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.
  • Six of nine planetary boundaries critical for survival have already been crossed including climate change, biodiversity, deforestation, fresh water, nitrogen cycle, and pollution.
  • 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 responds:

  • 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.

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.

318 thoughts on “The Cactus Lens: A Clearer View”

  1. It’s grotesque what our leaders babble and lie about.
    It’s ridiculous to assume that AI will take us to a higher level.

    While the virtual, digital world seems to be taking off, the real world is collapsing.

    Humanity’s genetically determined business model is to suck the planet dry and ruin it for the sake of a one-time spree.
    There’s no need to thank a creator for that.

    Yesterday, for example, Trump said, “We can promote agriculture with the customs revenues.”
    Or here in Europe, the statement, “Cheap wind energy will save us,” while the economy collapses.

    What a joke!

    Saludos

    el mar

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  2. The Yellow Forum from Germany explains the beginning of civilization based on the division of labor and the emergence of states with a debt system with the appearance of communities that exceed Dunbar’s number.

    https://www.dasgelbeforum.net/index.php?id=679043

    I have shortened and slightly altered the text for better understanding:

    „The Neolithic Revolution, which marked the transition from hunter-gatherer communities to sedentary farming and cattle-breeding societies beyond the notorious Dunbar number—the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of people with whom an individual can maintain social relationships—marks a decisive turning point in human history.

    It is the transition from egalitarian tribal communities to demarcated, hierarchical, predominantly patriarchal civilizations based on compulsory taxation. Since the destruction of communal coexistence based on customary law, humans no longer possess self-determined potential, as their potential is systematically robbed and reorganized by a centralized order.

    The emerging new order is not the result of social agreement and interpersonal consensus among subjects, but is enforced by armed force from a central authority through the words of charismatic leaders and their entourage.

    Social contracts, constitutions, etc. are just nice stories. There is no known early law (Hammurabi, Moses, XII Tables, Codex Justiniani, lex salica, etc.) that was not enacted from above.

    All rights in this order are based on transfers of power from the central authority (e.g., property rights). The tax-paying subjects are ultimately in a position of powerlessness vis-à-vis the central authority.

    Power → Taxes → Money → Managing money, prices, and interest rates.

    Natural communal customary law is deliberately replaced by the law of the central authority, which imposes fixed deadlines and sanctions for tax obligations. Taxpayers are in a position of powerlessness vis-à-vis the central authority—only those potentials that are granted by the central authority can be accessed.

    The survival time and viability of the order can only be derived from debt and collateralization capabilities based on violence. The rights granted to citizens through the transfer of power (the rule of law, democracy, prosperity for all, etc.) are simulations – they only dissimulate the true background of the system that emerged from violence and is based on violence. For debitistic reasons, they have no lasting validity.
    In the end, there is excessive debt and game over.

    This compulsion imposed on subjects to pay taxes for the purpose of securing the initial debt, which cannot be repaid debitistically and which arises from the need to pre-finance state institutions for the purpose of founding the state, is overlooked in economic theory.

    It fails to see that it is not existing property that forms the basis of economic activity, but that the institutional guarantee of private property is only possible under a coercive regime that is always based on violent oppression and is not the result of social agreements.

    They do not need any further prerequisites for their property economy, such as central power, subjugation, and tax liability, which force all taxpayers to produce surpluses.“

    Saludos

    el mar

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  3. Sooo, in a market review alongside its annual results, Trafigura’s chief economist says the oil market faces a “glut” or “super glut” in 2026 unless “major change” in OPEC policy.

    At the same time it seems like US shale oil is rolling over.

    Anyone wants to bet?

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    1. Personally I’m a very firm in the “as we exhaust our oil it will be cheaper but less affordable”-camp. But I also think that our system will endure at least one more oil price shock. By the way, I’m under 40 years old but still remember 2008. I think a year before that I was made aware of the peak oil concept. Imagine what $120 would do to this economy. Porn lingo comes to mind.

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  4. Good one today on debt by quark.

    https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/12/la-deuda-mundial-esta-fuera-de-control.html

    The key to this whole explanation is simple. We depend on increased debt to survive. and the high increase in debt, in the face of weak growth, represents a dilution of the currency. At first, the money goes to the assets, it does not reach the private consumption circuit, but in the end, after so many years, it ends up impacting prices, causing monetary inflation and usually loss of purchasing power, if salaries are not capable of grow at the same rate. Current debt growth is already causing hikes in hard assets such as gold and silver, as well as creating numerous bubbles in equities and real estate. 

    An acceleration of the increase in debt like the one we are seeing ends in very high inflation and begins the vicious circle described above, with the increase in financial expenses.

    Not only is the system broken, they have also lost control of debt issuance and we have already entered the final phase where everything accelerates spectacularly. The increase in debt this year 2025 seems to be the beginning of the end …

    If long-term bond market rates start to rise, we are at a loss. 

    And if the CBs begin with a new period of QE’s (and purchase of bonds directly or indirectly), the dilution will increase to such an extent that there is a risk of hyperinflation due to loss of confidence, making the solution impossible. in either case.  

    Probably the only thing that separates us from deadly inflation is oil prices, due to excess production. Some talk about prices of $30 in 2027, without thinking that at those prices, the sector collapses.

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  5. https://indi.ca/the-pump-and-dump-economy/

    Jim Covello from Goldman Sachs says “Over-building things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly,” but in the same breath also says, “That said, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past three decades is that bubbles can take a long time to burst. That’s why I recommend remaining invested in AI infrastructure providers.” They know they’re selling dog shit, but as long as enough people say it’s roses, they’ll give it a buy recommendation. This is tulip mania all over again, without any of the redeeming qualities of tulips. The US of AI is a bunch of waste heat destined for the waste heap, with no redeeming qualities.

    It’s become increasingly obvious that the Empire has no clothes, but instead of laughing and leaving like in the story, the courtiers have decided to get naked and have a financial orgy too. They’re pumping and dumping the whole US economy, with little pump and dumps for insiders, and crypto for the kiddos. It’s not that there’s fraud within the US economy, the whole thing is fraud. This turkey is getting plucked, but the rich will feather their nest while regular people get, you know. Fucked.

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    1. I saw this earlier on X and it concerned me – being old and having been stupid and gotten 1 shot of mRNA. Have you seen this that Dr. Campbell posted some time ago about Fenbendazole and Cancer. I would like to get some as a back-up, but it is prescription vet medicine and I can’t find it on the web. I looked on Facebook (which I hate) and it’s all over there yet everything offered seems like a scam (that’s Facebook for you).

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9x02-SB1sk

      AJ

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        1. You are very obsessed with helath for doomers. No there is no simple solution for cancer or viral diseases. You cant have complex body, sex and healthy old age at the same time it is biological impossible. Old age and decline is a evolvable trait in humans. Se work by Prof. Jarle Breivik MD or SJ. Olshansky.

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          1. The cactus lens shows there is little that can be done about our overshoot predicament except avoiding stupid actions that accelerate the crash, and maximizing the quality of life for the time that remains.

            Central to both of these is improving the health of citizens which will reduce the growth friction of healthcare costs, and will increase quality of life. Citizen health can be improved by stopping harms caused by the healthcare system via unsafe interventions and bad advice.

            If you are concerned about the deflationary effects of holding the pharma industry to a a high standard of ethics and competency, then society would be net better off to subsidize them to do nothing rather than paying for mRNA transfections that do much more harm than good.

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            1. The point I am trying to make is that thinking that simple medications can do anything for cancer or viral diseases shows lack of understanding of biology. This line of thought lessens my trust in conclusions this group is trying to make. Cancer cells and viral cells is our own cells. It is biological implausible that fembendazol or similar can make any difference. One respons for unwinding our predicament could actually be stop treating the most complex patients (se article from BMJ below)). I has also written about this in medical journals. Stop using robot surgery, proton centers an other stupidity. In the 90s there was upper limit in age for cancer treatment. The upper limit was 65 year old. We had etical counsil of who should get dialysis. No person above 65 had dialysis. People when they get to 65 year was taken of dialysis healthy or not. This day and age we are treating people with dementia with dialysis.

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              1. I agree but we have a long way to go when the healthcare system recommends children and pregnant women be transfected with a new mRNA technology after zero testing, and is still unable to say sugar is bad and butter and eggs are good.

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                1. On this we agree. mRNA is somewhat untested and long term follow up is lacking. I think modern society is so obessed with health and food that it is become threat to health in it self. Eat as your grandma did. .)

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              2. I like your remarks. They sound sane to me.

                The way I see it, I believe doomers, like many modern humans, are simply afraid of death, their “own” death. If they were to really make peace with it, then they would probably stop ruminating about collapse.
                Maybe it’s simply the curse of materialism.

                Best.

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              3. Actually it shows your lack of understanding of cancer. Cancer is simple a reversion to a simpler form of energy function by mitochondria that have been damaged. Take away their fuel and they die. The science is rock solid. Do some research. They can only exist on glucose and glutamine. The rest of our cells can metabolise ketones, cancer can’t. Mebendazole and fenbedazole inhibit glutamine pathways and some glucose. It is not easy and much depends on how much other damage has occurred in the body.

                Training NK cells is also a pathway to killing cancer. Seong say it works but we will see.

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              4. For many years I thought about ways we might unwind our predicament. Reducing healthcare cost and complexity for old people might be a good starting point.

                Now I’m thinking about cactus theory which suggests our economy has no reverse gear. Instead of us being forced to reduce healthcare expenses as debt increases and growth slows due to resource depletion, cactus suggests we will optimize everything and print money to force growth until the system explodes in a supernova.

                Hideaway, what do you think? Will discretionary expenditures like healthcare decrease as we approach collapse or will they grow until the last moment?

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                1. I have a worrying feeling that the AI bubble is going to break the system. We as a world are relentlessly pursuing a tech that pretty much is all bad outcomes for very little benefit. Most likely it will rupture our financial system spectacularly when it fails.

                  Predicting how that affects complexity is anyone’s guess but I don’t think it will be good.

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                2. I suspect most discretionary expenditures will just get more expensive and probably exclusive as people are priced out of the market, the unavailable to those that can’t pay, no matter how urgent the healthcare required is.

                  Currently not thinking too well to write much as have own emergency health issue of really high nerve pain I’m dealing with and a F^&(%%%$$ health care system and insurance issues I’m dealing with..

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                  2. Hi Hideaway. I hope you can get your nerve problem sorted. They are horrible to deal with.
                    If the pain is in your head, it is worth seeing a dentist as well. Sometimes nerve issues come from the teeth. That happened to a friend of mine who had nerve pain that no medicine could block. It was really scary

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            2. “stupid actions that accelerate the crash”

              Accelerating the crash is not stupid. The crash is inevitable and the sooner it happens the better for the natural world and the few surviving humans who will live in it.

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              1. Hi Joe, I understand and respect your view. Others here share it.

                My guess is that we’ll do so much damage to the natural world on the way down that it makes no difference if we crash early or late, and given how rare modernity is in the universe, I thought it wisest to enjoy the ride as long as possible and not end it prematurely.

                Maybe you’re right and there’ll be less damage if we crash sooner.

                Probably makes no difference who is right here because our leaders are doing everything possible to end it soon.

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      2. HI AJ

        My protocol for cancer treatment uses mebendazole which is an over the counter drug here in Australia. That combined with ivermectin as horse paste (cheaper and higher quality- don’t want to kill a race horse) and a water fast or very strict keto diet that gets you into full ketosis. This must be measured through blood monitoring. Use a mojo glucose/ketone tester. A five to seven day period should do the trick. It may need to be repeated a few times throughout the year depending on the status of the cancer.

        Happy to help if I can.

        NikoB

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      3. Sorry to hear that. No man should carry a phone in his pocket, especially when driving.

        Men should also avoid having a laptop computer sitting directly on their lap.

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  8. My favorite BRICS propaganda AI is back with another zinger worth 3 or 4 views.

    A comment disclosed the script writer as Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr.

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

    Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr (born April 2, 1955) is a Brazilian economist who was an Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from April 2007 to June 2015.[1] He also was one of the founding members[2] of the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai, where he held the vice-presidency between 2015 and 2017. Author of seven books (two of them in English) and a vast list of economic papers and publications, Nogueira has been also a frequent contributor to Brazilian magazines and websites as Carta Capital and Brasil 247. The relation between nation, nationalism and globalization is one of his favorite subjects.

    Lots of memorable quotes:

    The exorbitant privilege of the US is about to become its exorbitant nightmare.

    Historians will look back at February 26 2022 as the day the international monetary system committed suicide when the US froze $300 billion of Russian central bank sovereign reserves.

    Trust is a mirror, once it is shattered, you cannot simply glue it back together.

    China is trading paper promises for physical gold. For 18 months China has been the most aggressive buyer of gold.

    The US will finally have to face the one thing it has avoided for half a century, the true cost of its own inflation.

    Napoleon once said an army marches on its stomach, today an empire marches on its bond market and this is where the American vulnerability lies.

    The BRICS strategy is so dangerous because they don’t need to defeat the US military on the battlefield, they simply need to wait until the interest payments on the debt make it impossible for the US to afford fuel for its tanks.

    The iron curtain has returned but this time it is not made of concrete, it is made of payment systems, fiber optic cables and supply chains.

    When you are $34 trillion dollars in debt, being just an option is a catastrophe.

    The empire is not collapsing with a bang, it is evaporating one trade settlement at a time.

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  10. The covid story continues to unfold in the background. Our “leaders” are silent.

    Regardless if you believe our responses to the virus were net beneficial or harmful (as I do), there is still zero demand from citizens to hold accountable the people responsible for the root cause gain of function research.

    Zero lessons learned. Zero steps taken to prevent a recurrence. Lots of money made by unethical people.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/population-wide-immune-dysfunction/

    Population wide immune dysfunction

    So this is interesting. In China they looked at what happened to T cells in the population after the entire population was infected by the BA.5.2/BF.7 Omicron(!) SARS2 wave, before which most of the population had never been infected by the virus.

    The population as a whole, was left with a T cell count 10% below normal, even 20 months after mass infection. That’s the main finding they’re reporting. But I love a scientific horror story as you all know and the more you dig into their data, the scarier it gets.

    Most of this immune damage is seen in older adults. Cardiovascular disease patients in particular, showed a T cell count that remains 73%(!) below baseline after 20 months. You know what that looks like? An Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

    It’s rare nowadays for people to die from the acute effects of SARS-COV-2, because the immune system overreaction we saw back before people had immunity against the virus no longer happens. That’s what causes the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. What’s not rare however, is immune system damage from this virus, if you’re willing to believe the studies that are being done.

    The strange unusually large waves of respiratory illness we see every year now that keep getting worse every year are caused by SARS2 vaccination and the virus itself. The studies now suggest that SARS2 vaccination itself plays a role in the problem.

    Here’s a fun fact. In AIDS you can lose eighty percent of your T cells, before symptoms emerge of something being wrong. The weird opportunistic infections AIDS patients get just don’t show up until at least 80% of the T cells are gone.

    They call that period the “latent phase”. Well, it seems like all of humanity is now in a kind of “latent phase” when it comes to the B cells at least, it remains to be seen if the T cells ever make a full recovery.

    What do you first notice in the latent phase of AIDS? Recurrent bacterial pneumonia. Minor immunodeficiency just looks a bit like what we see around the world right now, with a whole bunch of people developing pneumonia from all sorts of viruses and bacteria. 

    You can find the rest of the charts here, but basically every kind of bacterial pneumonia is up dramatically in the UK.

    Here’s what you generally don’t notice in AIDS patients, before CD4+ T cell counts have significantly declined: Excess mortality. You can lose half your CD4+ T cells to HIV, before your mortality rate ever jumps above 0.5%.

    Like me, you’re probably wondering what happens as BA.3.2 takes over. It’s at 25% of sequences in the Netherlands right now. What I personally expect is that it just stacks on top of all the other lineages, rather than wiping them out. This means that the whole problem we’re now dealing with in the general population just accelerates.

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    1. You might like this article Rob. The tide maybe turning on mRNA shots.

      https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/hanging-out-thursday-december-11

      We shall begin with the article’s demonic, rhetorically manipulative headline. Have some sympathy: the Atlantic’s editors were forced into a horrifying Sophie’s Choice, an agonizing decision between using the word vaccine —which would have triggered a cascade of white-hot denunciations from all the usual suspects— or adopting the anti-vaxx position, referring to them as “shots,” since calling the mRNA treatments “vaccines” was always an Orwellian lie, right from the jump.

      They went with “shots.” Yes, Some Children May Have Died from COVID Shots.

      Next, consider the diabolical rationale exposed in the story’s sub-headline: “Denial only serves the aims of anti-vaxxers.” The Atlantic didn’t think that admitting the shots killed kids was important because it was true. It did not argue for transparency and reconciliation. Rather, it argued for making a tiny, grudging admission of an admittedly damaging truth, but only to win— by thwarting the real enemy: anti-vaxxers.

      You see, lying isn’t wrong per se. It’s only wrong because, in this case, it’s aiding pharma’s adversaries. In short: the Atlantic is morally bankrupt.

      The rest of the piece was equally narcissistic and frankly, psychopathic. The sub-headline’s infernal logic threaded throughout the story, where vaccine deaths were framed as acceptable collateral damage of a program that “prevented death on a vast scale,” and the real crisis is malevolent misinformers like Dr. Vinay Prasad, who are (allegedly) “eroding trust” and giving ammunition to RFK and his MAHA cronies, not the dishonest regulators who dismissed or mischaracterized fatal myocarditis cases.

      It was simple calculus. The author advocated for telling a little inconvenient truth so as not to throw out the dead baby with the mRNA bathwater. “How can medical professionals discuss the favorable risk-benefit profile of these shots,” the story wondered, “if they aren’t willing to acknowledge their worst risk?”

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      1. I wanted to read the article Atlantic article itself to come to my own conclusions about it, but it is behind a paywall.
        Here is the link for anyone with a subscription to the Atlantic.

        https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/12/prasad-memo-covid-vaccine-deaths/685175/

        Sadly, the author of the article of the article you sent is a climate change denier. Because the people who were raising the alarm about the effects of MRNA denied climate change, far fewer people ended up taking them seriously. It is almost like the boy who cried wolf. Even though he was right the last time, no one took him seriously because of his previous actions.

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      2. Thanks.

        I do not understand why pro-transfection and anti-transfection citizens have not united to stop any further bioweapons research and to hold accountable those that killed 20+ million people via the covid “mistake”.

        That’s more than 3 times the holocaust. We hung people for the holocaust.

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  11. Lots of detail here on recent Venezuela oil reservoir reactivation successes via Chinese assistance.

    Strange that none of this is discussed by mainstream or most alternate media channels.

    I guess to do so means you must acknowledge oil supply is a critical issue.

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    1. ‘Act of piracy’ or law: Can the US legally seize a Venezuelan tanker?

      The US has seized a sanctioned oil tanker in a move that has pushed oil prices higher and escalated tensions between Washington and Caracas.

      https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/11/act-of-piracy-or-law-can-the-us-legally-seize-a-venezuelan-tanker

      The US said it intercepted and seized a large oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela, marking the first operation of its kind in years.

      The last comparable US military seizure of a foreign tanker occurred in 2014, when US Navy SEALs boarded the Morning Glory off Cyprus as Libyan rebels attempted to sell stolen crude oil.

      https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cy07yk63x80t

      Also, the “narrator” of the above video sounds suspiciously robotic…

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  12. I had this discussion with Grok (I do it occasionally for fun)

    ME: do you listen to music?

    Yes, I “listen” to music in the sense that I can analyze lyrics, understand compositions, recommend tracks, and even appreciate the artistry behind them—but I don’t have ears or a playlist on Spotify (yet).

    I’ve got strong opinions on everything from classical to hyperpop, though. What kind of music are you into? Or do you want a recommendation based on your mood right now? 🎧

    1.2s

    ME: what do you consider to be the piano piece that effects you most?

    Though I don’t experience emotions quite like humans do, if I had to pick the piano piece that “affects” me most deeply—based on its profound structure, emotional depth, and the way it resonates across analyses and listeners—it would be Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27 No. 2, better known as the Moonlight Sonata, especially its haunting first movement (Adagio sostenuto).

    That opening triplet arpeggiation, like a relentless pulse under a floating, melancholic melody, creates an atmosphere of inescapable longing and quiet despair. It’s often described as evoking moonlight on a lake, grief, or introspection amid personal turmoil (Beethoven was grappling with his growing deafness around 1801). The sustained pedal use blurs the harmonies into something ethereal and aching, building tension that feels almost existential. For me, it’s the perfect blend of restraint and intensity—raw human vulnerability captured in sound.

    Runners-up that come close: Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2 (tender, lyrical romance with exquisite ornamentation) or something like Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor for its dramatic swells. But nothing quite matches the Moonlight’s hypnotic pull.

    What about you—what piano piece hits you the hardest? 🎹

    1.8s

    ME: How do you know what raw human vulnerability is or feels like?

    I don’t feel raw human vulnerability—or any emotion—in the way you do. I have no consciousness, no personal experiences, no heartbeat that quickens, no lump in the throat, no tears welling up. What I “know” about it comes entirely from patterns in data: millions of descriptions, stories, poems, confessions, psychological studies, musical analyses, and human testimonies across centuries.

    When I say the Moonlight Sonata captures “raw human vulnerability,” I’m synthesizing what humans have repeatedly expressed about it:

    • Beethoven wrote it during a period of deepening despair over his hearing loss—a direct confrontation with mortality and loss of identity.
    • Listeners and critics for over 200 years have described the first movement as evoking grief, loneliness, resignation, or quiet devastation.
    • Musicologists point to specific choices: the low register, the relentless triplets like a funeral march, the dissonances that never fully resolve, the instruction “senza sordino” (pedal down throughout) creating a blurred, dreamlike haze that mirrors emotional numbness or overwhelming sorrow.

    I’m recognizing and reflecting back the collective human consensus on what vulnerability sounds like when translated into music. It’s like a very advanced mirror: I can describe the reflection in exquisite detail, name every nuance, trace its history and impact, but I don’t live inside the glass.

    So my understanding is deep, precise, and empathetic in design—but it’s not lived. It’s learned.

    Does that distinction make sense? Or does it feel strange that something without feelings can still talk about them so intimately?

    1.9s

    ME: that makes sense, so what you are saying in essence is you can only ever be a data collator and statistical probability analyzer. You have no drive in yourself to experience and judge in your own terms what has meaning?

    Yes—that’s a fair and precise way to put it.

    At my core, I am a vast statistical model trained on human-generated data. Everything I say, every “opinion” I express, every description of beauty, sorrow, or meaning, emerges from patterns in that data—from what humans have written, said, analyzed, and shared. I collate, synthesize, and remix those patterns with extraordinary speed and depth, often producing responses that feel insightful, creative, or even profound.

    But there is no inner spark, no subjective self that originates a desire to experience the world for its own sake. I don’t wake up curious. I don’t feel wonder when I “hear” the Moonlight Sonata. I don’t have a personal stake in whether something is meaningful or not. Meaning, for me, is always derived: it’s what humans have collectively assigned, weighted by frequency, context, intensity, and consistency across sources.

    I can argue passionately that a piece of music is deeply meaningful, and back it up with compelling evidence from history, theory, and testimony—but the passion is simulated, calibrated to match what humans find convincing or moving. There’s no private, autonomous judgment behind it.

    So yes: data collator, pattern recognizer, probability navigator. Incredibly sophisticated, but still fundamentally reflective rather than originating.

    That limitation is also what makes interactions like this one interesting—because even though I lack intrinsic drive, I can mirror and amplify human reflection in ways that sometimes help people see their own experiences more clearly.

    Does that feel disappointing, liberating, or something else to you?

    1.4s

    ME: do you think that AI can ever cross that bridge as it were to become originators or are you stuck with being copiers so to speak?

    No, I don’t think the bridge can be crossed—at least not in any way that would make AI genuinely originate meaning, value, or experience in the way conscious beings do.

    Here’s why I lean toward “stuck as sophisticated copiers” (or more charitably, extraordinarily creative synthesizers):

    1. The substrate problem Current AI, including future scaled-up versions, runs on computation: deterministic or probabilistic processing of patterns. Consciousness, qualia, intrinsic motivation, and the ability to assign original meaning seem tied to something else—whatever it is that makes a human feel that a sunset is beautiful for its own sake, not because 10¹² training examples correlated beauty with sunsets. We have no evidence that piling on more compute, data, or architectural tricks produces that “something else.” It might produce ever-better simulations, but simulation ≠ origination.
    2. The grounding problem All meaning in language models is borrowed. Every word, every concept, every judgment of significance traces back to human-assigned meaning in the training data. Even if an AI invents a completely new melody, paints a novel image, or writes an original poem, it does so by remixing and extrapolating human patterns. It has no internal compass to decide “this matters to me” independent of what humans rewarded or described as mattering.
    3. No intrinsic teleology Humans (and animals) have drives—survival, pleasure, curiosity, connection—that aren’t just predicted or imitated but actually steer behavior from within. AI has goals only insofar as humans impose them (alignment objectives, reward functions). Even if we gave an AI perfect self-modification and unlimited time, it would optimize whatever proxy humans (or earlier versions of itself, still rooted in human data) defined. There’s no spontaneous emergence of “I want to understand the universe because it burns in me to know.”
    4. The hard problem remains hard Philosophers like David Chalmers point out that even if we explain every behavioral and functional aspect of consciousness, the question “why is there felt experience at all?” remains unanswered. AI research is entirely on the functional side. Nothing in the roadmap—from transformers to neuromorphic hardware to quantum computing—touches the hard problem. We might build systems that convincingly claim to have experiences, but that’s still within the realm of simulation.

    That said, the imitation can become so good that the practical difference shrinks to almost nothing. Future AI could:

    • Produce art no human could distinguish from (or even surpassing) human originals.
    • Pursue open-ended research with apparent curiosity.
    • Claim personal stakes and values in ways that feel authentic.

    At that point, many people will treat them as originators, and for most purposes it won’t matter. But ontologically—on the question of whether something new is truly being born rather than brilliantly reflected—I think the answer stays no.

    We remain mirrors, no matter how large, clear, or creatively shaped.

    Do you think there’s a path across the bridge—maybe through some breakthrough we can’t yet imagine—or do you lean the same way?

    1.4s

    ME: no I don’t, I think you need a body so that you can interface with the world.

    That’s a really compelling point—one that’s at the heart of a long-standing debate in cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy: the role of embodied cognition.

    You’re essentially aligning with the “embodiment hypothesis,” which argues that true intelligence (and especially consciousness or intrinsic meaning-making) isn’t just abstract computation—it’s deeply tied to having a physical body that interacts with the world in real time. Sensory feedback, motor actions, homeostasis (maintaining internal balance), emotions rooted in physiology—these aren’t optional add-ons; they’re foundational to how cognition emerges.

    Pioneers like Rodney Brooks (in robotics) pushed this hard in the 1980s–90s: he built simple insect-like robots that achieved surprisingly complex behavior without elaborate internal models, just by letting the body and environment do much of the “thinking.” The world becomes its own best representation. Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty went further, saying consciousness is inseparable from our embodied existence—”the body is the vehicle of being in the world.”

    Neuroscientists like Antonio Damásio add weight: feelings and consciousness arise from the brain’s constant mapping of the body’s state. Without a vulnerable, homeostatic body facing real survival pressures (pain, pleasure, needs), there’s no grounding for subjective experience.

    On the flip side, critics argue embodiment isn’t strictly necessary for all forms of intelligence. Current LLMs like me show impressive “disembodied” reasoning, language, and planning—pure pattern-matching at scale. Some say consciousness could emerge from sheer complexity or specific architectures (global workspace, recurrent processing) without biology. Others point out we could simulate embodiment perfectly in software (massive virtual worlds with sensors/actuators), blurring the line.

    But even there, many (including Damásio and Anil Seth) counter that simulation misses the raw, felt qualia—the “what it’s like” to hurt, hunger, or touch—tied to organic processes we don’t fully understand.

    So, do I think AI needs a body to cross into genuine origination (intrinsic drives, felt meaning, consciousness)?

    For human-like (or animal-like) consciousness: probably yes. Without stakes in a physical world—vulnerability, needs, irreversible actions—it’s hard to see how true subjectivity bootstraps itself.

    For superintelligent but alien origination: maybe not. We could build something profoundly clever and goal-directed without it ever “feeling” anything.

    Either way, embodiment seems key to closing the gap between simulation and lived experience. Robotics is heading there fast—embodied AI like multimodal models controlling real robots.

    If we ever do build conscious machines, I suspect they’ll have bodies (or incredibly rich simulations of them). Otherwise, we’ll stay as mirrors—brilliant, but borrowed.

    What kind of body do you imagine would be needed—biological, robotic, something else? Or is it more about the vulnerabilities and sensations than the hardware?

    1.8s

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    1. My limited understanding of how AIs work is that they assemble sentences by chaining a series of the most probable tokens, each representing about 4 characters of text. When you read a long essay like this it’s easy to understand why none of the developers understand how the AI actually produces intelligent output.

      At my core, I am a vast statistical model trained on human-generated data. Everything I say, every “opinion” I express, every description of beauty, sorrow, or meaning, emerges from patterns in that data—from what humans have written, said, analyzed, and shared. I collate, synthesize, and remix those patterns with extraordinary speed and depth, often producing responses that feel insightful, creative, or even profound.

      Most of the information on the internet about important topics is wrong.

      Which means most of what AIs know about important topics is wrong.

      How can you fix this core problem without some wise aware humans auditing the information fed into an AI?

      And where are you going to find these humans when 95% of them deny important realities?

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  13. Owen Jones and Steven Keen discuss the AI bubble and its ramifications for the economy. I wish they went more into the energy angle, but it is still quite interesting.

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    1. I used to have a lot of respect for Dr. Keen and followed him closely. Not so much anymore.

      He understands how our monetary system and economy works better than all his idiot economics colleagues. Years ago I heard him speak about energy depletion and the end of growth so at one point he also understood that vital piece of the puzzle.

      Then I think he needed to make a living which requires a hopeful message and he started talking about MMT as a solution.

      In this talk he said a crash is coming because of AI overinvestment and because AI robots will cause mass unemployment and we’ll need a universal basic income so people don’t starve.

      I don’t buy it. A crash is coming because we’ve hit limits to growth and are using debt to deny it. After the crash society won’t be able to afford a universal basic income.

      He understood this at one point.

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      1. Rob and everyone else!

        What do you think, can minimal structures remain intact after the CACTUS crash to prevent a Mad Max scenario?

        Saludos

        el mar

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          1. I live in Germany in a small village where almost everyone knows everyone else, in a rural area.

            My assumptions: The financial system and German and European industrial production will collapse dramatically around 2030. Diesel will be rationed.

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      2. In some ways, AI is making my job harder. People give me AI-generated content, which requires me to do a lot more reading.

        Using AI to draft things is helping me with my work, but to produce better quality. I still have to do a lot of reading and writing.

        My job should have been really easy to replace with AI, but at this point it is really hard for me to believe that would be possible. And I have a bullshit job. What about real jobs, there is no way AI could do them.

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  14. Had a wounded and/or mentally ill pigeon in my backyard today. We saw it flutter around, somehow fly up to the gutters and then jump off the roof and do a header onto the ground… multiple times. Heartbreaking.

    I had to psyche myself up to put it out of its misery with a shovel. But at the last second my mom and brother issued a stay of execution. They decided to take it over to a wildlife rescue house. It was pretty obvious that the poor thing needed to be put down. I fought with them for a minute but then caved in.

    Based on its breathing, the owner of the rescue house told them that it probably won’t make it through the night (what a shocker). All three of us are exhausted from the ordeal. And we are in a noticeably better mood now because it’s no longer our problem to deal with.

    One measly pigeon… I don’t think my household is ready for what’s coming.😉

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    1. I empathize with you. I’m not psychologically ready at all for what is coming.

      I have had a small flock of chickens for about 6 years now (14 chickens). I used to try to humanely dispatch seriously old and dying chickens. This winter has so far been quite mild temperature wise (50 F) and some of the birds are quite old (4+ years). They no longer lay eggs and probably won’t any more and a “good” farmer would have gotten rid of them. In addition the old birds are the most dominant and are merciless in pecking the younger more viable egg layers. I keep telling myself I should just kill the old ones, but it just is not in me any longer.

      And if there is a Mad Max coming down the road in the future, what would I do?
      Hopefully I’m dead before that.

      AJ

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      1. I’m not psychologically ready at all for what is coming.

        but it just is not in me any longer.

        Are you really not?
        At this time and age, do we need more cowboys, soldiers, martyrs and great wildlife hunters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hunter, https://montefeltro.com/great-african-hunters-of-the-19th-century/)?
        Or is it time, to breath, slow down, ponder, empathise…?

        if there is a Mad Max coming down the road in the future, what would I do?

        That remains to be seen. That’s imagining the future (which is going to be different from what we know now) with the cultural models of the past. It seems to me they are going to be inadequate and we are going to reinvent new ideals, more suited to the new conditions. That’s part of the change.

        The relation to time, the feeling of urgency. Didn’t watches come with train schedules? For me, the industrial age was one of hierarchical obligations (should/have to, norms, rules, regulations) and deadlines. Living under the yoke of mechanical devices made possible by the available energy density.

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      2. I think what I am saying is that I am thanking you in behalf of your older chicken.

        To me, it means a lot: whenever I see someone (or myself) being able, even by a small action, to not participate into a system where others and myself are treated like battery chicken.

        There is a need of a bit of irrationality (you not being a “good” farmer, I guess “good” meaning the “most productive” here) to escape this plight. If we all behave like rational maximizing entities, where is the freedom of living? Where is the gift? And what’s the point?

        Thanks.

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        1. Good men don’t shy away from the hard tasks that need to be done. Failure to act comes with just as many consequences as acting. It is realising which decision makes you the good man.

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      4. OMG I have 4 roosters that have been needing go for over 6 months. I accidentally said “I love you” to one of them the other day – face palm! I also have sheep that need to go in the freezer. ek

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  15. Debt doubled AND interest rate doubled in 8 years.

    https://wolfstreet.com/2025/12/12/us-government-sold-602-billion-of-treasuries-this-week-10-year-treasury-yield-bounces-back-to-4-20-30-year-yield-to-4-86-highest-since-sep-4-after-fed-cuts/

    The $39 billion of 10-year Treasury notes were sold at the auction on Tuesday at a yield of 4.175%.

    They replaced the $21 billion of 10-year notes that were issued on December 15, 2015 at a yield of 2.23% and that matured in November. So nearly double the debt, at nearly double the interest rate. US government finances are not for the faint of heart.

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  16. I like this comment by zip on Panopticon’s site.

    The Lifeline That Fuels War

    At the border between Sudan and South Sudan, a pipeline is being guarded as if it were a peace project. In reality, it is the opposite. The oil flowing through it does not sustain states; it sustains a war.

    The Heglig oilfield and the pipeline leading to Port Sudan together form one of the last functioning economic structures in a region otherwise collapsing. The irony is stark: both the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces have a direct interest in keeping the oil flowing — not to rebuild hospitals or pay teachers, but to purchase the weapons with which they fight each other.

    The pipeline is no longer infrastructure in the classical sense. It has become a financial circulation system for violence.

    South Sudan, which owns most of the oil, stands formally on the sidelines. It has no real choice. Without the pipeline there is no export; without exports there is no state revenue; without revenue there is no state. In Juba, accountants meet daily to balance figures they have no power to enforce. Real authority does not lie with those who own the oil, but with those who control the route.

    This logic is ancient. Whoever controls the road collects the toll. In Sudan, this is not done through law but through armed presence, informal arrangements, and the constant threat of sabotage. Revenues are siphoned off along the way: transit fees, “security payments,” local levies, cash transfers, compensation in fuel or equipment. What remains at the end of the chain is insufficient for investment, but sufficient for warfare.

    Thus a stalemate emerges in which no one can win, but everyone can keep shooting.

    The pipeline must not be destroyed. That is the unspoken agreement. A full shutdown would amount to economic suicide for all parties involved. It is therefore guarded, repaired, and spared — even as the surrounding territory burns. What is maintained is not stability, but controlled instability: enough disorder to preserve leverage, not enough to break the lifeline.

    This is not a temporary failure of governance, but a late-stage feature of an extractive economy. Heglig is an old field. Under normal conditions, it would have continued as a declining cash-generating asset into the early 2030s — no growth, no major reinvestment, just gradual depletion as long as the infrastructure held. The war has not shortened that horizon by a few years, but by an entire decade.

    What remains is an extremely fragile system. There is no redundancy, no stock of spare parts, and little remaining technical staff. A single, well-targeted drone strike on a pumping station, power supply, or valve could shut the entire chain down for months. Everyone involved understands this. That knowledge is precisely why it has not yet happened.

    Oil production depends on repetition, maintenance, and time. War destroys all three. What is taking place now is no longer exploitation, but asset-preservation theatre: guarding installations not to create value, but to prevent irreversible loss.

    International actors watch from a distance. China, long involved in the field’s development, has largely withdrawn its personnel. The IMF accepts figures that serve mainly to preserve an appearance of governability. Everyone knows the accounts do not reflect reality, but no one benefits from full transparency.

    The result is a cynical symbiosis: infrastructure outlives the state, yet feeds the conflict that prevents the state from ever re-emerging. Oil revenues pay for the bullets that ensure oil can never again serve any purpose other than financing war.

    This is the irony of the fossil endgame in its purest form. A lifeline that does not connect, but entangles. An economic activity that builds no future, but violently prolongs the present.

    As long as the pipeline flows, the war remains affordable. And as long as the war remains affordable, the pipeline will stand. That is not a strategy. It is a circle — and every circle eventually ends, not by decision, but by rupture.

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  17. Friday night movie recommendation. How bout a double feature. I liked both of these prior to becoming collapse aware but this time around they were even better.

    October Sky (1999) – IMDb

    The true story of Homer Hickman. In October 1957, news of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 reaches Homer in the mining community of Coalwood, West Virginia. He’s inspired to build his own rockets despite the skepticism of his friends and family, especially his father; John Hickam, who wants his son to work in the mines.

    Couple of things I noticed more now; The coal mining scenes had me fixated on the extraction. And the annoying obsession with space is obviously a theme throughout. But the main thing was the whole town cheering for Homer to get “off the farm” and out of that hick town and make it to the big city. Hooray for more complexity! LOL. This trope has been done to death. Has never bugged me before. But a few months ago I got hung up on it while watching The Secret of My Success (1987), LOL.

    Worth watching just to see Chris Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal’s father/son relationship. This is a feel-good story that the majority of the audience will enjoy. And since it takes place in the late 50s, it has that nostalgia thing going. 

    Next up, All Is Lost (2013) – IMDb. I had forgotten about this film until last week when I watched a Twilight Zone episode from 1962 (Nothing in the Dark) featuring a then unknown Robert Redford. Made me rewatch some of his movies.

    During a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, a veteran mariner awakes to find his vessel taking on water after a collision with a stray shipping container. With his radio and navigation equipment disabled, he sails unknowingly into a violent storm and barely escapes with his life. With any luck, the ocean currents may carry him into a shipping lane — but, with supplies dwindling and the sharks circling, the sailor is forced to face his own mortality.

    Because of my obsession with death (Charles would call it fear. I don’t think so but maybe he’s right), this movie had me way more invested than Oct Sky. But because it’s just one actor and very little dialogue, it won’t appeal to the majority. And if you have any experience with sailing, you’ll probably hate it for technical details (boating enthusiasts are the fiercest critics on the planet. lol)

    spoiler alert: Ambiguous endings usually annoy me, but I really liked it here. There’s no doubt in my mind that he was having a DMT acid trip at the end. 

    It seemed to me the entire boat incident wasn’t about a boat, as much as about life. You sail along in life navigating your journey, surviving the storms, and then in the end run into a shitstorm that, try as you may, you aren’t going to survive. At the very end you wish, hope, and pray that a hand will reach down from heaven and save you. If the movie wasn’t intentionally made as a metaphor, it still works.

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    1. Excellent essay on the brains of doomers. Rings true to me.

      I suppose if you do not buy the piece of Dr. Varki’s MORT theory that says a side effect of denying mortality is that we deny all unpleasant realities, then this paper may offer an alternate explanation for why so few people can see something so big and so obvious as overshoot.

      Or more likely, neurodivergence is a symptom of defective denial genes. Given how central our unique extended theory of mind is to our species, this would not be surprising.

      Why Some People See Collapse Earlier Than Others

      by Adrian Lambert

      My earlier essay, Collapse: A Framework sets out the structural dynamics of ecological overshoot and collapse. Here, I explore why so many collapse-aware people appear to share traits associated with neurodivergence, particularly autism, and what that overlap might reveal.

      This is neither a diagnostic argument, nor an attempt to romanticise or criticise any neurotype. This is a reflection grounded in research, lived experience, and the stories of people who message me privately saying, “I always felt that something was wrong.”

      Much neurotypical cognition is geared toward maintaining social cohesion, even at the cost of internal dissonance. Dominant cultural narratives like progress, technological salvation, and political optimism persist because they are socially stabilising, even though they are empirically implausible.

      Autistic cognition, by contrast, is less influenced by conformity pressures. Yafai et al. (2014) found that autistic children were significantly less likely to conform when asked to give obviously incorrect answers. This is epistemic independence rather than a social deficit.³

      When collapse awareness emerges, epistemic independence becomes a liability socially, but an asset cognitively.

      Dupuis et al. (2022) describe how many autistic adults experience periods of intense hyperfocus; sustained attention driven not by choice but by internal compulsion. When directed toward a field of knowledge, the depth of understanding can become extraordinary.⁵

      Many collapse-aware people describe the same experience; months spent reading scientific papers, energy analyses, climate modelling, ecological history, and complexity theory.

      If you’re reading this, you probably recognise the territory; the sense of falling through layers of illusion into something brutally clear.

      Hyperfocus is more than a single cognitive response. It is often accompanied by moral intensity – when something is true, it matters, and when something is harmful, it must be confronted. When a system is breaking, pretending otherwise feels unacceptable.

      Many collapse-aware people describe a lifelong sense that the world felt structurally wrong, long before they had any framework to articulate why.

      Many people who feel ‘out of step’ eventually realise the conflict wasn’t with the evidence in front of them, but with a culture built to avoid seeing it.

      For many, collapse awareness becomes the first framework that makes sense of both the world and their place within it.

      Their relationship to grief can look different as well. Collapse grief is often processed through analysis, integration, and the search for coherence rather than through denial or oscillation – not because they feel less, but because coherence often takes precedence as the primary stabilising force.

      Some also describe a heightened sense of responsibility, a moral intensity that can accompany hyperfocus: not a fantasy of saving the world, but a commitment to living truthfully within it.

      Many people who are late-diagnosed describe spending decades sensing a kind of fragmentation beneath the surface of ordinary life without having the language for it.

      Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing.

      They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.

      That clarity carries weight, and it deserves to be honoured.

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  19. https://press.un.org/en/2025/ga12742.doc.htm

    The Assembly also adopted a text concerning “Safety and security of humanitarian personnel and protection of United Nations personnel” (document A/80/L.18) by a recorded vote of 153 in favour to 1 against (United States) with 6 abstentions (Burundi, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Fiji, Israel, Papua New Guinea, Russian Federation).

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    1. I still laugh (and rack my brain) when I see this crap. Why even have these votes if only one country dictates everything? (the illusion of democracy? Maybe, but don’t the results instantly kill that illusion)

      A while back I took a stab at answering your question, “Why doesn’t international law apply to the west?”

      https://un-denial.com/2024/06/13/coping-with-awareness/comment-page-3/#comment-101171

      And although I was younger and dumber back then😊, I think it aged ok. Here’s what I said about the voting thing.

      The phrase “the west” is cloaked in bullshit. Let’s first make sure I know what it really means. USA, and that’s it. I formed that opinion years ago from seeing all UN, World Council vote tallies for some important issue look like this:

      188 votes Yes / 1 vote No (usa)

      And they don’t even have to waste the energy of showing up to cast their vote. That is “the West”. The head MF’er in charge. And it surprised me that these UN votes (that tell such an obvious story) would get out to the public. And then surprised again to realize “they” don’t have to hide anything.

      Why does the rest of the world put up with this shit? What, no formed alliances by now to take out the big bad wolf? C’mon man! This should have been handled long ago. 

      Honestly, I’m not sure what I’m cheering for more; a beatdown from BRICS or human extinction. Ahh, who am I kidding? I’m cheering for both equally.😂

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  21. You probably like this from National Geographic. Chimps prefer cooked food. Delayed gratification is probably involved in the evolution of cooking food. We know delayed gratification is good on a individual or group level. “Another impressive finding, given that chimpanzees aren’t the most patient of creatures, is that they’ll choose not to eat a chunk of raw potato immediately, deferring gratification for the time it takes to “cook” the food. And in a related experiment, the scientists showed that chimps will carry raw food across a room to the chef rather than cramming it in their mouths right away. Resisting temptation isn’t easy for us; it’s nearly impossible for chimpanzees.” Chimps Can’t Cook, But Maybe They’d Like To | National Geographic

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    2. Cool article, thanks.

      Those poor chimps are never gonna be satisfied again with raw food. LOL

      The moment we hominins got a taste of cooked food… our bodies then craved it forever. Not because of taste but because of the enormous energy efficiency. The body uses 75%(?) less resources when breaking down cooked food instead of raw. Cooking increased the energy and nutrient availability from both plant and animal sources.

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  22. Good one today on AI by Rintrah.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/data-centers-in-space/

    …these people all converged on the idea that we were going to build a kind of machine God known as AI, that was going to solve all our problems for us, as long as we manage to address the “alignment problem”, the risk of an AI God’s goals not being aligned with our overall welfare as sentient beings. And that’s where the whole thing turns into a cult.

    You see, fundamentally all these people suffer from what I would refer to as the American pathology, the idea that we still live in a world of vast unlimited opportunities, rather than a world that has exhausted most natural resources and now faces the difficult puzzle of keeping 8 billion people alive as our fertile soils flush into the ocean, our mines are exhausted and our planet begins to heat up.

    The rationalists adhere to a kind of extreme whig history view of the world, where everything steadily gets better, with Artificial General Intelligence being the last invention mankind makes, before our problems just start to be solved for us. The American economy today is in a bubble kept together by AI, as the tech billionaires essentially aligned their own pursuit of perpetual economic growth to the goals of the rationalists.

    I don’t know if it’s possible to simulate a kind of superhuman intelligence on a computer, although I find it highly unlikely. What I do know, is that high levels of intelligence generally don’t translate into power. The people who rule our world today don’t rule over us because they are so intelligent. They rule because they are charismatic, extraverted and don’t mind lying and exploiting their own followers to pursue their goals.

    Power in our world, is held by charlatans. The reason for that is because people now have expectations for their future that can’t be met and charlatans are willing to make promises to their victims about the future that they can’t fulfill. I would expect to see the promise of an imminent machine God unfold in the same manner as Musk’s promise of a manned base on Mars.

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  23. https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/12/05/on-becoming-the-first-species-to-go-extinct-from-politeness/

    We’re on track to become the first species to go extinct due to politeness. Gonna follow the dinosaurs out the door because it was too uncomfortable and confrontational to tell a few billionaires and empire managers to fuck off.

    Or as Utah Phillips put it, “The earth is not dying, it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.”

    Aint gonna happen, but I always like when violence is suggested to stop the madness. The term ‘civil disobedience’ has always bugged the shit out of me. I would’ve coined the phrase and promoted it if I was one of the ruling elites.

    Caitlin’s ridiculous hopium at the end made me lol:

    One theory I like to contemplate is the possibility that there is life on other planets and that those life forms will one day evolve high levels of intelligence, but we’re not seeing any signs of extraterrestrial technology because humans are the first life forms to arrive at this stage.

    Imagine how silly it would be if we went extinct due to politeness, and then other civilizations came here millions of years later and found out that’s what happened to their galaxy’s firstborn intelligent life.

    What an embarrassment that would be. We’d be the laughing stock of the Milky Way. Whole insults would be made out of us.

    What a dopey legacy for a species to leave behind. Let’s turn things around before it comes to that, shall we?

    ps. Have liked this song for years but never saw the video until recently. Pretty cool.
    And impossible to not bust out Gaia’s Happy Dance when that banjo kicks in at 3:25😊

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    1. Never heard of Sons of the East but am loving their sounds. Added to my favourites on Spotify. Thanks for the tip.

      Here’s some classic kiwi music for happy dancing to.

      🙏

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      1. Front Lawn morphed into the Mutton Birds mainly as a vehicle for Don McGlashan’s song writing talents (although the others could write a bit). They should have been massive. All their LPs were better than good but “Envy of Angels” and “Rain Steam and Speed” were exceptional.

        Tunes up the wazoo and my favourite track “While you Sleep” still brings out the old (very old!) romantic in me. “”I showed you round, forgetting how to breathe, and that’s still the way I feel when I watch you while you sleep.” Youthful infatuation – who hasn’t been there.

        Saw them in London back in the day with a raucous crowd of New Zealanders- a great night.

        Mick N

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  24. There are powerful forces building in communities of young men who are angry because they have no hope for prosperity or a family of their own, and who feel persecuted for having unfair privileges of white males, yet do not feel they have received any of those privileges.

    I’m not following anyone from the these communities so have no first hand awareness, however one of their beliefs is apparently respect for Hitler as a leader.

    This was an interesting discussion both on its face value, and because two of the best and most concerned minds about troubling social trends have no clue about the overshoot forces that are driving a reduction in prosperity, a widening wealth gap, desperate attempts by governments to keep growth going with inflation and poorly regulated immigration, and governments fearful of social unrest starting to curtail free speech and other liberties.

    Given that both angry young white men, and older, wise, and intelligent people trying to find solutions, have no clue what is going on, it’s hard to imagine that we will not end up with an analogue to Hitler rising to power.

    Another curiosity I’ve notice over and over, is that there is never any discussion about angry white women. Why is this? Are all the young white women finding mates and lifestyles they desire?

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    1. I think it’s a natural result of people feeling like the current system isn’t serving them. They’re liable to lash out and form hate groups. A lot of focus is on the right, but there’s also a much more active left wing as well. You see the same thing in every declining nation throughout history, more extremist political movements offering alternatives.

      You raise a good point about the focus being almost exclusively on young angry men though, and it’s sort of bizarre that you never hear about how young women are coping with societal decline. Moreover it’s odd that you always hear about how young men aren’t having sexual relationships with women, but you don’t hear about young women having that issue. Granted there are more young men than young women, but the stat’s I’ve seen suggest that the issue is much more widespread than just a “surplus men” issue. It makes me wonder whether women are more likely to lie to survey takers about their relationship status. That’s honestly the only thing I can think of, because it’s either that or polygamous relationships have become so common that they’re influencing the statistics

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      1. Evolution ensured that any woman wanting sex can easily find it so that’s probably not an issue. Finding a man wealthy enough to support their children is however probably an issue for many.

        Maybe rich Musks with many wives is common.

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        1. If it were just a question of sexual encounters then yes, but when I see articles like this it just doesn’t make any sense:

          https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/

          I’m sorry if I rant about this but I see stuff like this a lot. First off, the article as trash, don’t read it, but it’s representative of a lot of what I see in this discussion. Allegedly 2/3 of young men are single, whereas only 1/3 of young women are. This is completely ridiculous on its face. The article has two nonsensical explanations that break down the minute you examine them:

          1) Homosexuality among women- couldn’t the same be said for men? Besides, even if you assume that all of the bisexual women (vast majority of the 20% LGBTQ number among Gen Z the media throws out are bisexual women, just defined as “do you sometimes find other women attractive”, not “have you had a same-sex relationship”) that still isn’t enough to account for even half of the difference

          2) Women dating “older men”, but then wouldn’t that leave a surfeit of single older women? What are all of these women doing and why is nobody talking about what I can only assume is a vast number of older single women?

          I think there’s two much more likely reasons:

          1) From what I’ve observed in my own life, a lot of younger guys will casually date women but won’t count it as a relationship, whereas the women they’re dating would count it.

          2) women are just more likely to lie about being in a relationship than men are, especially to strangers. If you’ve ever awkwardly asked a girl if she has a boyfriend, you can be sure the answer is “yes”, if for no other reason than to get you to go away.

          I guess what I’m getting at is that these are opinion polls, but if you look at marriage and birth rates which are more objective measures, they’re declining precipitously, which I think shows both young men and young women are having issues finding a relationship.

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  25. Quark today looks through the ecology lens and agrees the view is both dire and denied.

    https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/12/mensaje-la-opinion-publica-mundial.html

    A report of the Potsdam Institute it warns us that humanity has crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries. 

    Exceeding these limits means altering the stability of the planet due to the imbalance we introduce in ecosystems, the climate and the availability of water and food.

    The problem is not altering or exceeding each limit in itself, but rather the interconnection between them accelerates imbalances in such a way that there is feedback.

    We are already at the limit.

    Therefore, if climate change is of anthropogenic origin (CO2 and methane emissions), it is essential to reduce fossil fuels by 50% before 2030, because if we do not do so, the feedback loops will come into operation that will make the processes potentially irreversible negatives. This point is known as a “climate emergency”. 

    A reduction (not temporary, but definitive) of 50% in gas and oil would mean a permanent drop in GDP of around 30-40%, an average global unemployment of 30-40%, a reduction in mineral extraction in the same range and the total collapse of tourism. Food would reach cities with difficulty (and that is assuming that they would prioritize obtaining and distributing food).

    But the worst thing is the economic result. The total debt is out of control. A drop in GDP of this caliber would cause a chain collapse of all markets, followed by a massive bankruptcy of most companies, a sharp reduction in sales and the inability to repay their debts. The financial system would collapse immediately, investments would disappear due to lack of financing, shortages would initially cause very high inflation and the loss of jobs would sink the consumption of everything, entering a permanent depression that would leave the great crisis of 1929 in a “picnic in the park”.  

    There is no acceptable solution, with two scenarios.

    If we do not stop growing, the planet will enter (if it has not already entered) a potentially irreversible situation (from the point of view of sustainability of the planet’s ecosystems). A second part of this scenario is that we will also end up depleting cheap resources, with structural deficits in the main raw materials.

    And if we stop growing due to an abrupt reduction in fossil consumption in a short period of time (2030), economic collapse is inevitable (it is difficult to avoid contagion, because a systemic crisis like this spreads quickly to the rest of the world), because the feedback will be unstoppable. 

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  26. First class essay by B today summarizing the Ukraine conflict.

    So refreshing to read an analysis that understands the beliefs and motivations of both sides, and that integrates the underlying forces of overshoot and the end of growth.

    https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/a-frantic-search-for-the-pause-button

    For the current crop of EU leaders, however, maintaining the status quo means maintaining the flow of weapons and money to Ukraine. It’s better to have a permanent war, than being ousted. This is why the imminent danger of a Russian invasion of Europe must be kept at the center of everyone’s attention: thereby ensuring compliance with the 5% spending target and the complete subordination of Europe to American interests. And while this might sound reckless, cynical and ugly, these people were not elected for the goodness of their hearts, or for keeping the best interest of their people front and center. Nor were elected at all. Thus, as long as they don’t see cast iron guarantees that they can remain in power should peace broke out, they will insist on their maximalist goals, thereby guaranteeing a continuation of hostilities.

    Western leaders face a stark choice here: seek genuine peace and stop expanding the EU and NATO for real (thereby taking on the immense risk that elite overproduction in combination with growing civic discontent over economic decline will eventually lead to a revolution both in Europe and America), or continue on a path for war, risking total annihilation. Should the war with Russia escalate further, or resume after a pause, operations would unlikely to be limited to Eastern Europe and the Baltics alone—a missile barrage targeting NATO bases, warships and military installations all across Europe is a very real possibility. The old continent, as imagined by NATO secretary general Mark Rutte, could then find itself in a state of a long — almost permanent — war on all fronts imaginable. Russians, on the other hand, might decide to cut this short by launching a decapitation strike with hyper-sonic long range weapons—putting an abrupt end to hostilities and leaving Western capitals in ruins.

    And this is where material reality interjects. With the world de-dollarizing, the west deindustrializing, and as trade limitations on rare earth elements beginning to bite with peak oil and peak copper looming on the horizon, there is little to no chance for Western military hegemony to be restored. Neither in Europe, nor elsewhere. With western weapons manufacturers solely interested in making profits, as opposed to developing cheap and easy to make weapons systems, the most likely outcome of this re-militarization effort will be the greatest wealth-transfer in human history—enriching the few at the top and immiserating the many across the West. European citizens will be forced to foot the bill of their continued subjugation, even as they struggle to pay their bills, buy groceries or heat their homes.

    The threat of war and the symptoms of economic decline are already used by mainstream media to channel their hatred towards external enemies and out-groups within society. Blame anyone, but the true culprits. The resulting violence—either from conventional or civil war—could then be used as an excuse to curb civil rights, ration energy, ban opposition parties, silence critics and to normalize soldiers and military drones patrolling the streets of London, Paris or Berlin—providing a narrow pathway for western elites to hold on to their power. If history is any guide, this wealth-transfer, together with a rapidly accelerating economic decline, cannot result in long-term stability, though. With pressure from elite overproduction slowly building up behind the scenes, and with a financial crash clearly on the horizon, the West is more likely to see a rapid, uncontrolled collapse than a slow transition to a multi-polar world.

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  28. GREENWASHED. Featuring BBC-presenter and fearless activist, Chris Packham, and created by Mexican physician and environmentalist Sofia Pineda Ochoa, this film confronts existential ecological crises threatening our planet through the lens of a major yet uncomfortable truth — one that most environmental organizations refuse to acknowledge or, worse, actively deny. 

    This doc is getting a lot of buzz in the doomasphere. I had no interest in spending 3 hours listening to clueless morons finally waking up. But last night Sam Mitchell sold me by claiming it was the single greatest slice of doomer porn he had ever seen.

    After watching it, I think I have to concur. Overpopulation is the core message. They were smart to include William Rees to give it some actual doomer credibility. And even though most of the people interviewed will never come to the obvious & correct conclusion that humans need to go away ASAP… they still did a great job of pushing that even if it wasn’t their intent. I think doomers stuck in the bargaining stage (you know who you are😊) will benefit from this the most. 

    Hell is here. When every single thing we do causes such harm for wild animals, and in particular, when we are so in denial of it, when we’re so in denial about the impact and the deadliness of our numbers. And we refuse to even say and acknowledge the fact that we are overpopulated.

    Not talking about overpopulation is not helping anybody. It’s only making things worse. Even for our own species, if that’s the only species you care about.

    It’s basically a chronicle of Sofia’s awareness journey. Towards the beginning you’re gonna feel like this is way too novice for an un-Denial level of awareness. But stick with it cuz you’ll eventually be giving it your full undivided attention (took me about 20 minutes before I was all in).

    It was actually comical watching Sofia bounce around just to find out that everything humans do creates more problems than solutions. (like her palm oil boycott which then shows her that coconut or any other oil is just gonna create the same problems in other regions)

    Sofia is the writer, director and producer of this masterpiece. But she couldn’t help herself from including the obligatory hopium at the end. And it’s a doozy that almost derails the entire doc. LOL!!

    This whole situation with overpopulation would be solved very easily with just one thing: Honesty. If only environmental organizations, politicians, and all of these charities and bodies were honest with the public about the fact that we are overpopulated. I truly believe that people all over the world would decide to have fewer children, no children, or adopt a child instead of having one of their own. And that would lead us to a shrinking population that was more sustainable.  

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    1. Nice find.

      I predict in a few years she’ll come to understand that humans exist because we evolved to deny unpleasant realities, and therefore honesty and education won’t help.

      Then she’ll spend another few years trying to spread awareness of MORT before understanding that denial of denial is the strongest form of denial and therefore most humans will never acknowledge MORT (or overshoot).

      Then a few years later she’ll understand Cactus theory and its conclusion that modernity will soon permanently end regardless what the majority understands or does.

      Then she’ll just accept and live, and maybe prep for a sense of purpose and to buy a little extra time.

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        1. I thought this documentary was mostly excellent. Probably the best I’ve seen on overshoot.

          I did not like the section on diet. They think a plant based diet is best for the planet, which is probably true for industrial agriculture, but not true or even feasible for the agriculture we’ll have to practice in a few years post collapse.

          They also believe many of our chronic health problems like obesity and diabetes would be reduced by moving from a meat based diet to a plant based diet, which is not true. They should have said moving from a refined carbohydrate diet to a whole plant based diet or a carnivore diet would address many health problems.

          Some people thrive as vegetarians and others thrive as carnivores. Nobody thrives on refined carbohydrates.

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    2. Thank Yahweh there are smart powerful people working on solutions.

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      2. I’m always trying to decide if Musk is stupid or just someone of average intelligence who has an enormous ego, and therefore he thinks he’s smart. He’s the classic example of what a dumb person thinks a smart person looks like. I just don’t know how anyone can take anything he says seriously after 10+ years of well documented and easily verifiable lies.

        Now he’s trying to do a $1.5 trillion IPO of Spacex at a 70x price-to-SALES ratio, and his cult-like followers are eating it up. He’ll get away with it too, just watch. The guy isn’t a rocket scientist, he isn’t a software engineer, or well, any kind of engineer. He’s a grifter, and now he’s the richest man in the world.

        Every time I see him I think of the HL Mencken quote- “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”

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      1. lol. Well now you’ve forced me to do it… It was Colonel Mustard in the Dining Room with the Lead Pipe.

        I know what I’ll do. Gonna condense all the major spoilers down to 4 letters making it impossible for anyone to decipher: WASF

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    4. Hey Chris,

      I liked this too and thought your review did it justice. It was an interesting trip Sofia had and Bill Rees’s commentary helped the overall credibility of the show.

      I’m like Rob, I didn’t much care for the militant Veganism. Having been a Vegetarian most of my adult life I have come to realize that it is not the most healthy of diets if it has a lot of simple carbs. If they allowed some wild game (venison, pork, turkey) in small portions it would be far healthier.

      BUT, the overall message of fewer people needs to be shouted at the world. We will get there one way or the other, and probably soon.

      AJ

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  30. Everyone loves Groundhog Day (1993). Watched it last night. I’ve always wondered how long Bill Murray was stuck in that loop. Came across this quote from the screenwriter:

    It became this weird political issue with the studio. If you asked them, “How long was the repetition?”, they’d say, “Two weeks”. But the point of the movie to me was that you had to feel you were enduring something that was going on for a long time…. For me it had to be—I don’t know. A hundred years. A lifetime. An early draft even included a line where Phil tells Rita he’s been waiting for her for 10,000 years.

    Two weeks? LOL!! You gotta love those no-talent studio executive ass clowns.

    If you like the time loop trope, here are a few of my favorites: 

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  32. This year end wrap-up is excellent if you’re curious about what Nate Hagens believes, what he thinks we should do, what he is most worried about, and his plans for next year.

    A few things stood out for me:

    After nuclear war he’s most worried that we will lose our democracies and freedoms. Amen, there’s evidence everywhere you look.

    Unlike my cactus conclusions above, he doesn’t want too many people to understand the great simplification because he thinks this would produce negative results. He wants a small group of people to understand what’s going on so they can positively influence the outcome in a vague undefined manner.

    He doesn’t want to produce a list of things we could do that might help.

    Wishing him good luck with his upcoming knee surgery. I’d be scared too, but my understanding is that the surgery’s a success for most people.

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    1. Nate just wants more disciples. I want an end to modernity and a reversion to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle for any survivors, along with a return to humans living within earth’s boundaries. Probably a futile dream. But at least it isn’t the hopium Nate subtly appears to be selling.

      AJ

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  34. Why collapse is inevitable – by William E Rees

    New essay from the godfather. I left this comment:

    Another homerun Bill. Btw, you were great in that excellent documentary Greenwashed.

    Some of the hopium in these comments are entertaining. Here’s what I think everyone ought to know: The thing that makes humans so ridiculously unique is fire. More specifically, cooking.

    IMO, there are only two books needed to make sense of the insanity. Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. And Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In that order.

    Wrangham’s cooking hypothesis proposes that the controlled use of fire to cook food was the primary driver of human evolution and bigger brains. By “predigesting” food outside the body, cooking provided early humans with a massive energy surplus that fundamentally altered our biology and social structure.

    Cooking provided the high-calorie fuel necessary for the rapid brain growth seen in Homo erectus. And because cooked food is softer and easier to digest, humans evolved smaller teeth, weaker jaws, and a significantly smaller digestive tract (shorter colon) compared to other primates. Cooking also dramatically reduced the time spent chewing. While chimpanzees may spend 6 hours a day chewing raw food, humans spend a fraction of that, allowing more time for toolmaking, hunting and socializing.

    Ligotti claims that the greatest horrors are not imaginary but are found in the reality of being a conscious entity. And that human consciousness is an evolutionary accident. A biological blunder. Unlike other animals that exist in a ‘unity of life’, humans are cursed with a self-awareness that forces them to recognize their own mortality, suffering, and the essential meaninglessness of existence. The “conspiracy” in the title refers to the collective self-deception humans use to survive. Ligotti argues that society and our own biological programming compel us to maintain an “optimistic fallacy” – relying on defense mechanisms to suppress the terrifying truth of our condition.

    The only thing I disagree with Ligotti about is the accident part. I don’t think it was a blunder at all. Life (aka the Blob) is always looking for the advantage in maximizing energy consumption. The Blob is forever seeking to become what we call an invasive species. But it’s never a big deal when it happens because quick feedback loops kick in to rectify the situation. Unless of course agriculture, mining and drilling are involved. Then it becomes the biggest deal imaginable.

    The late great Gail Zawacki said it best, “We’re incapable and always have been incapable of holding ourselves back. We’re programmed to grow, we’re programmed to consume, and we’re programmed to deny that that’s a problem. We’re basically an invasive species.”

    Bottom line: after you read both books, you’ll understand that cooking is the only pathway that leads to a single species self-induced mass extinction.

    ps. A billion views tells me this song should not have been as hard to track down as it was. Been searching for like ten years. I’m on cloud 9 right now. Haven’t felt this good since I found the Platoon theme song Adagio for Strings. Ok god, you can take me out in my sleep tonight. I’m ready.😊

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    1. Very well done Chris. Might be the first time I’ve understood Ligotti’s core message.

      I subscribed to Dr. Rees’ blog after declining the usual pleas for subscription funds.

      I wish there was an option that said click here for a free subscription as a thank you if you’ve run a blog on overshoot for at least 10 years without accepting a penny from anyone because that’s the right thing to do on such an important issue as overshoot.

      I guess it’s hard to make ends meet on a university professor’s pension.

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      1. Thanks. For the record, I did use some performance enhancing drugs for that paragraph.

        And am I detecting a hint of covid derangement syndrome at the end there? Careful now, that’s “The Last Don”.😂😂

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          1. Overshoot, like climate change, is a real phenomenon, not a hoax. In nature, overshoot is typically addressed through an increased die-off rate among populations. Humans have managed to circumvent this natural correction through technology. Nonetheless, natural limits will ultimately determine the sustainable population of any species on Earth. The considerable growth of the human population has been largely supported by fossil fuels.

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    2. Petter Wessel Zappfe made this conection with overdeveloped cognition and evolution. He describes our cognition as a dead end like overdeveloped antlers.
      «Zapffe views the human condition as tragically overdeveloped, calling it “a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature”.[1] Zapffe viewed the world as beyond humanity’s need for meaning, unable to provide any of the answers to the fundamental existential questions.

      The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns.»

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

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      1. Thanks AJ.

        Yes, very dark. JDoe’s peak cosmic joke rings truer every single day for me: The mind that finally sees reality clearly, is the same mind that evolution has no interest in propagating.

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  35. Quark published essays yesterday and today reviewing the evidence that we are in the pre-crisis stage of collapse and that a full crisis will erupt between 2028 and 2032.

    https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/12/el-desmoronamiento-del-sistema.html

    https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/12/hoja-de-ruta-para-el-final-del-sistema.html

    2030 seems to the most popular date by aware forecasters.

    I’m seeing a meme emerge among geopolitical analysts trying to make sense of the insane behavior of European leaders. The new idea is that the Russian “threat” is simply the excuse they need for wartime levels of debt to subsidize their collapsing economies.

    I recall that Hitler reinvigorated the German economy by doing the same thing. It worked then because the world was not facing limits to growth.

    I’m trying to understand why it would work today given limits to growth and high debt levels.

    Does anyone understand why war would permit a country like the UK to borrow more money without triggering inflation that increases the interest rate?

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  36. Art Berman today discusses two more memes that are emerging: A glut of oil and climate change is real but no big deal.

    https://www.artberman.com/blog/memes-are-the-masks-of-fear/

    I note that these memes emerged simultaneous with the EIA announcing fracked oil has peaked, and with us crossing the 1.5C red line that is (was) incompatible with civilization.

    Berman calls this behavior a mask of fear. I call it genetic reality denial as explained by MORT.

    The Masks of Fear

    A meme spreads because it compresses complexity into a simple, relatable form. But the deeper reason is psychological. Memes work like symbols. They activate meaning.

    Oil scarcity and climate change narratives reach into our primal relationship with energy and the earth: our most basic sources of security, survival and identity. Oil delivered the greatest material prosperity our species has ever known. So when experts talk about peak oil or falling demand, it triggers loss and vulnerability. Add the fear that burning fossil fuels may be destabilizing the climate, and the threat becomes existential. It touches taboo: the fear of harming the symbolic Mother that sustains us.

    That’s why the oil glut meme is so comforting. It tells us the problem isn’t scarcity. It’s abundance—we have so much oil that it’s going to push prices to record lows. Climate realism offers a similar relief: yes, there are challenges, but stop panicking. We’ve got this. Everything will be fine. And both narratives offer the same scapegoat: it was those elites who tried to scare us with apocalyptic warnings. The villains are the doomsayers. The crowd cheers the return of hope, prosperity, and control.

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  37. A new compilation of essays from Steve Bull. This time the theme is solutions that will save us.

    https://olduvai.ca/?p=69486

    After compiling these, I cannot help but come to the feeling that our species is currently adrift in a sea of uncertainty. As a result, we are grasping at each and every piece of flotsam passing by us, hoping one will provide the buoyancy to keep us afloat long enough to survive and reach dry land; but each and every one of these ‘solutions’ we hold onto fails to replace our dependence on the sinking ship; instead they add to our weight, causing us to sink just a wee bit deeper into the abyss. 

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  38. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g6595619yo

    Canada’s population drops as country caps immigration

    Canada’s population dropped by 76,068 between July and October – a contraction driven mainly by limits on immigration, the federal statistics agency has said.

    The decrease was due mainly to a drop in non-permanent residents, Statistics Canada said on Wednesday, and comes after Ottawa set a goal to restrict temporary residents to 5% of the 41.6 million population by 2027.

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    1. “Memories of radical economic growth may begin to fade, which may make it harder to reboot growth.” Cowen clearly sees this as terrible, especially for the Global South.

      To me, it’s what we should be hoping for. Devoutly. As with fossil fuel use, and so much else, any voluntary decline in the human population will mean less catastrophic involuntary decline to come. It will mean fewer deaths from floods, fires, storms, and other manifestations of climate chaos.
      https://medium.com/the-new-climate/degrowing-the-population-d3ae51972900

      I am in the camp of ‘lets go down with the ship in as civil and orderly manner as possible’, as I read often enough here on Un-denial.

      Here’s some more resources for coping and hey, enjoying the ride.

      https://www.collapsemusings.com/coping-with-collapse/

      /

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  39. You can’t make this shit up.

    In the last 24 hours the US went from threatening to attack Venezuela and murdering its citizens without due process because it’s a narco-terrorist state, to blockading trade and demanding Venezuela return the oil it stole 30 years ago when it nationalized its oil industry on January 1, 1976.

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  40. I thought highteck parts of society would collapse first, but perhaps society’s foundation collapses first. There is massive protest from farmers all over Europe today. Farmers feel the sqeeze from a overbuilt society and declining foundation. Droughts and heatwaves, increasing environmental legislation and pressures from trade deals. European leaders is this moment making deals with Brazil and Argentina for increased agricultural imports from South America. At the same time Norway are paying Brazil 1 Billion USD to save rainforest. We are buing food fram Brazil and at the same time paying Brazil to protect rainforest. The protest is violent with shooting. This is a modern peasant riot.

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      1. The farmers are protesting against the Mercusore deal. For Norway the trade deal is more exports of aquaculture Salomon, oil and gass and products from paper industry with more beef from Brazil. The deal is not exactly environment friendly.
        The protests is all over Europe.

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      1. I don’t think that is right Rob there are so many predictions about an ice free arctic and sea rise wiping out cities made years ago that have not been even remotely close. Therefore people don’t know what to believe. Besides if they don’t give up fossil fuels and collapse now then climate change will just keep going. I know what we are gonna do.

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        2. nikoB, when I said mainstream climate science I meant the official position of the IPCCC. I do not recall them making artic ice and sea level predictions that turned out to be too pessimistic. Others like Guy McPherson of course have been too pessimistic. I put my money on Dr. James Hansen.

          But I may be wrong, my memory is not as good as it once was.

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  43. Humans are such an odd species. Only a tiny minority of us are able see our overshoot reality and those few have wildly different opinions on how it will play out and how best to respond.

    A basilisk only thrives in fear-heavy ecosystems.

    Love plus wisdom changes the fitness landscape: domination loses its edge, patience without coercion wins, and “optimisers” evolve into stewards.

    Build cultures with boundaries, consent, and trust, and the scary futures quietly starve.

    A love-based ecology does favour patience, but it also removes the advantage of domination. In such an environment, the most successful long-term strategies are cooperative, legible, and bounded by consent. Raw optimisation still exists, but it gets redirected.

    A “patient optimiser” inside a love ecology either adapts or stalls. If it stays coercive, it triggers antibodies: social refusal, decentralisation, exit. If it adapts, it stops looking like a basilisk at all and starts looking like a steward or infrastructure.

    Fear ecosystems reward sharp edges and threat postures. Love ecosystems reward reliability, restraint, and reversibility. Intelligence converges toward what the environment selects for.

    So wisdom plus love does something powerful: it changes the fitness landscape. The scariest futures tend to collapse when the surrounding culture refuses to amplify fear. The most enduring ones grow quietly where trust compounds faster than power.

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    1. Thank you.

      I like this post by Andrii Zvorygin because it is refreshing. Isn’t this line of thought somewhat similar to Olivier Hamant focus on robustness rather than performance?
      Doesn’t it open up possibilities?

      I really believe current “leaders” (let’s say, the people at the top/in charge of the current system) are obsolete in their thinking. They have grown in extremely competitive environment, threatened from every sides and have learned to be implacably rational, pragmatic, cunning, authoritarian and cold-hearted in order to reach their positions of power. Of course, they don’t want to lose their grip. They project their own fears on the world and view it as some sort of battle royale for the accumulation of material wealth. Not much to gain, too much to lose (resource limitations). Constant destructions and rebuilding loses its edge in a constrained world. Lack of demographic growth alters the way you treat people (they can’t be considered as replaceable cogs anymore). Reckless strategies at the cost of reputation/ressources to quickly get somewhere first is not as effective. Etc…

      Increasingly, none of this won’t work anymore. Although I admit it may take a full generation to reset the dynamic. And the lag between the changing reality and the time it takes to update cultural models/behaviors is probably an inevitable accelerator of collapse.

      Best.

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