How is this possible? Seriously.

Sarah Connor, I think without an AI, explains why this will be the last collapse.

She’s getting closer to understanding CACTUS, although still believes the collapse will be slow:

The end of modern civilization probably won’t appear as a blinding flash or a sudden, dramatic rupture (barring nuclear Armageddon). History tell a much more mundane story.

The fall of complex systems is a protracted, agonizing process of structural decay, economic exhaustion, and ecological overshoot. We are living through it right now. The collapse of our industrial civilization is underway, driven by the inescapable mathematics of diminishing returns on investment.

https://www.collapse2050.com/the-last-collapse/

History is full of civilizational collapses. In each case, humanity as a whole eventually (sometimes after a long period of stagnation) continued to develop new technologies, grow wealth, and expand the population. Every collapse was followed by recovery, which sets a false precedent.

Some take solace in this precedent believing humanity will hit a baseline, heal the Earth, and eventually spark a second, perhaps wiser, industrial renaissance. Unfortunately, the geological and thermodynamic realities of our planet render this impossible. We have burned the bridges required for a post-collapse resurgence.

The first Industrial Revolution was entirely dependent on the exploitation of highly concentrated, easily accessible fossil fuels. Surface-level coal and shallow crude oil acted as a geological cheat code, providing the massive energy surplus required to build our modern complexity. We have systematically exhausted these sources. Our EROEI is in terminal decline. We now rely on deep-water drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and tar sands, methods requiring billions of dollars in capital and highly advanced infrastructure. A post-collapse future society, stripped of satellite navigation and heavy industrial machinery, will find the remaining deep-earth reserves entirely inaccessible.

The same finality applies to our mineral wealth. We have mined the high-grade veins of copper, iron, and phosphates. Modern extraction requires processing exponentially larger volumes of low-grade rock, a task demanding massive energy inputs. A nascent agrarian society will immediately confront an insurmountable barrier, lacking the dense power required to refine the scattered, low-grade ores left in the Earth’s crust.

Future civilizations, if they exist, will also face the catastrophic loss of the Haber-Bosch process. Our global population is sustained by synthetic fertilizers created through this energy-intensive chemical reaction. Without the natural gas feedstocks and complex industrial infrastructure to support it, the Earth’s carrying capacity will plummet from over eight billion down to an estimated two to four billion people, all things equal. Of course, not all things are equal and systemic unravelling would likely pummel the human population back towards the millions, unevenly distributed in pockets around the world.

Without synthetic nitrogen, remaining humans would revert to pre-industrial, organic nitrogen fixation, relying entirely on crop rotation and manure, placing a hard, physical limit on global agricultural yields. Attempts to scale biomass to power industrial machinery will merely replicate the destructive deforestation that crippled pre-fossil empires, preventing any accumulation of surplus energy.

We have also fragmented our knowledge base too deeply to recover it. Human understanding is hyper-specialized and distributed across a massive global network. A technician in a microprocessor plant cannot mine rare earth elements, refine ultra-pure silicon, or build a power grid from scratch. A post-collapse society might possess the theoretical blueprints for modern medicine or electronics in surviving texts. They will entirely lack the sophisticated construction materials, chemical feedstocks, and pristine clean-room environments required to physically build them. The material remnants of our world will offer no salvation. The highly specialized plastics that form our medical devices and mechanical components suffer from rapid, progressive degradation. The age of plastics will draw to a permanent close shortly after the collapse, decaying into useless dust before a new society can relearn sophisticated organic chemistry.

Any future civilization will face this technological void while stranded in a fundamentally more hostile environment. The virgin biosphere that nurtured the birth of human agriculture has been permanently altered. Extinction is forever. The highly specific web of species interactions, pollinators, and stable soil microbiomes that fostered our initial rise have been replaced by disorganized, novel ecosystems with vastly less ecological capital.

We will face this degraded world without the concentrated energy needed to buffer us against its volatility. We have burned through the Earth’s geological inheritance to construct a temporary, hyper-complex machine. When the gears finally seize, we will be trapped in the thermodynamic deficit we created. Without the easily accessible fossil fuels to pull ourselves out, and without the fertile biosphere to catch us, the descent ahead is permanent and inescapable.

Curious minds want to know why representatives of the Iran government, who are working hard to educate citizens on the injustice of the US attack, never mention control of oil and exchange for USD as key drivers.

I understand why the aggressor wants to obscure the truth, but why is the victim also obscuring the truth?

Is it simply that both the aggressor and the victim don’t want to draw attention to scarcity and overshoot?

Maybe support for attacking Iran would increase if western citizens understood peak oil?

Does anyone understand what’s going on here?

Indrajit Samarajiva with a brutal rant against the US empire human nature in times of scarcity.

https://indi.ca/america-has-dementia/

Trump Doesn’t Have Dementia. ‘America’ Does

It’s all lies, but look at how much better presented they were before the brainrot took hold. ‘America’ was always genocide, but now it’s genocide with dementia. Late-stage ‘America’ has been reduced to its core personality, which is killing natives, calling them savages/terrorists when they resist, and making blood money out of dead children. When their nation was young, this actually worked. But now that they are old, they just look like jerks.

Trump and Biden (two cheeks of the same ass) are both older than Clinton and Bush II. Not older than those precedents when they took office, but older than them right now. It’s not just that ‘American’ Democracy™ is dying; it has a death wish and elects dementia. The stupid population elects stupid leaders who express their core being, their idiot id, killing natives and taking their land because freedumb. Tocqueville, who I’m sure most ‘Americans’ have not read, actually called it when he said, “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.” Obama was the last snake to sell that oil, even in the dim Oprah’s Book Club sense. Now they’ve gone full retard. The country functions below a sixth-grade reading level and they elect people who ‘tell it like it is.’ And ‘America’ really is this stupid, and Trump speaks to them. A cruel and ignorant man for a cruel and ignorant settler populace.

It is not some anomaly that ‘America’ is genociding Gaza; ‘America’ is genocide, how do you think they got there? Getting away with genocide is the ultimate White privilege and Jews are rightly confused that they’re criticized for doing what, in any other century, was applauded. ‘How did you get there?’ they reasonably ask Australians, Canadians, and other abominations, who hunted and skinned their own native populations. The tragicomic fact is that Jews are still not White enough (as they’ll find out soon enough when they’re abandoned). ‘Israel’ is just the final ghetto Europeans sent Jews to, crying emoji, lol. Jews sold their collective souls to White Empire at the end, just in time to be holding the bag for them. Another European tradition.

At the end, this demented Empire is led by dementia’d old men, humiliating themselves with their naked lust and avarice. It doesn’t matter if the men actually have dementia; it’s precisely what they represent. And I certainly don’t use dementia as an insult, it was the fate of my beloved grandparents and probably my own. I say that dementia can reveal who we were (not always, for sure). At the end of life, if we die of natural causes, we are oft reduced to our natural conscience. Our base-level reasoning, when all the filters are turned off. Perhaps we are basically kind to others, or perhaps we are most devoted to our work, or perhaps we are genocidal rapists who just want to hurt. You can see White Empire is the latter, reduced to being as White supremacist and empire-seizing as inhumanly possible. So you get likely dementia patients running an actually demented society. It doesn’t matter if Trump has dementia. ‘America’ does.

Imagine you’re an alien visiting planet earth trying to understand one strange animal species that competes for status by having eight females dance in a pool to the music of a pedophile.

A interesting essay topic for Hideaway would be to explain that as energy falls GDP will probably fall faster.