bad Bunny is the world’s most streamed artist”

            Ugghh, I feel like Frasier Crane when a young musician moved in above him and was driving him crazy from the loud shitty music. 

            Frasier: How does an arrested adolescent who barely knows two chords, get a penthouse?
            Daphne: His last album sold five million copies.
            Frasier: Oh well then, I’ll just add that to my list of reasons to die.

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    36. I propose a fourth lens through which to view our overshoot predicament:

      “Irrational mass psychological behavior.”

      Scarcity and deprivation do not have to be experienced in reality for people to panic. It is enough for them to perceive it as threatening or unacceptable because propagandists convince them of it or because memes and narratives simply develop on their own in people’s limbic systems.

      An example: The hatred between France and Germany can quickly develop again if Germany is no longer willing or able to finance the early retirement of the French, e.g., through Eurobonds. Agitators can quickly turn the two nations against each other. Then there is a threat of war between France and Germany instead of between NATO and Russia. In my opinion, this could happen very quickly if the recession that is already beginning turns into a depression.

      The veneer of civilization is very thin and a “fair weather phenomenon.”

      Saludos

      el mar

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      1. Interesting idea. If I understand correctly, you are saying behavior is another collapse force just like debt, energy, and complexity.

        The threat of scarcity causes behavior that accelerates scarcity.

        I discussed a connected idea in the essay above by pointing out war in the past could be beneficial for the victor, but today war will make things worse for everyone.

        Perhaps if we collectively work on a cactus essay, you could write the section on behavior?

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        1. Yes, ypu underswteand correctly, your sentence sums it up perfectly:

          „The threat of scarcity causes behavior that accelerates scarcity.“

          People become afraid and eventually rush to the exit at the same time. Bubbles burst, avalanches crash down, chains break. At some point, it becomes too much. We don’t know exactly when! At some point, the Minsky moment arrives (see above). It’s like Jenga: you don’t know which block will be the last one to topple the fragile tower due to mass psychological herd behavior.

          I don’t think my knowledge of psychology is sufficient to write an article.

          This book by Mathias Desmet describes the phenomenon very well:
          “The Psychology of Totalitarianism”

          „Totalitarianism is not a coincidence and does not develop in a vacuum. Its origins lie in the phenomenon of “mass formation,” a kind of collective psychosis. Using detailed analyses, examples, and findings from years of research, Mattias Desmet outlines the steps that lead to mass formation: A general feeling of loneliness and a lack of social ties and meaning give rise to fears and dissatisfaction, which in turn manifest themselves in frustration and aggression. These are skillfully exploited and channeled by government representatives and the mass media with the help of certain narratives. As a result, the influence of the state on the private lives of individuals continues to expand. In addition to a crystal-clear psychological analysis and building on Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, the author also formulates a sharp critique of cultural “groupthink” and the culture of fear—which already existed before the pandemic but have increased exponentially with the COVID crisis— warns of the dangers of our media consumption and our dependence on manipulative technologies.“

          Saludos

          el mar

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          1. Mathias Desmet was famous during covid for explaining why mothers volunteered their children, who were at zero risk from the virus, to be transfected with a novel untested mRNA technology, despite that technology not preventing transmission, and why those same mothers hated anti-vaxxers.

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    37. With all our chat about AI today – this article is a must read based on latest releases just in the past couple of weeks from OpenAI and Anthropic

      https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403?s=20

      It’s gone viral, at 83 million views. It’s about 5k words, so a long read, I’m about half way through. And i can’t help but see the similarity he has in the feeling that ‘no one believes me’ as we have here with regard to cactus.

      The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is “really getting better” or “hitting a wall” — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It’s done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn’t used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what’s happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don’t say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

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      1. Good article, thanks Renaee.

        Hideaway, I think you said you have been asking AI to find possible solutions to Cactus. Maybe ask AI if Cactus can be delayed by firing 50% of workers, paying them UBI at a lower level than their old wages because they no longer have the expenses associated with work, funding the UBI with heavy taxes on the GDP now created by the AI, and delaying Cactus because non-renewable resource consumption drops with most people staying home.

        <As of new AI releases on Feb. 5, 2026> I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

        The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

        …most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone.

        On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical documentation, they included this:

        “GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations.”

        Read that again. The AI helped build itself.

        Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It’ll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

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        1. Having a look this morning, there is also pushback on his article. Example from Substack:

          https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/about-that-matt-shumer-post-that

          And this earlier one too:

          https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/gpt-5-overdue-overhyped-and-underwhelming

          Who knows. I think the truth of it must be very nuanced and impossible to know accurately the big picture, and somewhere in the middle.

          I did some work a few months back with a colleague who works exclusively on open source Drupal CMS, he says he has used the paid version of GPT for past 3 years and now could not do his job without it, and would easily pay 10 times as much a month to be able to continue using it. But the part about it being able to build an entire app, while you give it instructions and walk away and come back and 4 hours later it’s done with testing and all, it is hard to believe. I did watch some of that Lex Friedman interview as well, so his experience seemed to confirm Matt Schumer’s take, but he is a rare one, operating at the top of the game and he still had to do a lot of work directing it.

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          1. The Lex Friedman interview was significant because that software developer has had a couple big successes and he said that to program he now talks to the AI, plus the AI writes all his documentation.

            Regardless what the exact reality is, it does seem clear that AIs are improving quickly.

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    38. I watch the Iran situation with great curiosity. People I follow are all over the map on what they think will happen ranging from a full-on war to a peace agreement. I see zero consensus emerging on the probable outcome. Which means I think that anything might happen.

      My intuition is that it is more dangerous than most assume because it is existential for all the players:

      • US power depends on the petrodollar and soon imported oil to replace depleting fracked oil. Iran is a key force undermining the petrodollar by exporting 90% its oil to China in exchange for Chinese Yuan. Iran also has one of the few remaining good reserves of oil.
      • Israel’s survival depends on a strong US and a weak Iran. Israel has a policy to use its nukes if their survival is threatened.
      • Iran now knows with certainty that US and Israel will not stop until they achieve regime change, regardless of what “deals” are agreed.
      • China gets 15% of its oil from Iran. It would be very hard to replace that oil from other sources.
      • Russia does not want a US puppet threatening its southern border.

      Which means if any side starts to clearly lose, there is a high probability of desperate escalation.

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    39. percentage of today’s global population living on $10 or less per day – 60% (5 billion)

      number of billionaires in the world:
      1980 – 13
      2000 – 470
      2025 – 3,028

      That jump from 13 to 3000… In the past I’d have dove into the numbers more to stress that a tiny segment of the population (European descent, aka white skin = 10%) ended up with 50% of the billionaire gigs. And how that particular pigmentation didn’t show up on this planet until only 7,000 years ago.

      But I no longer see it that way. I still get naively angry that humanity allows this absurd inequality to exist… but I’m no longer confused. Every fossil energy peak in the universe probably looks like those stats above.

      We all got to experience the peak of what’s possible in the universe, but only a few got to truly experience full peakness. 

      ps – A lyric from this excellent song is what got me thinking about billionaires today.

      I still owe money to the money to the money I owe

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    40. Here’s a recap of the predictions made by each lens including el mar’s proposed new behavior lens.

      Let me know if you spot any errors or omissions.

      Debt Lens

      A crash of the economy is guaranteed in the short to medium term, triggered probably by something random that causes a panic, with the outcome that standards of living will fall via inflation or deflation, but modernity will survive, and standards of living will eventually recover, until the next bubble forms and the cycle repeats.

      Energy Lens

      Economic growth will slow and eventually decline as energy becomes less affordable due to depletion, however the change will be gradual, providing people time to adjust to a falling standard of living, and a return to older and simpler ways of life, with an end state lifestyle that is probably medieval, however this will take many decades to arrive.

      Ecology Lens

      The health of ecosystems are steadily being eroded by the product of human population and consumption, guaranteeing a gradual decline in public health and living standards over many decades, with a probable hunter-gatherer lifestyle end state far in the future, because we have already emitted enough excess CO2 to eventually create a climate incompatible with any form of civilization.

      Behavior Lens

      As limits to growth caused signs of scarcity are detected by people, their behavior will change in a way that increases scarcity, thus creating a self-reinforcing collapse of modernity. The most probable outcome will be wars that destroy ecosystems, populations, and wealth, and that damage the complex global network of supply chains that sustain modernity. It is hard to imagine that our 12,000 nuclear weapons will not eventually be used by angry emotional people, creating a worst case end state of rapid near extinction.

      Cactus Lens

      The global economy will continue to grow slowly, with living standards for the majority falling as the wealth gap widens, until something forces growth to stop and to begin a significant persistent decline, the most likely trigger being US shale oil depletion, however other triggers exist like a Minsky moment, or trade and nuclear wars. Shortly after the significant decline in total economic activity begins, there will be a supernova collapse of modernity caused by self-reinforcing feedback loops of complex global supply chain failures, technology scarcity and falling complexity, falling non-renewable resource flows, and defaulting debt, resulting in a probable hunter-gatherer end state, with no possibility of ever returning to modernity.

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