
Rob here: Over the last 6 years I’ve made many attempts to write a concise summary of what happened and why during covid.
I’m still trying, most recently a reply I wrote to a reader yesterday, which explores dimensions not covered by Jeffrey Tucker’s summary, and which I’ve copied below as an addendum.
In case you’ve never tried to succinctly explain all of the important elements of covid, it is REALLY hard because so many big evil complex things happened.
Given that covid is the biggest crime ever committed, and given that no one has been held to account, it is important that we keep trying to increase awareness, and to break through the ignorance and apathy of most citizens.
None of my attempts to write a summary have been as complete, or compelling, or concise as these fabulous 428 words published today by Jeffrey A. Tucker.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-big-picture-of-extraordinary-evil-in-428-words
Here is Tucker’s introduction to his summary. Note his invitation to collaborate on creating an even better summary.
Life seemed to be going along pretty normally when the third month of 2020 hit and all our lives, and the lives of billions around the world, were thrown into upheaval. We’ve spent the last six years trying to figure it out and so have many others.
The revelations are flying fast and furious, so much that we can hardly keep up. We have meetings, groups, publications, phone calls, and share as many links and data points as we can. No matter what we do, the big story continues to be elusive.
There are two reasons for this. First, the national media does not care. It happened. It’s over. We survived. Who cares? Second, the reality is literally incomprehensible. Too many data points. Too many institutions. Too many motivations. They all flew into motion at once. Separating prime from second movers is impossible.
Those who try to make sense of it all come across like conspiracy theorists at best and babbling lunatics at worst. I don’t like to sound this way. But every time I try to present what I know in a calm, rational, wholly reasonable way, I sense that I’m not capturing the fullness of it all.
What I’ve attempted below is my best undertaking at reconstruction. It has no links so I invite you to use the AI tool on this website that has been trained by 4,000-plus site records and countless numbers of outside links.
If it sounds implausible, I can only assure you that it is not. You might know more than I do and could write something better. If so, drop me an email and we might publish a compendium. The goal is short (no longer than 500 words), evocative, comprehensive, no exaggerations, and verifiably accurate.
Here is my own attempt.
The Big Picture of Extraordinary Evil in 428 Words
In 2019 or before, a US-funded biolab in Wuhan, China, one of some 120 in 30 countries, made a virus and inoculation based on an American recipe that leaked and spread, causing worry that US/UK officials would be blamed. They formulated a well-rehearsed fallback: lie about the lab origins and prepare the population for the antidote based on a new gene-editing technology that otherwise would never have been approved on grounds that it was too dangerous and not effective. That scheme could turn would-be villains into saviors.
That required buying time while preserving pre-leak immunity profiles of the population via lockdowns for nine months until the injection was put through perfunctory trials and available; hence the travel restrictions, stay-at-home orders, masks, distancing, and canceled events.
During this time there had to be mass censorship of people who caught on, a manufactured panic, widespread trauma, school closures, a removal of other therapeutic options, millions of business failures, a shutdown of the arts and religious practice, plus various technical manipulations along the way like redefining exposures as cases, running PCR tests at high cycle rates, and paying for death misclassifications. This was essentially cosplaying a level of severity that did not exist – despite inevitably rising seroprevalence and natural immunity – in order to ramp up demand for the incoming pharmaceutical product.
There was also a political coattail rider: infectious disease panic enabled a new experiment in mail-in ballots, encouraged by the CDC even before the lockdowns began, thus unleashing mass ballot fraud designed to defeat the rise of populism in all countries and creating conditions for closer citizen surveillance and digital identification systems necessitating mass data centers.
The scheme also required a printing/spending binge to paper over vast economic damage, policies that would hack off a third of the value of the dollar, leaving vast carnage, but permitting an indemnified pharmaceutical experiment on the whole population, meaning that mass injury would have no recourse in law. When the shot finally appeared, uptake was too low to create the expected profit windfall, plus government had a surplus it needed to dump before expiration, thus triggering urban segregation in five major US cities plus mandates for millions enforced on pain of losing their jobs.
The entire time, most of academia, corporate America, and major media played along for reasons of careerism and also overt and implicit threats from Deep-State actors to do their part lest they prolong the pandemic they created. No one has been punished for any of it, and the mainstream media has no interest at this late date.
Addendum I – Rob’s latest summary
A reader yesterday asked me to comment on the efficacy and safety of mRNA transfections, and on the trustworthiness of public health institutions.
This was my reply:
You’re over the bullseye Bob.
Another important issue is the source of the virus, but that’s so obvious now it’s not worth discussing. It’s still an open question whether the lab leak was accidental or deliberate, but I lean accidental.
I spent WAY too much time during covid trying to figure out what was going on and most importantly WHY. As my confidence grew in understanding the science and evidence, my anger also grew.
I remain very angry about what happened, and that most citizens don’t want to know, and that no one has been held to account, and that no lessons have been learned.
Rather than providing you with many links to complicated rabbit holes I’m going to share with you what I have distilled the key issues to think about are.
- mRNA is a new unproven complex technology.
- mRNA technology has nothing in common with the vaccine technologies we grew up with and trust(ed). They called mRNA a vaccine to deliberately mislead us. I call it a “transfection”, or if you prefer, a gene therapy.
- Several attempts prior to covid were made to commercialize mRNA. All failed the safety and effectiveness tests. That should have been a huge red flag for anyone with integrity thinking about injecting it into billions of people after extremely abbreviated testing.
- Given the short time frame, a competent person with integrity would have preferred a lower risk vaccine using conventional technologies like China and Russia used.
- A new vaccine using proven technologies takes about 10 years to properly test and scale up. They developed and tested a novel mRNA technology for covid, that had failed every prior attempt, in about 1 year, and then assured us it was safe and effective, before coercing it into billions of people, including pregnant mothers and children that were never even tested.
- It was physically impossible for them to have known if the covid mRNA was safe and effective, which means they rolled the dice and lied.
- If you review the little testing that was done you will find that it was statistically insignificant, and they had to perform fraudulent commonly used tricks on the data to make it appear more effective than it was.
- If you think back on the messaging from our leaders, they were singularly obsessed with transfecting every citizen, young and old, at risk or not, with mRNA. Why?
- There was no discussion of prevention, or alternate treatments. For example, Vitamin D is super safe and cheap, and was known to reduce risk, yet they were silent on it. For example, Ivermectin is a noble prize winning drug known to be effective treating RNA viruses, and is super safe and cheap, yet they ruined people’s careers for even discussing it.
- mRNA was known very early on to not stop covid transmission, and they never even tested for this property. Why then would a person with integrity push a new technology with side-effect risks into young healthy people who were not at risk from the virus?
- There are simple to understand reasons to expect harmful side effects from mRNA.
- How does mRNA work?
- mRNA causes cells to produce non-self proteins that stimulate the immune system to create antibodies that are (hopefully) effective against the virus. Questions you should ask are : 1) What cells in the body are affected? Just the muscles at the injection site? Heart? Brain? Arteries? 2) How long do the cells produce the non-self protein? 3) How much non-self protein is produced? (i.e. what is the dose?)
- They told us mRNA would remain local to the injection site. That was proven to be untrue. mRNA went everywhere in the body.
- They told us mRNA was only active for a few days. That was proven to be untrue. I saw one study that proved it was still active after 60 days and then they stopped the study.
- They did not have good control on the manufacturing process and dose, at least in the early days. Hot harmful batches are known to exist.
- Think about the effect of cells producing non-self proteins, for indeterminate time, at indeterminate doses, in all organs of the body, including organs like the heart and brain, that do not readily repair the damage of cells being killed by the immune system because they appear to be non-self cells. You would expect to see what we saw, with young healthy people dying unexpectedly from heart related problems, and an increase in stroke frequency.
- Think about the effect of an immune system being persistently over stimulated against one threat. You would expect to see what we saw, and still see, which is an increase in many other diseases like cancer.
- Determining the causes of changes to health trends is tricky business. Especially when there’s a novel virus, plus novel interventions, plus lifestyle changes that occur during a pandemic. Nevertheless, healthcare professionals with integrity and competence would be vigilant, and would collect and analyze the data necessary to understand what it going on, and would take corrective action when signals appeared. Our “professionals” did none of this. In fact they aggressively denied all evidence that might have cast a bad light on their policies. If you were paying attention, it was obscene. (See more on this below in Addendum II.)
- The most reliable data for detecting a problem is all-cause mortality. The data can’t be screwed up. You are either dead or alive. When you transfect billions of people with a novel technology to protect them from a deadly disease that you claim is killing them, a person with integrity would monitor all-cause mortality. If all-cause mortality goes down when transfections begin, that’s good. If it goes up, that’s bad. It’s easy to collect and analyze yet very few countries reported on all-cause mortality. UK was one of the few that did and they stopped as soon as the data started to make their mRNA policies look bad.
- There were many obvious signals like VAERS (vaccine adverse events), and morticians reporting unusual clots, and athletes dropping dead on TV, that indicated possible problems. They ignored them all. No attempt was made to investigate and adjust policies to reflect the safety and effectiveness data, nor the reduced threat from later virus variants.
- I could continue writing for many more hours and still not present all the evidence that condemns our “leaders”. I’m going to stop now, because it’s not good for my mental health.
Addendum II – By Senator Ron Johnson: The story the media — and the government — don’t want you to hear
No one has been held to account for:
- engineering a virus that directly and indirectly killed 20+ million
- fomenting panic about a modest threat
- coercing unsafe and ineffective mRNA transfections into people that did not need protection, like children
- blocking other safe and effective responses
- and as follows, ignoring clear safety signals
One hero in the battle for covid accountability and justice is US Senator Ron Johnson.
On April 29, 2026, as Chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, I held a hearing and released a report titled “Unmasked: How Biden Health Officials Purposely Turned a Blind Eye Toward COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Signals.” There has not been a bigger government scandal during my lifetime, and yet even now that we have documented proof of corruption, most of the legacy media refuses to report on it.
My report details how in March 2021, Peter Marks — director of the FDA center that approves vaccines and is responsible for safety surveillance (CBER) — was briefed that the algorithm they were using to analyze the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) would mask or hide COVID-19 vaccine adverse event safety signals. Twenty-six days later, using an updated algorithm, senior FDA officials were shown 25 safety signals, including sudden cardiac death, pulmonary infarction, cerebral artery occlusion, basal ganglia stroke, agonal rhythm, and Bell’s palsy.
For the next three months, they received updates showing more serious safety signals. Instead of warning or informing the public, they ordered the data analyst to “cease and desist” and then lied to the American public that “they weren’t seeing safety signals” and that any adverse events were “rare and mild.” The whole point of using sophisticated algorithms to analyze VAERS is to find needles in the haystack — nonobvious potential harms that doctors and patients should be alerted to.
With the COVID-19 injections, we didn’t need sophisticated algorithms. The sheer volume of adverse event reports overwhelming VAERS was enough to trigger my oversight efforts. We faced impenetrable stonewalling until Secretary Kennedy’s commitment to radical transparency provided my Subcommittee with 11 million pages of documents. The documents make clear that FDA and CDC officials did not use an “err on the side of caution” standard to alert the public. Rather, they insisted on definitive proof of causation — a standard they knew would never be met.
They were far more concerned about not causing vaccine hesitancy than they were about informing the public of adverse events. They wanted to ensure that the injections would receive full licensure approval so that President Biden could mandate them to the military and millions of civilians, including healthy college students.
Perhaps the most egregious coercion involved healthy children who had virtually zero chance of serious harm from COVID-19. That coercion was based on another false claim that the injections would stop transmission. Some children were killed and others have been permanently disabled from the COVID-19 injections. Imagine being the parent who believed all the lies they were told and decided to have their now deceased or injured child injected.
Also in March 2021, Dr. Avindra Nath, clinical director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), began leading a team of clinical researchers who were diagnosing and treating individuals with serious COVID-19 injection injuries. Twenty-three study participants were diagnosed and treated, then instructed to “not talk about the study” until the NIH could release its findings and conclusions. Dr. Nath maintained that early recognition and intervention were crucial for effective treatment. Yet no guidance was provided to physicians — one participant remarked that the NIH scientists had “taken the data and left us hanging.”
Adding insult to injury, in April 2021 the CDC published a report stating that similar adverse events were “anxiety” — not a problem with the shots. It was not until study participants began speaking publicly in 2022 that the NIH quietly posted its study on a preprint server that virtually no one read, leaving medical teams nationwide in the dark and the injection-injured left untreated.
We will never know the full extent of the harms (or the benefits) of the COVID-19 injections. But we do know that federal health officials were aware that serious harm was being done within months of them granting Emergency Use Authorization. We also know that those same officials turned a blind eye toward the safety signals that were screaming at them, but they refused to warn the public. The public pays federal health officials to evaluate drugs for safety and efficacy, and we have the right to be informed.
How many deaths and injuries could have been avoided had federal health officials simply done the job we paid them to do?
Currently, VAERS shows 1,676,100 cumulative worldwide adverse events and 39,099 deaths associated with the COVID-19 injection, with 9,332 (24%) of the deaths occurring within 2 days of injection. Most of these tragic adverse events occurred well after federal health officials should have informed the public about the risks they knew existed. Instead, they hid or downplayed those risks. As a result, millions were harmed after being denied their right to fully informed consent.
That’s why I consider this to be the biggest government scandal in my lifetime, and one that is crying out for full media attention and coverage.
Good energy discussion with Jeffrey Currie.
I agree good discussion.
BUT, Currie is still a shill for the U.S. supremist ideology. No way Trump can sustain this as a cratering U.S. economy is his biggest worry and he doesn’t have the missiles to sustain anything for longer than a week or so.
Additionally, I think Russia can much more easily take out Ukraine once Putin pulls out the stops and puts Europe in it’s place. My problem with Mario is he just doesn’t push back when his interviewee says nonsense.
AJ
Thanks!
I haven’t followed Currie long enough to have an opinion on his integrity.
US increased the Hormuz toll from 1% to 20%.
Good interview between Galloway and Marandi on Iran’s perspective and intentions.
They should call the ground invasion “Operation Meatgrinder”. Just to see if the troops tag along with the orders.
Just some key points to keep in mind as we progress on this road:
1) War is back on and it will last a while, years…
2) Hormuz is closed and it will be closed for a while, years…
3) Financial markets are rigged & they provide no guidance to reality.
4) Oil price is rigged.
5) Trump is lame duck & he has no control over the trajectory of anything.
6) Oil shortages are just a matter of time (few months); EU & much of Asia will be hit first.
7) US cannot fight Iran using the present style (planes from GCC & two aircraft carriers) for much longer, hence ground war is inevitable, just like in Vietnam.
8) US cannot cut & run from this war.
9) All politicians in DC are bought by special interests & all politicians in EU are Epstein-material blackmailed. Hence they will act to hurt the people of the countries they “represent”.
10) Iran & Russia wars are intimately connected in that they are the pathway to WW3.
This will be much worse than Vietnam if US goes in.
https://x.com/TOzgokmen/status/2076981656359952779
TOP 10 STAGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST:
In my humble view, implications of this statement, if truly from Trump’s account, is profound.
I checked & a subcommittee of the senate is indeed voting on this today, in a closed session.
Implications:
1) US will not withdraw from Iran war & Hormuz will not open for a long time.
Those folks who have been claiming that I am posting over dramatization of the matter have been wrong over & over again.
2) Entrainment of Israel into US military means they do not need special Congress approval for aid; it will be a line item in Pentagon budget, which simply means open check for Israel’s military from American tax payers & national/international debt money buyers.
3) Israel will effectively enter NATO, without really being officially so; no approval process.
4) NATO will effectively expand their focus from EU vs Russia only to the Middle East. Epstein class will not object, I am sure.
5) I also think that a massive economic crisis is awaiting for EU & US as soon Fall 2026. This is critical for the next 5 steps:
6) Once the economic crisis settles, military draft will be instituted both in EU & US, claiming that Iran must be defeated at all cost.
Crisis means extreme measures must be taken. There was no false flag going into their war, but they will leverage it with Greater Depression, like WW2.
7) Eventually, after a long nasty war, the West might defeat Iran, at least in part, because Iran cannot defeat the West alone and nobody is coming to Iran’s side. They are a very powerful nation, but quite alone in this.
8) Defeating Iran after a nasty war in the Middle East means that the West will seize ALL OIL & GAS. That goal #1!
9) Post war, GCC countries will be reconfigured in Sykes-Picot manner.
0) What are the counter scenarios to this:
* China will enter the war directly!
But this did not happen in 4.5-years of Russian war and 1-year of Iran war.
Thus the West concluded that China will simply freeze and try to wait things out.
10) Post war, the West will not only reconfigure the Middle East, but also cut oil to China & have them collapse economically under the overproduction & export model. That is goal #2!
Ambitious plan… I think.
A plan that gets skewered by a
Cactus!
Maybe.
Iran must be thinking about this scenario.
They would be foolish not to be building nukes as we speak and Iran is not foolish.
Is US bombing Iran’s largest petrochemical hub in Mahshahr, in Khuzestan Province?
Have you heard anything about when the other shoe is going to drop? Gas prices where I live are continuing to go down, although they are still higher than pre-war levels. I just feel like there’s a disconnect between how severe the energy shock should be, and what i’m experiencing day-to-day.
I’ve been watching the energy situation non-stop since the US murdered Iran’s religious leader and his family and 160 schoolgirls in a sneak attack while pretending to negotiate.
I expected serious problems before now. So did most of the energy experts who know a lot more than me.
The people I follow think the US has made a catastrophic mistake by manipulating the oil futures market and draining the SPR to keep oil prices low and therefore demand high.
They think a violent correction in price and supply will occur in the next 1-8 weeks depending on whether the US is willing to drain the portion of SPR normally reserved for the military.
All these experts were wrong before so maybe they’ll be wrong again.
Iran has publicly stated that they want a low oil price so that the US crashes into a brick wall at high speed.
China dramatically cut its oil imports to help keep the oil price low and it’s possible they are collaborating with Iran on the high speed brick wall crash plan.
It’s also possible that US cut a secret deal with China and gave them something valuable in return for helping to keep oil prices down. Recall that Trump visited China right before this fiasco and we don’t know what was agreed.
A few people with darker suspicions believe the US can’t possibly be this stupid and is intentionally crashing the system for some unknown reason as evidenced by its simultaneous attacks on Russian energy infrastructure which has shut down all exports of Russian refined oil products.
We should know soon what is true.
Honestly after observing their behavior during covid, it wouldn’t surprise me if China was more tightly integrated into “western” power politics more than is let on. Don’t forget they went along with the entire production just as willingly as the US and other developed countries. Their economy and thus internal stability is directly linked to the global economy functioning in a status quo configuration. It’s like the post-Stalin Soviet Union- they might have had their own agenda but after the 1950s they really didn’t want to destabilize the global order too much.
Possible.
China played a key role in fomenting the covid panic.
I think the US/China spooks who funded the bioweapon at Wuhan were genuinely panicked in the early days because they knew the potential of what they engineered.
We got lucky that the bioweapon turned out to be a dud.
The real damage was done by the mRNA antidote.
But China and Russia did not use mRNA.
That could be the case, although I see the Wuhan origin, whether or not the release was intentional, as something that would make China complicit either in the initiation or the reaction to the virus, and points to much deeper ties than are publicly discussed. Even if you take the official story at face value, you’re left with the question of why there are so many links between western and Chinese virology research when you’d think both sides would want to keep such sensitive research separate from the other. It doesn’t really mesh with the narrative that there’s two separate power blocs that are competing. It reads to me more like the governments of China and the collective west grandstand that there is a major rivalry so they can continue to fund inflated military budgets, when in reality they are collaborating with each other closely in many areas.
All excellent points.
Why would enemies collaborate on bioweapons research? Unless it really was medical research that both sides understood had military potential and they collaborated so that each knew what the other was doing.
Another strange fact is Chinese involvement in the Darian gap use to flood immigrants into the US.
There’s a lot going on we do not understand.
Maybe easier to understand if we assume big bank owners are a power layer above all governments.
There’s a lot of political scientists and philosophers who have written tons about this, but basically countries usually need an enemy or rival to help orient their own societies. It pretty much boils down to governments need help justifying their existence because they’re protecting you from “the bad people over there”, even if there’s no intention of actually acting on that belief
the twist here is that in reality business deals are being done in the background. If you read the excellent book catch-22 there’s a great parody of this with the character Milo Minderbinder, who I think is one of the greatest characters in all of fiction. While his squadron is either patriotically fighting the germans or just trying to not get killed, he’s out there cutting deals with them
That’s definitely what’s going on in Europe. They’re all collapsing due to high debt and low growth because they have no energy, and they’re demonizing Russia as the enemy, which just happens to have some resources that might bail them out.
pretty much sums up my thoughts
Gas prices are falling in my region too, which seems very odd to me. Something just doesn’t seem right, almost as if we are in the calm before the storm.
Very nice fresh recap of the covid crimes by Bret Weinstein discussing Sonia Elijah’s new book “3/11: Viral Takeover”.
There’s too much to summarize but a couple quotes resonated with me:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249000157-3-11-viral-takeover
I really am surprised at how successfully COVID was memory-holed by the powers that be. I haven’t been asked to take the vaccine in years. That alone should tell you how big of a fraud the whole thing was. If COVID really were that deadly, and the vaccine really were that effective, then why isn’t it still being pushed harder now that the novelty has worn off? The silence speaks volumes
I don’t think governments needed to do anything.
Most citizens prefer not to know what happened.
The evidence of major crimes is overwhelming now and no one cares.
Very few people have the ability to admit they allowed themselves to be deceived, especially when the deceit was obvious.
Probably another example of MORT.
It really is paralleled by people who lived in countries that used to be totalitarian. Most of them don’t like to talk about what it was like because they’re uncomfortable with the fact that they were either taken in by the propaganda, actively participated in perpetuating the system, or passively went along with it just to get by.
Yep.
I broke relationships with family and friends that thought I should transfect myself with a gene therapy they were certain was a miracle of science.
Those same people were gleeful when the protesting Canadian trucker’s had their bank accounts seized.
May they all burn in hell.
Maybe one day the truth will come out and be widely understood, but I’m not holding my breath.
It did reveal the character of a lot of people I thought I knew
It’ll be CACTUS soon and then people will only worry about food.
ya, but hopefully things don’t go tits up before my much needed vacation.
It is sort of fascinating to watch people who are collapse aware but not aware of the covid travesty, and vice-versa, struggle to articulate how people could be so blind to their own pet issue. I just want to tell them “it’s not just that, people are in denial about a lot of things because facing the facts is too much for most people to handle”. MORT goes a long way to explaining it, because ultimately if people faced up to the reality of their own mortality most of the values of our civilization would vanish completely
Still waiting for Nate Hagens to declare his covid beliefs. Dr. Varki thinks RFK Jr. is evil. Sam Mitchell won’t discuss covid. I think Dr. William Rees and Jack Alpert supported mRNA transfection policies. Mike Roberts, the only person ever banned from un-Denial, defended covid policies.
A recent vaccine failure, and the authorities refusal to acknowledge the failure, demonstrates that nothing has been learned from covid.
That’s because no one has been held to account for killing 20+ million people.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/a-gonorrhea-vaccine-fails-and-reveals
Here’s an update on the white fibrous clots in cadavers that appeared after mRNA transfections began.
As with the lab leak and deadly mRNA side effects, the fibrous clots are no longer conspiracy theories.
The clot mechanism is not yet understood but a theory is presented here.
As with all other covid questions, our “healthcare professionals” are not investigating.
https://philipmcmillan.substack.com/p/the-white-fibrous-clots-can-no-longer
The wicked witch is dead.
How many covid mRNA transfections did Lindsey Graham inject?
So… We have officially arrived at the point where companies want to launch tens of thousands of satellite mirrors into space so you can subscribe to daylight even when it’s night in your region:
https://theconversation.com/the-u-s-just-approved-a-giant-space-mirror-to-test-sunlight-on-demand-low-earth-orbit-is-getting-weird-283482
I do have a question, actually. Can I rent multiple satellite systems of this sort and direct them all at the same spot? I have a few places I would like to torch down eco-friendly with 100% natural light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_gun
Hell of a way to burn up the last of the fossil carbon.
Can I get a huge sunshade in space so that I can subscribe to night during daytime hours? I have a few annoying neighbours whose solar panels I would like to block off.
Poor young Goobie just discovered that 4 billion will be dead by 2050 due to 3C temperature rise.
See appendix I in this actuarial study:
Click to access planetary-solvency.pdf
Good thing Goobie is CACTUS blind or he might become really depressed.
Fingers crossed people will be so demented from microplastic in their brains by then that they don’t really care if they get fried.
I read recently that the worst micro plastics are the particles released into the air as a consequence of tires wearing. These react with ozone and produce a compound (6PPD-quinone) – after crossing the brain-blood barrier it puts people on a fast track to dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease.
I watched the latest interview with Marandi and Iran seems determined there will be no further negotiations and Hormuz will remain closed until the US fulfills all of the commitments it made when it signed the MOU including Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon.
Iran seems ready to eat grass before it bends to the evil empire. Let’s watch to see if the US is also willing to eat grass to remain dominant in the middle east.
A few minutes ago Iran replied to the US demand to apologize and reopen the strait:
I am starting to no longer follow the US-Iran news. My mind has replaced it with this:
Rob I think you need to differentiate between the people of Iran and the regime. I’m sure the regime is quite prepared for the people to eat grass, I’m not so sure about the people. The left in Iran made a terrible mistake when they joined up with the religious mob to get rid of the Shah thinking that when they did the religious lot would go back to thinking about multiple virgins in paradise and they could take over.
Bad misjudgement and now the people are stuck with a theocracy forever (which as we know may not be long) because the regime will never relinquish power.
The actions of the USA and Israel remain (apparently with the knowledge we possess) insane.
We seem to be watching different news feeds. I saw many millions of citizens in the streets mourning the sneak attack murder of their leader, waving red flags demanding revenge, and booing their political leaders for signing a MOU that was too soft on the US.
This is a big problem today. People have legitimately different worldviews based on what their social media feeds have decided they want to hear.
It’s true that every news feed creates a bubble.
But as far as understanding Iran goes, it’s helpful to know Iranians, and the history.
The military-theocratic rulers present themselves as representing the whole Iranian people, but this is just not the case.
There’s also such a thing as ‘rent-a-mob’: the regime has created groups of dependent clients, and it can go badly for you if you don’t turn up.
How Iran chooses to govern itself is none of the US’s business.
Just as it is none of Iran’s business that US elections have no influence on starting wars or foreign policy.
Rob you keep saying Iran and not the people of Iran. The people have no say.
I don’t believe that is true based on hundreds of hours of listening to high integrity Iranians like Nima Alkhorshid and Professor Marandi, and by watching the actions of the Iranian government.
I don’t care that US citizens have no say over their government, and if I’m wrong and you’re right, I don’t care that Iranians have no say over their government.
I care that US constantly starts wars all over the world, kills millions of innocent people including 160 schoolgirls, and funds the genocide in Gaza; and I care that Iran does not.
Today, July 11, is world population day. Unfortunately, overpopulation is a predicament with a tragic outcome and CACTUS makes a soft landing impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Population_Day
I used to be a huge fan of Nicole Foss and even paid to watch her speak live once.
She disappeared for a few years and recently returned to blogging but I haven’t been that impressed with her new writings.
Today I see signs that she’s finding her footing again.
https://www.foss.blog/2026/07/11/the-empire-moves-to-infiltrate-and-subvert-another-country/
There seems to be an increasing emphasis on localised resilience but I can’t see how resilience is possible as civilisation collapses. It will affect everyone, no matter how resilient they think they are. Apart from uncontacted tribes, of course.
Which is why real preppers should join those uncontacted tribes. Personally, I highly recommend the Piraha of the Amazon!
Larry Johnson’s energy expert ghost writer continues with an interesting explanation of the US’s predicament.
https://sonar21.com/part-ii-the-sour-crude-problem-how-long-can-the-salt-caverns-keep-bridging-the-gap/
Stephan Burns does a great job here:
People who have studied The Carrington Event of 1859, like those members of Dr. Peter Vincent Pry’s Taskforce on National and Homeland Security, have warned for a long time that if one of those powerful solar-flare, coronal mass-ejection events were to occur these days, it would be more than “lights-out.”
Dr. Pry’s group studied a variety of EMP possibilities and published their final report to Congress as “Catastrophe Now: America’s Last Chance to Prevent an EMP Disaster.” in 2023. (available at Amazon books) Apparently, the recommendations were basically ignored, as were previous reports.
I’m pretty sure that Canadian Prepper was one of the last to interview Dr. Pry before he died. Easy to find.
Another publication by the taskforce and affiliated groups is found here:
Click to access A-Call-to-Action-for-America-Revised-on-3-10-2023.pdf
Pages 3 and 4 basically sum up the aftermath of such an event.
Interesting, thanks.
Stefan Burns seems legit. Any chance you could summarize his world view in one paragraph to bring us up to steam on his deep YouTube channel?
I am aware of the risks associated with a Carrington like event on modernity. It seems to be a genuine threat. An EMP weapon seems like a great way to take out an enemy quickly without ruining the land for later colonization.
Have you studied the ECDO theory promoted by the Ethical Skeptic (aka Roger Cunningham)? I have not studied ECDO and don’t have an opinion yet however Ethical Skeptic proved he had high intelligence and integrity during covid with excellent data analysis so I would not dismiss him as a whack job without listening first.
Summarize Ethical Skeptic’s ECDO theory.
I have not watched this yet but AI says this is a good summary of ECDO.
Yes, I’ve been reading at his site for a few years and have been watching his interviews since noticing he has hooked-up with Ben Davidson (Suspicious Observers), which surprised me. ECDO is pretty interesting. Diamond & Leah over at Magnetic Reversal News seem determined to debunk it. Those Grimerica guys are a real hoot; love ’em, mostly.
Have you decided if ECDO is probable?
Allow me to preface this with the fact that I respect the work of people like Temple Grandin, who have grounded their unique perceptions by actually doing things that reduce suffering; in her case, impacting the lives of millions of animals, and thousands of people who raise and slaughter them. There is no doubt that Earth has had many civilization-ending cataclysms, but discovering the mechanism(s) underlying those is a moot point relative to our present conundrum. Roger Cunningham’s work is impenetrable, and unfalsifiable, as far as I can see. What I have been able to discern, after reading many of his posts, is that there are a number of “glitches” among the many brilliant observations he produces.
Plug this question into Claude.ai and see what you think about the response.
read this: https://theethicalskeptic.com/2024/05/23/master-exothermic-core-mantle-decoupling-dzhanibekov-oscillation-theory/ and then assess the caveat expressed by Roger Cunningham, aka The Ethical Skeptic,
“This petition for hypothesis is offered without any intent to provoke panic, apocalyptic thinking, or preparatory survivalism. Its purpose is instead to introduce the theory for consideration under the plurality allowed by Ockham’s Razor and to encourage continued evaluation within competent scientific inquiry. Although it advances a postulate concerning Earth’s catastrophe cycles, it neither asserts that identical sequences must recur nor that such events follow a fixed periodicity. It remains entirely plausible that we presently occupy only a precursor regime of geomagnetic instability and exothermic core activity.
Whose history is concealed from them is also captive.
Man himself has proved to be a greater threat to our knowledge and understanding than any natural disaster ever could be. Envy finds fault in the trivial, while a concealed truth intoxicates. Until we mature spiritually, we will perpetually believe that we were created out of clay or recently and amazingly evolved from a dissimilar yet extinct species.
Every ancient library burned, every inscription erased, every sculpture smitten, every artifact easily explained, reburied, and ignored – all in the name of The True God™ and The True Science™ (same team, same playbook). As long as our hearts remain in this darkened state, so too will our past be equally opaque, and our present a constant series of paradoxes.
Thanks for confirming my suspicions about ECDO.
When someone is unable to clearly articulate a theory and you have to dig and dig to try to understand what they’re saying it is a big red flag.
It’s hard to find people without flaws. I had a lot of respect for Ethical Skeptic during covid.
https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-07-11
My spidey-senses are screaming at me to buy more preps, but I’m running out of storage space and ideas for things to add.
I’d like to top up my gasoline supply but I try to keep it low during the hot summer months.
I’ll probably go to my discount store today and buy some more canned soup.
What are you doing?
Wondering if I will ever use the ammo I have (for trade hopefully?).
I too try to limit how much gasoline I keep during fire season.
AJ
I can’t legally get the guns I would want to have where I live (I kind of like sniper rifles like the VSS Vintorez (integrated silencer with very heavy subsonic rounds), but it would probably make more sense to go for something with a less exotic calibre [unless there are conversion kits available]) – but I do have a compound bow (still wonder if I should have gotten a crossbow instead). Can never go wrong with a “firearm” that never runs out of ammo (if you disregard that arrows / bolts can still break, get stuck or just be lost).
I kind of always wanted a repeater compound crossbow, magazine-fed, with full-auto capacity, but I don’t think I am enough of a prepper to go all in like that.
Aqua Vitae: The Story of Dr. John W. Willard and his Breakthrough Discovery: Catalyst Altered Water
Roy M. Jacobsen, published in 1987.
On page 38 are before-and-after pictures of second and third-degree burns, sustained by a welder when his polyester coveralls caught fire and melted onto his inner-thighs, which were severely scorched as a result. Harry Reasoner of 60 Minutes, did a show on Willard Water back in 1980 — still available on YouTube.
Reasoner was there around the time when Chauncey Taylor had returned from his doctor’s office, a 50-mile trip drive he did after he had first soaked his legs in a bathtub of Willard Water and removed the melted polyester.
His doctor was amazed that Chauncey was experiencing no pain after driving 50 miles to his office. Dr. Lemley later testified at the House Subcommittee Hearing on Catalyst Altered Water.
Harry Reasoner’s camera-man documented the ugly burns when they had not yet healed and the duo came back sometime later to film the dramatic results — pink new skin and no scar-tissue. It is well worth watching on YouTube.
Search “60 Minutes and Willard Water”
I have a few outstanding experiences with Willard Water and burns. A friend once preheated a cast-iron skillet in her oven to 400-degrees. She took it out and put it on the stovetop and a few moments later, she forgot to use a potholder. She lifted the skillet and was in burn-shock immediately. My wife called out to the backyard where I was hanging out with her husband, asking if I had any Willard Water in the truck. I always carry it and was in the kitchen within a minute to spray it on our friend’s palm. She was trembling and her hand was turning bright red. Within a few sprays, she looked at me like I had landed from Mars, as her pain had almost immediately subsided. She continued spraying as they went about preparing our meal and may have soaked it later that evening after we left as recommended. She was fine the next the next day with no blistering.
Copied from an online source:
Yes, 400 degrees Fahrenheit can severely burn or blister a human palm. Skin contact with temperatures above 140°F (60°C) can cause burns almost instantly, and at 400°F (204°C), the damage would be immediate and severe, likely causing second- or third-degree burns, including blisters, tissue damage, and potentially nerve damage. The palm’s skin, while slightly thicker than other areas, is still highly susceptible to thermal injury at such extreme temperatures.
A few months ago, here in 2025, I seared my forearm on the inner-frame of a countertop-oven that I was using to cook a chicken at 425-degrees. I did a WW spray for a while and then put a thick-cloth soaked with it, held in place with an elastic-wrap. I left that on for a couple of days, moistening it from the edge with the spray bottle. I have discolored skin now from that inch and a half burn, but there was no blister or pain after the initial contact.
Note: always dilute the concentrate as specified on the label – one or two ounces of concentrate added to one-gallon of clean water, preferably distilled, or reverse-osmosis, or spring water. More is not better, the concentrate is very alkaline.
I have applied Willard Water on other less-intense burns; like the time a potato exploded and burned my sister-in-law’s hand on the web-of-skin between her middle fingers, which caught the blast of steam. I have sprayed it on friends who had severe sunburns, even blistered, to great results. The pain relief is miraculous.
Then came the day when I was rescued from a trip to the emergency room.
I had a dump truck full of limestone scheduled to be delivered to my country driveway. When the truck arrived I hopped-up on the passenger side to talk. About three-inches of my bare forearm, just below the elbow, pressed against the truck’s exhaust-stack. I heard my skin sizzle and got that strange metallic taste in my mouth. By the sound of it he was running the truck with no muffler, so this was likely an 800-degree burn at least.
I grabbed a spray-bottle of Willard Water from my garden-shed and had to spray the burn every 30-seconds to keep the pain at bay. After we got the load dumped, I went in the house and soaked the burn in a shallow-pan of Willard Water.
I kept it submerged for two hours before taking my arm out to see how it felt. It was good, but I could feel pain coming back after a while, so I did a couple more two-hour submersions, with longer breaks in-between them. I slept just fine with a soaked cloth on the wound and did another extended submersion in the morning and one in the afternoon. I did a few shorter ones over two or three days just for good measure and the results really showed themselves in zero pain, no blister, and a lack of scarring. All I had a few weeks later was a thin light-brown patch of skin that flaked-off in a few days, and pink new skin underneath.
Doc Willard called this action “Healing by First Intention.” He discovered burn healing himself when he had an accident with a soldering iron. He hypothesized that the catalyst altered-water penetrated and coated the nerves, which then did not transmit the pain signal to the brain and thereby blocking the inflammatory responses that normally result from a burn. It allowed the body to produce one layer of cells at a time, until the healing was complete, with no scar-tissue.
There is a small 57-page booklet printed in 1992 by BL Publications in Viejo California, titled: Dr. John Willard’s Catalyst Altered Water. It was one of a series of Health Learning Handbooks authored by Beth M. Ley. It is her interview with Dr. Willard covering: Catalyst Altered Water: What Is It? — Practical Household Applications — Agricultural Applications — Greenhouse Applications — Livestock and Poultry Applications — What Willard Water Can Do for You — Testimonies — and Suggestions for Use.
Dr. Willard had many Patents granted on his discovery. They covered a wide spectrum of uses, and many of those involve beneficial effects on plants, animals, and soil. He never spent the money it takes to do formal clinical-trials on humans, so he never put health claims on the labels and was careful in his written work to be very specific about what the research said about what the catalyst was doing to the water it effected. He did do many trials on plants, using controls. Also, on fields of soil, demonstrating the drought-resistance that was highly visible.
Many people have been drinking the dilute solution for years. It is very hydrating and reduces stress. I used to make lemonade with it and a high-strung brother-in-law called me a few hours after drinking some to inquire about how he was feeling more relaxed than he could ever remember. He said, “what was that again?”
I have gifted 8-ounce bottles of the concentrate for decades and have all kinds of anecdotal reports back from people who have used it for a variety of things. I knew one old-timer who swore by its effect on his psoriatic scalp. Another claimed relief of eye issues. The funniest one was a friend whose mother had a front-lawn in the process of dying. My friend came back awhile later to tell me her mother was upset that after applying Willard Water a few times, she had to cut her lawn more frequently than ever before.
An old friend of Dr. Willard’s founded “The Nutrition Coalition Inc.” The website has a good deal of information about Willard Water and its uses. https://www.willardswater.com/content/category/2-willards-water-info
Below is a good article on the differences between three versions of Willard Water – Clear, Dark, and Ultimate. (one ounce of concentrate per-gallon for the Clear and Ultimate versions: two ounces per gallon for the Dark)
People get confused when they shop around and hear different stories. I used to order on the phone 30 years ago and had conversations with that old friend of Doc Willard, Charlie Sunde. The Nutrition Coalition Inc has exclusive rights to market the Ultimate Willard Water Concentrate (aka, Ultimate Dark) which was Doc Willard’s last formulation, and which Doc said was the best of his three versions, with 4-times the effectiveness of the others. That’s the one we use for drinking, watering plants, healing burns, and various cleaning chores.
We use the Clear version for bathing, and it makes for a great eyewash. Remember, ALWAYS DILUTED.
https://www.willardswater.com/content/15-ultimate-clear-dark-the-differences
The best prices I have found for quarts and gallons of the Clear and Dark Willard Water concentrates are Swanson Health Products and Heart of the Earth Marketing, a Family Run Small Business, with Excellent Customer Service. Located in the Black Hills of South Dakota: EST. 1996
https://www.swansonvitamins.com/q?kw=willard%20water
Here is a summary of pet-applications from The Whole Dog Journal in 2006
Click to access WDJ_june06_willard_water.pdf
Here is information about the Alkaline nature of Willard Water and the benefits to human metabolism and health.
https://drwillard.com/blogs/news/health-benefits-of-alkaline-water-willard-s-water
Summarize recent Iran supreme leader statement on revenge.
I have a feeling my estimate of the US drone-striking Iran’s current leader over the next three months was too cautious.
Trump murdered Iran’s pope and his family, plus 160 schoolgirls, with a sneak attack while pretending to negotiate.
What did Trump think a country of 90 million proud people would do in response?
What would you do now if you were Mossad?
Allah have mercy and wake me up when this is over. You’d think the insanity of it all couldn’t get worse but it seems to be following the same exponential hockey stick curve of all other CACTUS parameters.
I vacillate daily (sometimes hourly) between all emotions but still can’t centre upon that elusive acceptance, at least not for long. As long as I’m alive and have front row seats to this drama I want to feel everything that’s coming to me, warts and all. We’ve paid dearly for this show, and I want to be brave enough to see it to the end, or least the end I can cope with. Some days I just can’t and don’t want to look but then I remind myself that it may be a once in a universe privilege to be alive and conscious, and to honour that I must be fully present for the time I’ve been given to life. I think I can come to accept that.
I’ve been planting potatoes, 10 different varieties of them as I’m experimenting with what works best in the subtropics. I am mainly growing them in bags (including old potting mix bags that I progressively roll up as the potato grows and bury the stems with more soil) because the soil here has been so heavy and wet due to our super rainy season. We’ve had over 3 metres of rain so far this year, no kidding. Thankfully, we’re on a good slope and the water does drain. There’s something very satisfying in knowing that one potato can yield more, and you won’t know just how many until you dig, it’s like a treasure hunt! One day, potatoes will be a more desirable find than gold.
Today I put up some fairy lights under a new roof that was erected over our deck. It’s hard to believe but the glowing, changing colours of the lights just spark so much joy and delight in me. Maybe it subconsciously brings me back to being a child filled with wonder and anticipation of the good things and celebrations that bright baubles generally herald. It makes me so sad to know that so many children will never have this association, their bright lights in the night sky are accompanied by deafening booms and destruction.
Allah have mercy upon us all.
I hope all are traveling well and garnering strength for what is ahead. Love and best to everyone.
Namaste.
I’m there with you Gaia, just marveling at still being alive feeling that any day will be my last and on some level peaceful with that acceptance.
We here are experiencing the worst drought since we moved here 12 years ago (10″ less rain this season) amidst a hightened fire danger. The streams are already down to September levels. The only redeeming thing is that the temps have been more moderate this year.
I too am having “news” overload and sometimes just have to turn off YouTube and all the podcasts. No good news except that collapse seems to be going slowly at times. . . and then fast at others.
To top it off CACTUS (entropy in this case) struck our house 2 weeks ago as the PEX plumbing system that was installed when I built this house 11 years ago failed with leaks at multiple “brass” junctions that should have lasted 40 years. Seems that spring water probably has a slightly acidic pH that leaches the zinc out of the fittings (zinc was substituted for lead in brass in the 1980’s) causing pin hole leaks. Now the plumbers have to come in and make holes in all the walls and replace all the fresh water lines at great expense and inconvenience. Of course this would be impossible once collapse truly starts.
AJ
Sorry to hear about your plumbing problems. What a pain in the ass.
Dear AJ,
So wonderful to see you here and always know that we are connected not only through this space but more importantly through our shared feelings and experiences. You have been in my thoughts and I am glad that you and your family are going along as well as can be, minus the plumbing nightmare you describe.
We have a similar threat but so far it hasn’t eventuated in breached infrastructure, at least not that we know of–in our Tasmanian house our low pressure hot water cylinder which is part of our slow combustion woodstove set-up uses an indirect heating through a copper coil and our water is rainwater which is also on the acidic side. This has leached copper throughout the pipes which shows up in the shower bay as a pretty blue-green stain, however that is evidence that copper is being eroded and eventually there may be pinhole leaks throughout the system, too. We have been adding bi-carb to the rain tanks on occasion to raise the pH as a quick fix (otherwise we would have to set up a proper calcite filter system but that would most likely affect the gravity fed flow which we currently rely on, which means adding a pump inline, and you can see how much more complex everything is getting which is why we haven’t done anything…) However, using bicarb, whilst cheap and relatively easy (we still have to dissolve the bicarb first and then climb onto the tank stand where the gravity tank is…) is adding a lot of sodium to our water which is also our drinking water, so that means being able to access water from another rain fed source (more trouble). We have decided to toss some calcite directly into the tank to dissolve according to pH (keeping the gravity fed function as it won’t go through a filter) and leave it at that. A bit of extra calcium probably is better than too much sodium, but who knows? Does anyone else using rainwater have this issue?
I know how vigilant you are for fire risks and I hope the rest of the season passes smoothly and some moisture will be on the way. How did the dry spring and summer affect your garden crops? I remember so well that you were looking forward to another Spring and I join you in gratitude that so far we’ve made it through again another half turn around the sun. Now let us hope for another more gentle Autumn (and for me, Spring). Life does go on and that is a great comfort for all of us.
Namaste, friend. Blessings and love to you and your family.
Hi Gaia,
Talk about complexity and CACTUS with plumbing systems. You are there too. Nothing in this society that isn’t riddled with complexity and subject to failure at all it’s multiple points.
With respect to weather, we had a very anomalous May and June with cool/cloudy days with light rain followed by hot dry days. When mostly we would have had dry moderate days. Never got enough rain to make up for what we didn’t get in winter. Now it is getting warmer and the plants in the garden are growing prodigously 😉 . I always worry about fire this time of the year.
Best wishes to your family.
AJ
Always such nice words from you Gaia. Thank you.
Good idea on planting potatoes in bags.
We harvested a few new potatoes a week ago and they are delicious.
Preptip:
We grow exclusively a yellow oval German variety called Sieglinde. I think I’ve mentioned them before but they are the best tasting potatoes I’ve had in case you’re looking for variety ideas.
My potatoes are looking really healthy this year. I weed them more frequently than is required but it is a labor of love.
Can’t remember if I already mentioned this but last year’s harvest kept really well. I did not wash them and stored them loose in a cooler. They were harvested on Sep 3 and I ate the last ones which were still perfect on June 21.
Hello Rob,
I’m so proud of your spuds, too! That’s amazing that they kept so well and long. Sieglinde potatoes are not available here in Australia but from the description, they sound delicious as a firm potato perfect for steaming and salads. I’ve got an assortment of potatoes for different uses (baking, roasting, chips, mashed), and a couple that are red and purple fleshed. It will be a few more months yet before the verdict is in on what worked best in terms of yield, but in the meantime I can always bandicoot some new potatoes. Storage is something that I need to work out in the subtropics, especially with all our wet weather. Now that I’m getting into potato growing (although it’s not wise to count spuds before they hatch, I am hoping for at least 125kg given all the bags I have going) probably the best thing is to dig and line out some kind of root cellar, the old ideas are the tried and true! Well, that will be another project to add onto the list!
If we really had a chance at our un-denial commune (and there could be many possible ideal locations within our little community here, Gaialand is only one of many choices), with all of our combined skills we could have really made a go of it. In the meantime, I’m sending all strength and encouragement to everyone wherever you are and keeping the dream alive in my heart because we are all connected.
Namaste, friends and fellow spud-lovers!
Thank you. It would have been nice to have met in real life.
I am very impressed with your 125kg.
Something tells me that number is not random and was planned.
Half of 125kg is way more than I want to eat when other staples are available but is about right if two people are eating potatoes every day to survive.
I’m trying not to count my potatoes before they’re hatched but it will be exciting when I dump out each bag (I’ve got 45 of them) and see what’s hidden inside. All going well, I’m hoping there will be at least 3 kg in each so that’s where I got my anticipated harvest weight, plus or minus.
Yes, we have other starchy staples growing but if the potato in bag technique works well, then it will be one of the easier crops so it will be good to know we can grow in quantity if needed.
As for real life, being part of this community here is as real as it gets and since we are certainly friends, then we should consider ourselves met! We get the best of each other here without the daily maintenance, haha! But joking aside, I would definitely choose you and others here to be on my team in Survivor Challenge on CACTUS Island.
My schizoid mind remains emotionally flat. The Trump instance follows the expected behavioral trajectory, as does homo sapiens as a whole. Worst-case-scenario: cessation of personal vital functions, expected loss of remaining time to be alive and in good health: 30 years. Loss considered mildly annoying, but acceptable within given parameters.
Ed Dowd is covid dissident hero. He never quit.
Today Dowd laments we have unequivocal evidence of the crimes, and no one cares.
You can understand why the people who supported and enabled the crimes are silent, but I remain deeply disappointed with the majority of citizens, including my friends and family.
If citizens cared, the criminals would be held to account, but most don’t, and there will be no justice.
How bad would a crime have to be today for citizens to care?
20+ million dead worldwide all-in due to gain of function research plus unsafe and ineffective responses, plus probable damage to their own health, is apparently not enough.
That’s 3 times the holocaust and no one cares.
https://eddowdbeyondthenarrative.substack.com/p/the-covid-reckoning-that-never-came
My anger at the medical community and PHARMA is off the charts. How can anyone listen to what they say on “health”? Medicine did some good before it became BUSINESS in the U.S. When was that? Probably 40 years ago or so, but definately since before Covid at some time. Now I have no trust in M.D.’s (sorry Gaia).
AJ
On the contrary, AJ, I have no trust in MDs either! I avoid them like the plague! Something in me must have been alerted me those years ago (it’s been 31 years since I graduated medical school) that I needed to leave the profession almost as soon as I started, and although that took some courage of conviction then, I am so thankful that my decision has saved me from violating my oath of first doing no harm thousands of times over.
Keep doing what you know is healthy for your system and trust in the wisdom of your own body, that and time will heal most things. In any case, soon with CACTUS the role of MDs will be obsolete as they can’t do anything (including harm, hopefully) without modernity being firmly in place. Gone are all the art and skill of diagnosis by proper history taking and physical examination, that was already dying in my day as we came to rely more and more on tests and scans. And certainly gone (and never was in the allopathic, that is western medical world) is any knowledge of herbs and natural cures, so it is wise to keep some book of such knowledge in the home, I have several. It is probably also a good idea to have a couple home medical references in any case, for when the time the internet is down. It is useful to have some foundational background on what system is ailing, the knowledge is reassuring and can help focus your common sense on how to alleviate symptoms whilst knowing the process of the illness or injury.
That’s all from Dr. Gaia, pretty much do nothing other than what you already know is best for you and time does heal everything one way or another.
Namaste, friends.
Mac10 on the end of empire.
https://www.financial-reality.com/post/the-days-of-reckoning
Frightening. I know of what he speaks. I’ve been saying to family and friends that this U.S. economy is a mega bubble that when it pops is going to destroy the U.S. worse that any Great Depression or Soviet collapse. Family and friends just dismiss me as an old idiot and keep investing in the newest thing.
AJ
Chris Martenson is shocked.
Ukraine hit 30-35 Russian tankers in last 24 hours.
Ukraine is also hitting Russia’s decentralized refinery system, everywhere.
Russia has switched from being an exporter of refined products to an importer.
If you want to know how bad the situation is you have to pay Martenson for a subscription, however his free advice for the cheap seats is buy lots of sardines, which means I don’t need to pay him for a subscription.
To better understand that is actually going on, replace “Ukraine” above with “US”.
Refined oil is a collection of critical fungible products like diesel traded in a global market.
This means US wants to cause diesel shortages.
Which either means US has plenty of diesel hidden away in storage that the experts don’t know about, or US wants to cause itself to crash.
Why?
Our world makes no sense.
This is behind a paywall but the headline is enough to understand everything.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/meta-meltup-hynix-hype-crude-crunch-and-vaporized-volume-send-stocks-shooting-higher
fyi: BTFD = buy the fucking dip
The not so bright, but oh so ubiquitous (and tiresome), Larry Johnson, has an energy expert ghost writing for him that is not acknowledged.
https://sonar21.com/the-sour-crude-problem-why-americas-refineries-depend-on-imports-and-why-it-is-relevant-to-the-strait-of-hormuz/
This is my first exposure to energy analyst Philip Pilkington.
He has some very interesting things to say about the Iran debacle and energy market manipulations.
Must listen I’d say if you’re interested in energy.
Maybe you are making the wrong assumptions about the central powers.
From the masses, they like complacency and crowd behavior, not so much responsible collective behavior. So yes, they will switch from “everything is fine” to “major crisis” overnight and pass a few more bills to get extra-powers.
Why should we expect anything else, given what we have seen so far?
Very good point.
You’d think there would be a few western leaders in a few countries trying to do the right thing.
But as with covid, they’ve all abandoned their integrity.
B today on (NOT) renewably mining for renewables.
Me thinks B lurks around Hideaway’s writings.
Of course no acknowledgement of Hideaway nor mention of CACTUS.
The conclusion contradicts prior conclusions by B, which suggests a titanic battle between reality and denial in the MORT circuit of B’s brain.
Of course no mention of Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT either.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/we-are-not-mining-with-renewable-104
Hello Rob,
Hope you’re going well. I’m so happy to see photos of your recent exploits, that dehydrating container is a roaring success and I am so proud that you are so proud of it! The fishing trip is an exclamation point for this pointy end of modernity, but I trust you enjoyed being out on the water and the freshest of fish. Your sardines must be jealous!
I read B’s latest before coming here and the entire time I felt nothing but indignation that he obviously has been quoting Hideaway (using some of the exact same phraseology, including inclusion of complexity playing a major role) and there’s no reference to our Uncle and his CACTUS story. I must admit, one of the reasons I read his piece after being taken in by the title, was to just see if this time B finally admitted to CACTUS and acknowledge that the complete theory was already parsed out. What does it take to give credit where due?
We all here know who and how it was hashed out, unfolding as it did in real time and from the horse’s mouth–that has got to be one of the peak experiences of our lives (the peak just before we go off the cliff) and no one can take that away from us! The rest is imitation, but there is only one original (and the best) Hideaway!
Namaste, everyone. Sending love and best.
Thanks Gaia.
I detected subtle criticism of the dehydrator in your comment. In case you’re wondering about my judgment, if I owned the farm, I would not have invested in a large dehydrator. It is a complex device prone to failure after a few years and does not produce food that will be useful post CACTUS. I am however proud of the design that I was asked to build.
Ditto on fishing for salmon in a 400 horsepower boat with sonar and down-rigger technology that does not give the fish a chance. I would never pay for such a waste of precious resources. I went because it was offered as a free gift by a friend.
I’m still watching for the first mention of Hideaway’s CACTUS by any intellectual leader in the overshoot space.
Dr. Ajit Varki’s MORT theory has been mentioned a few times over the last 10 years but quickly forgotten and never integrated into stories that explain our predicament.
Oh no, Rob! You have misread me completely (and that is one of the main downfalls of solely written communication, you miss all the usual signaling from face to face interactions) And in my case, I would want to give everyone a hug, too!
I am truly proud of your dehydrator and just wanted to express how happy I was especially to know that you were so happy with the outcome, that’s my meaning. And, I am glad that you had a chance to enjoy an experience that you otherwise wouldn’t have, just for the fun and possibility of it, and knowing that you would have gotten something out of the logistic and technical aspects of the boat but more importantly, just being in the fresh air, out on the water and capturing a new view of your beloved environment.
I hope you know by now that I only ever have the best intention and feeling for you and everyone here and I am sorry that you felt uneasy for a time because of my comment.
I hope this post rights it all and consider it a virtual hug, too!
You’re the best, Rob!
💖
3 of those sentences are very closely paraphrased from Greer’s book The Long Descent, which mentions similar themes to a lesser degree of rigor.
Hello Dario and welcome.
Are you making the point that Greer explained CACTUS before Hideaway?
I’ve read the long descent. In the book, Greer argues for a slow catabolic collapse, not a fast CACTUS-style collapse.
I think Greer’s MORT kept him from getting that far, but he managed to describe the declining ore yields accurately enough. His hopium was in the idea that the survivors will somehow manage to recycle at better efficiencies than our own society. AFAICT from recognising the sentence construction, Matics may have borrowed a couple lines of descriptive-purposes stuff wholesale and adapted it to newer numbers.
I very much doubt Greer would mind anyway, so it’s up to whether we consider it as telling entirely stuff we already know from a hopeful angle or doing something better.
Nate Hagens today with another dose of sophisticated sounding words like “regeneration” intended to obscure reality.
Lot going on. Europe clamping down on free speech.
https://no1sdailydigest.substack.com/p/daily-digest-2026-07-10
Howdy y’all – here’s a couple of “MORT-CACTUS writ-large” discussions that cover the institutional-layers handling the Colorado River crisis and the Corpus Christie water sharing dilemma. If Rob gives the OK, I’ll post a Claude MORT-CACTUS combined analysis of the texts of both videos. It’s a bit long, at 17-paragraphs, but I found it useful.
better yet, here’s a link to the MORT-CACTUS analysis
https://claude.ai/share/e8bc5df6-cf15-414d-a423-a803ba644a0c
there’s are a couple of references to other names since this project has been one continuous and very long thread over 2-months so far. Claude has been trained to integrate previous material, but this one is pretty clean in that regard. What I found most useful was the parallel-dynamics contrasted per timelines and specifics.
The Corpus Christi and Colorado River documents analyzed through a MORT-CACTUS lens
Good essay today by Rintrah on the water crisis.
https://www.rintrah.nl/americans-dont-recognize-their-dependence-on-nature/
I dunno, I see several mischaracterizations and errors, does he use AI?
I agree with overall thrust, but the mistakes make me wary.
Probably. He has a history of mental illness.
He’s also not CACTUS aware and thinks there is a solution to climate change.
“Degrowth is dumb”
For nuance, here is the largest ever-conducted meta-study (roughly 1 000 scientific papers analyzed) on degrowth and how it seems mathematically necessary: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab842a
The peer review process is bullshit. This paper concludes degrowth is required but does not mention that modernity is impossible without growth. One simple comment by Hideaway debunks the life’s work of these scientists.
It’s a long paper but includes some reality..
“Currently, decoupling appears to depend on prior use and accumulation of materials and on extractive expansion and rising material flows elsewhere. As long as this is the case, decoupling cannot be achieved in the long-term or universally.”
So not entirely useless. However the final conclusions are drawn from those countries importing a lot of their goods from elsewhere, including solar and wind so it looks like decoupling, instead of adding back the imported energy used elsewhere.
None of these types of papers wants to look at the world as a whole, as that doesn’t look so good.
I stress “mathematically required”. Reality doesn’t care what is or isn’t mathematically required, only what is physically possible.
Personally, I think degrowth already fails at simple game-theoretical dynamics – if a nation really does stop growth, then an opportunist nation can just decide not to stop growing and ultimately absorb the degrowthers. The equilibrium would only be stable if you could ensure that 100% of all nations globally formed a lasting consensus, which seems highly doubtful. That’s on top of the complexity issues.
I just wanted to point out that Hausfather seems not to care that colleagues of his do not share his opinion.
Thanks hillcountry for the very interesting case study.
Looks like you have been doing some interesting AI research on CACTUS and MORT.
A summary of your work would make an interesting guest essay if you have any interest. I can help with editing if you want help.
Thanks for the offer Rob. I can scrape the whole thread for MORT-CACTUS replies, as that is a main part of what Claude calls our “framework.” Then I can arrange those in a coherent string that builds the case. It’s been ‘crunching’ everyone from Lars Larsen and Christopher Clugston, to many financial and geopolitical-layer analysts. I’m testing the tool lately by having it perform push-back/reality-checks on its own output, and find that it handles that pretty well and when it’s in that mode it tends to identify particular, mostly measurable things to watch, for more empiracally-grounded results on timeline probabilities. It recently “decided” that we were no longer in anticipation of a ‘phase-change,’ but actually in it right now. Who knew 🙂
Awesome. When done send to:
postcarbon@outlook.com
Corpus Christi has a very long and positive description in Wikipedia. Water is mentioned only at the very end. Most people probably don’t have the patience to get to that section.
The water section consists of one detailed paragraph that implies the water system is fine.
Followed by a single terse sentence, probably added by some rogue Wikipedia editor with defective denial genes, that says a “water catastrophe” is imminent.
Given that water is the most important resource for a city, that fact that only one sentence is offered with no detail or context is I think evidence for MORT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Christi,_Texas#Infrastructure
The Corpus Christi video has only 273 views.
The Colorado River video has only 8200 views.
That’s extremely low interest for issues of this importance that will impact 40+ million people.
It mirrors the number of citizens protesting in European streets to reduce the risk of nuclear war.
We swim in a sea of MORT.
This has 17 billion views:
The Lion’s share of the Colorado river is used by agriculture, so this is not only a water crisis, but will also affect food as well, though a lot of that water goes to livestock feed like alfalfa.
Also, semiconductor companies have decided to build semiconductor fabs in Arizona, even though that process is very water intensive and Building an advanced semiconductor facility is extremely capital intensive. For example TSMC has invested over $150 billion dollars in these facilities. This could be MORT in action, or it could be that TSMC and its customers like Apple, AMD, Nvidia and Broadcom have enough political leverage to make sure that they will not be the ones bearing the brunt of any water cuts.
It does sound like farmers are slated to take a bigger hit than they already have.
The Amkor, Peoria facility being built down the road from the TSMC wafer-fab is where the silicon-wafers will be packaged and tested. The complexity involved is far beyond the surface-mount and ball-grid-array packaging of the past. From what I’m hearing, the Amkor build is fraught with difficulties. I tend to think that these kinds of operations must have secured priority water-allocations, as you alternatively surmise, especially in that the Chips Act and National Security considerations are in play, financially and otherwise.
Study: 97% of Children Ages 3-17 Have Microplastic Debris in Their Bodies
https://hrnews1.substack.com/p/study-97-of-children-ages-3-17-have
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-nanoplastics-antarctic-soils-range-atmospheric.html
Microplastics have been found even in the most remote regions of the planet. There is no where you can go to escape.
Based on purely personal experiences on X and real life encounters, I think what triggers MORT the most in almost every instance of homo sapiens intellectually capable of understanding the matter is this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
0.5% of an aged, adult brain are microplastic by mass (that’s the median, 50% of all samples were above that, the highest data point sits at a ludicrous 5%, and everyone above 1% had dementia without exception; the median seems to be rising by 50% per decade given current trends)
There are more studies that prove that microplastics indeed bypass the blood-brain barrier in mammals (see Zhang et al’s publications on the matter – you can directly measure this by creating radioactive plastic particles of sufficiently small size and then checking the radiation coming from the brain of the contaminated organism, such as a rat), so the only serious question remaining is what the numbers are, exactly – and how it looks like in the brains of younger humans (yes, you need dead babies for this so you can extract brain tissue – freshly aborted and donated fetuses would be ideal, together with a comprehensive documentation of the lifestyle of the mother)
The fact that we as a species are not monitoring this like crazy with an army of biochemists and neuroscientists screams MORT.
Addendum:
Look at Figure 1d. Look at the data points. It’s a genuine measurement that was checked multiple times & published in a highly respectable journal.
It’s too bad Dr. Varki hasn’t commented on this, a part of me really wonders what his own reaction would be.
I don’t know if microplastic denial is higher than say the certainty and implications of a 2+C temperature rise, or the certainty and implications of peak oil, but it might be. I know I don’t think much about microplastics because I know there is zero I can do about it.
Last night I was making a salad with organic carrots and as usual I don’t peal them to retain the skin nutrients but I do give them a scrub with my dish cleaning sponge. I said to myself, I’ll bet that sponge imbeds microplastics in the carrot I eat. Think I’ll change my cleaning procedure but it probably won’t make a difference.
Apparently one of the biggest sources of microplastics is the rubber compounds that grind off car and truck tires as they roll. Try and find a location to live that has no cars or trucks nearby.
Well, to really quantify that, we would require a sort of metric. How do we measure denial? What’s its unit? Varki? In energy per second (devoted to not think about a given subject)?
I am not very optimistic about plastic pollution, but Dr. Campen’s work does suggest that contamination does not affect everyone equally, so it probably does have some effect to minimize exposure across all preventable sources (even though a lot of those are not really preventable),
Based on the study I linked, tire abrasions do not seem to be ending up in our brain much, the majority appears to be Polyethylene and Polypropylene, that’s more of a packaging and construction material (pipes come to mind).
I suppose if one wanted to absolutely limit exposure, one would have to wear a suitable air filtration mask 24/7, drink only filtered water and eat self-grown organic food from a wildlife reserve or what not.
My inner chemist sometimes fantasizes about a world where people saw this coming from afar (guess what, if you introduce fragmentable, non-degradable materials into ecosystems, they fragment and spread and contaminate – DUH!) and avoided it wherever feasible (ditching asphalt roads and rubber tires for off-road vehicles that use stainless steel meshes; ditching plastic packaging, synthetic fibres, PE/PP tubes/pipes etc.)
The world worked perfectly fine without plastics even in early industrialization – not entirely certain where exactly it became a necessary complexity-component to enable further scaling.
Amazing. The Iranian LEGO crew is calling on the Ted Kaczynski’s of the world to seek revenge on the US.
More compelling evidence that mRNA transfections caused serious brain damage.
Read the exact words spoken and then attempt to find any explanation other than brain damage.
https://twitter.com/DA_Stockman/status/2075180071933886606https://twitter.com/DA_Stockman/status/2075180071933886606
The aliens are watching and having the laugh of their lifetimes.
Speaking truth ends careers of politicians.
Drain it! I want to see if MORT ramps up or down in response!
Excellent discussion on the importance of putting yourself in the other’s shoes.
Imagine how Americans would react if Iran did to the US what the US did to Iran.
Now you know how Iranians feel and how they will respond.
From a J. Doe post below :
I have NEVER seen anyone else banging the following point (like a demented monkey) :
Carbon is emitted when money is earned, practically without exception.
Carbon is emitted when money is spent, practically without exception.
Buying a ‘green’ electric vehicle, or organic food, or anything, is never environmentally friendly.
NB. Saving, taxes and ‘not-earning’ make no difference.
We are fucked. Totally fucked. Catastrophically fucked.
We are absolutely, totally fucking fucked to fuckery!
To be fair, the 2nd law says that every complex system in the whole universe is absofuckelutely fucked.
As J.Doe said, it’s going to happen to every complex system in the universe, but I’d add that the larger and more complex any system the faster it collapses, whereas the smallest systems have been able to linger for a long time. They are the closest to “degrowth”.
How does our civilization compare to all other prior ones for comparison? Is it nice and small? Ohh… We are totally, catastrophically, quickly fucked…
The only real question is when?
It’s always when, never if. But humans don’t have the balls to accurately and diligently calculate when their time is up. Ask yourself: if you could with 100% accuracy know in advance how you die, when you die, and how it is completely unavoidable, would you want to know? I know I would, I like to be able to plan ahead, but I think I might be in a minority there.
Addendum:
My AI says that my guess is on point:
Click to access rev-rev0000055.pdf
“We conduct the first representative nationwide studies to estimate the prevalence and predictability
of deliberate ignorance for a sample of 10 events. Its prevalence is high: Between 85% and 90% of people
would not want to know about upcoming negative events”
Hello, MORT!
“Prevalence in the general public. We first report the results
for the five negative events, and then for the five positive ones.
Negative events. For each of the events, we first list the exact
wording of the questions (translated into English), the percentage
of people who do not want to know the answer, and, in parenthe-
ses, further information.
Would you want to know today when your partner will die?
No: 89.5%. (Uncertain: 6.5%; Yes: 4.0%; N 992)
Would you want to know today from what cause your partner will die?
No: 90.4%. (Uncertain: 5.0%; Yes: 4.5%; N 989)
Would you want to know today when you will die?
No: 87.7%. (Uncertain: 8.2%; Yes: 4.2%; N 1,002)
Would you want to know today from what cause you will die?
No: 87.3%. (Uncertain: 6.4%; Yes: 6.3%; N 1,001)
Assume you are newly married. Would you want to know today
whether your marriage will eventually end in divorce or not?
No: 86.5%. (Yes: 13.5%; N 991)
I would pick yes to all the above.
Addendum:
I would not be at all surprised if the people who choose “No” to the above would try to avoid people who choose “Yes” like the plague. Seems to indicate rather incompatible personality structures. One wants to feel good, the other wants to know truth.
Personally, I don’t think I would want anyone from team “No” in my social circle.
Addendum:
The perfect video game to match this subject:
I’d answer yes to all the questions, but before then my mind has kicked in telling me this is like a time machine that we know is impossible.
Now if we knew when any of those events would happen, we’d likely change what we do, even if it’s ‘prepare’.
Wouldn’t the change then change the outcome??
What if the answer was your going to die on June 10 2034 in a plane crash over New York. Wouldn’t you avoid flying in a plane over NY on that day??
This is the belief in magic kicking in with the impossible just thinking about it.
Oedipus
That would depend on the details – if the answer is that you will die of old age because you will exhaust your genetic limits, then you cannot do anything about it.
Same if you have a genetically hardwired terminal disease with no cure available.
So the question would be if the answer you get is a preventable outcome (Around 33% of all humans globally die of non-preventable causes ; 50% of all deaths are due to lifestyle choices people generally are not very willing to change even when they are fully educated that they are bad for their health like alcohol abuse, smoking, overeating etc.)
But generally, yes, we would have to accept an at least partially questionable premise as an axiom when answering these.
Addendum:
I can’t help but think of the example of some yeast in a petri dish. Obviously, yeast does not have a brain, probably no consciousness, and no capability of exerting control over its behaviour. Assuming it did, though:
Its environment is finite and confined: the petri dish.
Its energy source is finite and non-renewable: the nutrient solution.
Based on the appetite of a single cell, and its replication protocols, it is possible to exactly calculate when the nutrient solution is gone and the system inevitably expires.
The yeast, assuming it had some level of awareness and control, could decide: replicate as fast as possible and burn the solution in as little time as feasible – or not replicate at all and just exist until something else makes it expire.
If the yeast now asked how it will die, and the answer was: you will starve because you will use up your nutrient solution, would this cause the yeast to choose to restrict its own behaviour? In case of humans, the answer appears to be a clear “Nope!” (Hello, MORT).
«Russia bans diesel exports to ensure domestic supply after targeted Ukrainian drone strikes»
Hmm…..
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/russia-bans-diesel-exports-increase-domestic-supply-says-deputy-pm-2026-07-08/
What’s it gonna be?
Swallow my pride or nuke’m?
Says the toddler with a defective frontal lobe.
A nuke would be the perfect stress test for MORT. Does actual nuclear war lead to less or more denial? That’s a hypothesis worth testing!
Robert Barnes is not overshoot aware but he is by far the best geopolitical analyst on the interwebs circuit today.
So my country is effectively being run by an 80 year old toddler. That is so disturbing, but it explains alot. The timestamp for the toddler brain is roughly 13 minutes into the video.
Whatever the supposed degeneration of the elderly Trump, this surely ignores the most obvious fact of all: that the President does not, at any time, devise US state policy.
I would be very surprised indeed if he wrote any of his tweets either, however uncouth, illogical or mendacious.
Shall we assume dementia in the Pentagon, too?
A senile, narcissistic, President for whom anything goes is certainly a very good cover for those truly in charge to hide behind. And the perfect fall-guy.
Yes, beneath the demented toddler is a deep state that understands peak oil, the debt bubble, and the implications of increasing trade in non-USD.
https://indi.ca/a-tale-of-two-funerals-irans-and-americas/
https://climatecasino.substack.com/p/some-monsters-are-real
If you play with fire, you risk getting burned. Unfortunately, humans are very emotionally attached to playing with fire.
You’d think that if people are prioritizing their global adventures then consumption of something else must be falling off the table.
A lot of people require cars to get to work in order to get money to buy everything else. So even if the price of fuel rises, they still have to buy it, because it’s a prerequisite to get everything else.
It’s possible that travelling has a similar role, but in a less monetary sense. I’ve met a lot of young people who saw frequent travelling as a symbol of being open-minded, actively engaged with the world and possibly even as a sort of mating ritual (if you have ever been on an online dating site, you can perhaps relate – a person who is moving around the planet a lot might seem more interesting than a person who does not, so this can serve as a way to secure a romantic partner by being more interesting than the competition).
Maybe I am wrong here, but it may be a possible explanation why the response to rising fuel prices looks the way it looks like.
Addendum:
I just asked my AI. Some paragraphs:
“Multiple mating preference studies track how profiles are evaluated on dating apps. Across platforms like Tinder and Hinge, “travel” consistently ranks as one of the top interests that increases profile engagement and match rates.”
“Since high-status material markers (like owning a house) have become unaffordable or less appealing to Gen Z, status has shifted to identity expression. Showing off a unique destination signals open-mindedness and cultural capital far more effectively than traditional status symbols.”
“Because traveling requires physical health, high financial resources, and free time, it serves as an “honest signal” of high genetic and socioeconomic fitness. It is difficult to fake, making the traveler look like a highly resourceful and adaptable partner.”
“High flight prices operate less like a standard product price increase and more like a social tax. Consumers are willing to pay inflated fares because traveling acts as a critical prerequisite for social identity, dating pool competitiveness, and peer group belonging.”
Unless you desire a partner with ethics and awareness in which case you’d prefer someone who goes camping close to home.
If that was a majority mindset, the planet would not be experiencing ~4 sigma events!
“A Journal of Sustainable Tourism study tracking voluntary flight reductions found that the overwhelming majority of consumers treat holiday air travel as completely insulated from their moral worldview. Convenience, social connection, and lifestyle preservation routinely beat out abstract planetary concern at checkout.”
“Sociological research in tourism shows that among highly educated, urban populations (the exact demographic most concerned with climate change), global mobility has been reframed from a luxury item into an absolute right and human necessity.”
The “green” people close to me travel long distance a LOT more than “non-green” people.
But the greens make up for this by putting their recyclable trash in the correct bin.
There is a lot of science backing that up, yes. Sociologists refer to this as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-action_gap ,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing (this most closely fits your last paragraph)
My country’s own environmental agency comes to the same result, too.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/press/pressinformation/higher-income-earners-usually-have-higher-climate
“People with higher incomes usually consume more energy and resources – regardless of whether they perceive themselves to be environmentally aware or not. These are the findings of a new study by the German Environment Agency (UBA). UBA’s President Maria Krautzberger said: “The surplus income is all too often spent on large cars, larger homes and more frequent air travel, even despite otherwise environmentally conscious behaviour. But it is precisely these ‘big points’ which have the biggest human carbon footprint. The purchase of organic foods or a high level of waste separation do not offset this.””
In short:
Classic mind over reality. Hello, MORT!
There might also be a factor of:
‘If we can go on vacation several times a year, than all is still well with the world and it’s not all going to Hell’?
Lots of factors!
One of my favourite ones in my anthropological collection:
https://bureauoflinguisticalreality.com/portfolio/morbique/
“Mor·bi·que, Adjective
Definition:
1. The morbid desire to travel to places to experience them before they are radically altered by climate change or other manmade changes. The morbidity of this desire or action is often exacerbated by the fact that the mode of transport required to reach these places often burns fossil fuels, thereby accelerating the destruction of the very place one desires to visit. (…)”
US is agreement incapable.
Think about the implications of this fact.
I harvested a couple kilograms of blackcurrant leaves today and loaded up the dehydrator I built for a test run at making tea.
One pleasant surprise so far is that the dehumidifier puts out enough heat to hold the target 35C without much help from the monster ceiling heater which means operating cost should be reasonable at around 1100 watts most of the time.
Ahh the things you don’t know. Black Currant leaf tea. We never made tea from the leaves, we only used the berries. I see there is quercetin in it. Seems to loose its Vit C with a lot of heat. Is there a way around this?
I don’t know. Will do some reading. We kept the heat modest at 30-35C.
The tea is apparently very good but I have not tried it yet. We’re trying to find a way to generate more revenue from the same crop with a product that will be unique at the farmer’s market.
have you looked into growing St Johns Wort? It is a weed, but very profitable flowers.
I am jealous of the dehydrator. I really want one
I haven’t but I’d bet the brains of the farm I help knows about St. Johns Wort. I’ll ask her.
My test batch of blackcurrant tea was dry enough after about 20 hours but we let it run another couple hours.
I calculated the energy cost for running the system for 22 hours @ 1100 watts total is about $3.60.
We taste tested the tea and we all think it’s excellent. AI tells me if we harvest the leaves before the berries are ripe next year the flavor will be even better.
It also protects against evil spirits. Whether you believe in that or not…..
The stars are aligning…
I am so winning my 0.01 USD bet that the USA will assassinate the current leader of Iran via drone strike!!
I hate giving a thumbs up to this post as it feels like I am ok with Trump saying stupid crap like this. He is the worst president the U.S. has ever had and makes individuals like Bush 2, Clinton and Biden seem like paragons of intelligence and honesty rather than the evil persons they were.
My thumbs up only means I appreciate your post.
AJ
My thumbs down means I wish what you said was not true. 🙂
My thumbs down means that Trump has yet to use some nukes and pardon a war criminal such as Shiro Ishii like Truman!
Yeah, but he has abetted the GENOCIDE in Gaza which is not small thing. Admittedly Truman was a terrible president.
Ishii has committed genocide in China and Truman didn’t seem to have a problem with it – he ultimately had to sign off the deal.
Worse, the Truman administration WANTED Ishii’s human experiment data gained through rape, child abuse, murder, torture, mutilation, pretty much every crime imaginable.
If Trump officially pardoned Epstein and gave him a medal, then I would call things even.
CACTUS questions for the group to ponder:
1) Higher oils prices enable unproductive oil to be produced. But is this not just taking surplus energy from a high-EROI well and putting into a low-EROI well? Our currencies are a proxy for surplus energy.
2) As our society is “progressing”, more jobs and industries need more technology and energy to function – this means the surplus energy needed is increasing. So, the EROI to sustain modern society is increasing every year. Not staying at 10:1 as proposed by others. This would accelerate us getting to the end point (another cactus loop).
3) Is real GDP the best measure of realised energy surplus? And is ‘currency cost’ the best measure of anticipated energy surplus cost?
4) I have been thinking about how to model ‘realised surplus energy’ against inflation. Would real GDP be a good measure for this? See my crappy attempt at a graph.
5) Could I use USA dollars for modelling, instead of global figures? I don’t know if a global average rate of inflation would be very accurate or useful.
I changed your bullets to numbers to make it easier for people to respond to those questions they have an opinion on.
1) Oil prices rising relative to other goods and services prices means falling EROI, which means falling surplus wealth available for everything in the economy that is not energy, which means less growth, then contraction, then collapse.
Oil prices rising along with other goods and services prices means governments are printing money to fund their unaffordable deficits, which are needed to force some growth in the economy and money supply, to avoid monetary system collapse, which is associated with but different than a CACTUS collapse, which is caused by depletion and falling non-renewable resource reserve qualities.
2) I think you may have this one wrong. In his last essay Hideaway explained that one of the reasons we need growth is because increasing scale creates efficiencies necessary to compensate for falling EROI. In addition, to compensate for falling reserve quality we need increased extraction technology complexity, which requires a growing population. This dynamic unpins the point I made when attempting to summarize CACTUS that “increasing civilization scale BOTH enables and requires non-renewable resource flows to increase”.
3-5) I need to let this cook a bit first. My initial reaction is to be very careful when discussing inflation. Prices can go up because there’s less stuff available to buy, or because the quantity of money is increasing faster than the quantity of stuff.
Thanks rob, but I can’t see the numbers. I’ll see if I can fix it
Sorry my error, I’ll fix it.
Personally, I take GDP figures with many grains of salt. There seems to be an incentive for nations to overreport their economic activity (it’s easier to get people to invest in you if you look more productive than you actually are), which is especially feasible for more authoritarian nations.
One way this can be checked empirically is to take satellites and look at how much light a country radiates into space – there is a strong correlation with that and GDP; certainly not a perfect measure, but it gives you an idea if people are being honest about their own numbers:
https://qz.com/1277011/satellite-images-reveal-which-countries-cheat-on-their-economic-statistics
I try to not use monetary units as much as is feasible and heavily prefer biophysical data (which of course can be fudged, too, and you can’t conduct the measurements yourself to really be certain) – GDP ultimately represents goods and services, which both require stuff (goods are made from matter, and services require goods made from matter – even a prostitute cannot offer her immaterial service competitively without makeup, perfume, showers, towels, beds, the whole shebang; so the entire service sector still sits on physical production).
One thing I like to look at is actual global resource extraction (compared to global GDP, for the sake of completeness):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y
This graph is from the Nature paper I linked above.
Since resource quality (ore grades, for instance) constantly decreases because, naturally, the most easily accessible, high yield deposits are extracted first, energy cost of extraction constantly increases (if you exhaust your 2% copper ore and now must go for 0.5% deposits, you have to mine and refine four times as much stuff just to maintain current production levels; that does not account for any overburden that first has to be moved out of the way); without an increase in efficiency, you would have to throw ever more energy at the problem, constantly taking away an ever-larger chunk of it from the rest of society. You can play that game for a while, but efficiency cannot be increased to infinity (hello, law of Carnot and friends) while concentrations can drop ever lower. At some point, that game breaks your neck. Question is when.
If you are interested in the mathematics of it, this is quite interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comminution
A linear decrease in ore grade comes with a non-linear increase in energy required to process it.
Fun thought experiment:
~5% of global electricity use appear to be allocated to grinding rocks
If we assume that a halving of ore grade comes with quadruppling of of energy required for grinding, then…
First halving from now: 20% of current electricity use just to maintain current levels of production
Second halving: 80%
Third halving: 320%
Fourth halving: 1280%
…
Yes, this gets ridiculous very fast. Did anyone ever seriously crunch these numbers?
I suspect that CACTUS occurs somewhere between the first and second halving. I strongly doubt that you can sustain modernity with 80% of available electricity being used grinding rocks.
It’s a question of whether global total electricity can keep pace – if it can quadrupple at the same speed, then the fraction doesn’t change, relatively.
We also would need to know how fast ore concentrations half.
Addendum:
AI on copper:
“Copper provides the clearest example of rapid modern decline. S&P Global reports that global copper feed grades fell from roughly 1.5% in 2010 to around 0.6% in 2025. This represents a halving time of just under 15 years. Looked at over a longer horizon, global copper grades collapsed by nearly 75% over the course of a century (from a peak of ~4% down to ~1%)”
But to put things into perspective, copper ore so far only seems to account for a couple of percentage points of total global annual mining activity. The vast majority (over 80%) seem to be iron, aluminum and phosphate rocks.
Halving times for those three are a lot slower (currently centuries).
On the other hand, iron and aluminum sit at very high concentrations which require very little crushing – AI suggests that 90% of the 5% of global electricity used for crushing goes into the refinement of the low grade ores instead, so those would be the main driver of it.
Given that we are already hitting limits to fossil fuel extraction, and “renewables” are unable to replace fossil fuels, I don’t think we can keep up with that rising amount of electricity.
Very interesting. Hideaway knows quite a bit about mineral processing and has discussed the energy required for crushing but I don’t recall him mentioning this scale of electricity use.
This is something we would need precise numbers on if we wanted to feed a model with it. I just took some estimates from AI and didn’t double-check yet, so the math might be incorrect (but the AI tells me it’s about the right order of magnitude).
J. Doe …”This is something we would need precise numbers on if we wanted to …“
That’s precisely why there are no precise numbers on any of it. All the research on energy use in mining uses strict boundaries of what they define as ‘energy use’ and are mostly as useless as all the EROEI studies on energy with strict narrow boundaries, leaving out most of the actual energy used.
See bigger post to Monk not yet formulated.
Same old song!
Hi Monk, huge questions I’ve been contemplating so sorry to take so long to get back to you.
Firstly it’s not a crappy attempt at a graph at all, it’s very meaningful, except there are probably no straight lines, just like how none occur in nature. Also somewhere in the entire equation of total energy use, EROEI and prosperity lies ‘efficiency gains’, which is more an ‘S’ curve over time, with efficiency gains accelerating with small increases in complexity and now diminishing with large increases of complexity, because we are getting closer to so many physical limits of efficiency gains..
Point 1. Higher oils prices enable unproductive oil to be produced.
What is “unproductive oil”? Just because it’s lower EROEI, doesn’t mean it’s unproductive. If we took 50:1 EROEI oil and used 10 units of that oil to produce 5:1 EROEI oil we still have more net energy for the rest of civilization.
Mathematically we had 49 units of oil after allowing for the cost of ‘1’ unit from just the high grade oil, but extended to the ‘newer’ low grade we now have 39 units from the high grade (used up 10 in low grade), but received another 50 units of oil overall. Civilization now has 89 units overall to use for the rest of civilization.
The total energy available and growing counts. Turning those ratios into millions of bbls of oil for a minute, then at some previous time we were getting 50Mbbls/d at a cost of 1Mbbls/d, whereas later we are getting 100Mbbls/d for a cost of 11Mbbls/d, but overall for the rest of civilization we now have a ‘surplus’ of 89Mbbls/d instead of 49Mbbls/d previously.
Then add in technical innovation and efficiency gains on top and we are much better off, except for the not so minor detail of existing on a finite planet, so the high EROEI deteriorates over time. We still have some high EROEI oil.
Of course after trying to simplify it, none of it is that simple at all, as the oil doesn’t operate in a vacuum of just oil. We require coal and gas (and possibly other energy sources) all operating as per normal the entire time. The EROEI of coal and gas has changed because of the technical innovation and efficiency gains allowing newer more remote resources to be opened up and more easily obtained, so this affects the overall EROEI.
The EROEI of energy collection is not and never can be stable over time. All the technical innovation and efficiency gains have hidden the reality of declining grades of every resource we use to just maintain the system of civilization and the growth in both material and energy use to do so.
Fast forward to some point in the future to look at the math of the oil collection. We’d require say 133Mbbls/d, but only have 3:1 oil left having used up all the high EROEI oil. We would require to be gathering 200Mbbls/d using 66Mbbls/d (3:1) to be gaining net energy for the rest of civilization. Again not that simple as realistically we will still have some 20:1 EROEI oil, 19:1 oil, 18:1 …….. 2:1 oil EROEI..
“ Our currencies are a proxy for surplus energy.“
I think it’s more our currencies are a proxy for energy, not just surplus energy. We can see this in how the low/lower EROEI energy is nowhere near as profitable for the producers as high EROEI energy. This applies across oil, gas, coal, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, firewood and every other energy type you can think of.
My take is that if it’s profitable to produce, without economic subsidies of any type, in a fully free market, then it’s a net addition to civilization’s energy use.
OK, sort of covered point 1, but it’s not in isolation to the other points, which I’ll get to later…
Hi Monk point 2 … “So, the EROI to sustain modern society is increasing every year. Not staying at 10:1 as proposed by others. This would accelerate us getting to the end point (another cactus loop).“
This is where the pieces all start fitting together. On average the EROEI has to be increasing, which it was due to technology and efficiency gains, on top of ‘more’ extracted.
Going back to the late 1960’s we probably had our highest level EROEI due to technology making more high grade oil deposits available. Even back then we ‘knew of’ lower EROEI oil, like Alaska, North Sea, but they were economically unviable lower EROEI (but not negative EROEI). Curbs on production made oil prices higher and those types of deposits economically viable, while lowering the overall EROEI a bit, but increasing overall production, meaning more ‘net oil’ for the rest of civilization.
Meanwhile grades of all ore types of materials is on average falling every year, plus getting more remote, plus deeper in the ground and having a harder ore index, along with smaller grind size as well as the average particle size of metals we want gets smaller in lower grade deposits. It’s taking more energy and more materials, in the way of finished goods to gain access to the same quantity of minerals and metals each year.
Yet we require more each year, so that just adds another layer. However if we go back decades we kept finding good high grade deposits, so when they were developed, they could be brought on more cheaply, which is the mining equivalent of raising EROEI. (by finding high grade close to surface deposits).
Mineral and metal discoveries have gone the same way as oil and gas discoveries, we’ve searched the globe and found all the best near surface deposits, so it’s lower grade from here on out. Back in the 1970’s- 2000’s better technology allowed for greater searches, better understanding of the geology, more drilling in more remote areas, so we found lots of giant high grade resources, then started mining the best high grade parts of these deposits. Sure there will be further discoveries, but on average we’ve found the best high grade easy resources..
Civilization itself looks like a long term sustainable system because of all the newer discoveries over the decades, by increasing technology to find them, while other increasing technology has helped increase efficiency gains, so original high EROEI of civilization gained EROEI by better discoveries and further technological and efficiency gains. In 40 years we went from 30-40Tonne mining dump trucks to 350-400Tonne dump trucks that used fuel more efficiently. The gain is less truck drivers and 40%+ savings on fuel use. Likewise throughout our system of resource collecting and all the businesses that supply the resource gathering businesses.
However the number of parts in these large machines is probably an order of magnitude higher than in those from decades ago that were simpler mechanical machines. Now every vehicle and process in a mine has a myriad of electronic parts. A large low grade mine of today would possibly have 2 orders of magnitude more separate parts than the mine that had the same output of something like copper, 6 decades ago. Plus the weight of all the parts would be much greater than 6 decades ago. The efficiency gains have offset some of the declining ‘effective’ EROEI of mines, but the grade, distance, depth, hardness index, grind size declines have more than offset the efficiency gains..
We, as in civilization, can only afford to have all these parts at mines providing they are cheap. They are only cheap because so many of them are produced in massive factories by the millions, or tens of millions of hundreds of millions each year.
Simple computer chips, around 1,000-2,000 per large machine, whereas a modern sedan we drive will have nearly as many. These chips are only cheap because we produce millions or billions of them. Take away 90-95% of uses for these chips, the cost of them goes up sky high, assuming the businesses that make them can survive (unlikely).
EROEI or ‘effective EROEI’ when also taking metals and minerals into consideration has to keep rising for the whole of civilization to just be maintained OR the total of energy and materials mined has to keep rising fast enough to overcome falling/static ‘effective EROEI’.
Of course we live on a finite planet where there are limits that we reach long before anything runs out. Material and energy gathering, while grades of both are falling and extraction growth rates falling nearly flat (4.5Ej of fossil fuels, plus 3.2Ej renewables added in 2025 from latest Energy institute report), means the rest of civilization has to be robbed of resources to keep these industries supplied. It manifests itself as greater inequality throughout civilization, as the rich get richer dragging up official numbers, while the median person is worse of in materials and energy, especially in a growing population..
More later…
It seems I do not understand something basic.
You say EROEI must increase to sustain modernity.
I thought total energy and materials must increase to sustain modernity, but EROEI can and has been decreasing, which explains rising debt and falling living standards. We’ve still got modernity but its getting crappier.
Where did I go wrong?
Civilization as a dissipative energy structure that relies upon complexity, has to grow, due to the nature of the complexity, man made, and most importantly machines.
It has to be by increasing net energy, that can come from increasing EROEI and/or increasing total energy used, provided the net energy for the rest of civilization is growing.
Most of the experts that discuss EROEI in terms of falling more recently, leave out the gains of effectively increasing EROEI by technology and efficiency gains, as if they didn’t exist.
We’ve been growing net energy use by technology and efficiency gains as well as increased use of material and energy resources and new discoveries of high grade material resources and high EROEI energy.
This is a perspective over decades as civilization has grown in the last
250 years.
We provably had the highest ‘raw’ EROEI in the late 1960’s, but then had an explosion of technology and efficiency gains as people became aware resources were limited (Limits to Growth etc).
As energy and material use kept rising, this was an effective rise in EROEI. Like everything else technology and efficiency gains suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
The technology gains decades ago helped us scan the world for the last easy high grade resources of both energy and materials.
The high tech machines used in sand, clay and gravel quarries have been an effective increase in EROEI, as so much of these materials is relatively close to urban areas, so the declines in grades, distance etc is not as marked as metals, minerals and energy, leading to an overall ‘savings’ of energy in those areas..
(Nothing is as simple as one rule for all commodities in EROEI terms).
Economists use these variations in raw quantities to support their ‘substitution’ clause to show the future is viable. We can just replace copper use with more gravel…ummm..
Of course in more recent times, probably the last 2 decades, even the effective EROEI and net energy has been declining as the gains from tech, and efficiency have fallen, along with the growth of production falling..
Hmm, maybe what I’m calling ‘effective EROEI’ is really just the same as declining net energy, after allowing for materials as well. I keep coming back to how it’s an entire system and any one aspect that it seems possible to explain away, is really an integral part of the whole, so explaining EROEI by itself leave out important pieces of the big picture.
We have an entire system of civilization, not separate bits that have their own explanations.
I think I understand but please confirm this is correct:
Modernity requires increasing net energy (and minerals).
Net energy can increase while EROEI falls. (for example: many fracked wells versus one Ghawar).
Yes, but the total energy is virtually growing exponentially while EROEI falls, which brings on collapse quicker.
When total energy gathered starts falling, along with lower EROEI, also with lower ore grades etc, it becomes a rapidly accelerating decline in net energy for everything else, so guarantees collapse quickly..
Hence why I’m so keen on knowing when we are past total oil production with declines every year after. The whole Iran situation of course muddies the waters in what’s possible, but has to be less net energy for civilization as a whole. The big question is can oil/gas production from the Middle East ramp up again in time to avert a permanent decline in energy/net energy before too much damage is done to complexity around the world, which itself will undo efficiency gains as things simplify.
Thanks.
None of the oil experts understand what is going on. About half think demand has fallen due to a weak economy and the other half think we’ve avoided negative consequences of attacking Iran by draining our savings account. We should know what is reality soon.
We are a species that can measure gravitational waves, take pictures of black holes and communicate with light-speed.
But we cannot measure our own global economy. Yikes.
This whole area of inquiry is the main focus of the surplus energy economics website.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Peruse that and get good coverage on the difference between the financial economy, the real economy, and the critical factor of EROEI versus growth and complexity.
I’ve been reading that blog for years
A friend received a guided fishing trip as a gift and invited me to join him today.
Two 200 horsepower outboard motors burn 60 liters per hour at the optimum speed. At max speed they burn 120 liters per hour.
This is a view of my home from the water.
I’ve twice hiked to the peak of the mountain you can see in the background.
We caught our allowed limit of 2 coho salmon per person for a total of 8. We’re having some for dinner tonight and froze the rest.
Looks like a lovely day out. Great weather for it!
Nice. It’s crazy the amount of fuel you can burn cruising around with a couple of big Yamaha’s behind you. It can take well over an hour to get to some of the leases at work. Add a day’s work and the cruise back in and sometimes we’ll go through close to 400L.
Boats are unbelievably wasteful on resources to operate and maintain. I wouldn’t own one even if I was rich. One of those motors costs more than a nice car.
Instead of a boat, I would go for an atmospheric diving suit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit
Why cruise on the surface when you can take a hike a few hundred meters below?!
Addendum:
A modernized version of the 1882 Carmagnolle design would be ideal, I think.
The Iranian LEGO crew has been quiet for a while but they came back to celebrate July 4 with a banger.
The quality of this propaganda is orders of magnitude better than the garbage propaganda created by BBC and Fox news.
“Morally reprehensible”: Prediction Markets Offer Bets on Wildfires
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/prediction-markets-polymarket-wildfire-bets-ethics-arson-incentives/
No risk of Arson here.
Let’s just bet on potential assassinations of politicians! What could possibly go wrong?!
You go first…
How about 0.01 USD on whoever is head of state of Iran right now being killed by a precision drone strike of US origin within the next three months?
A classiness of behavior never before witnessed…
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/iran-stands-firm-on-hormuz-as-us
Meanwhile, most US citizens think this behavior, and the fact their country enabled a genocide in Gaza, and the fact Fauci is walking free, are perfectly ok.
Shame.