It's a pleasant wishlist for a happy, polite decline. Knowing that what's coming isn't happy and polite, how does the list change? That is, what's the mindset look like for the impact that we actually *will* encounter? I'm sure this was a cathartic exercise for you, but even you admit it's entirely fictional. I'm not demanding that you prophesy the future. I'm just suggesting that you collect all of the "sure things" that we know are extremely likely and make a new list.
Your neighbour will rip your face off in a battle over a can of tuna as he desperately tries to keep his children from starving...and for good measure he'll rape your daughters after you are out of the way.
Of course cannibalism will be a thing... but only as long as there is some meat on the bones to be scraped off and consumed... that won't be for long though because starvation tends to reduce bodies to skin and bone.
Thanks Eddy - but history demonstrates that your projections are highly unlikely. Even during the Ukranian Holdomor, and East-African famines, the kind of behaviour you describe remained rare, as it is now in Gaza, Palestine. This 'Mad-Max' collapse trope cannot go uncritically unchallenged.
While my expectation is not immediate Mad Max, and for reasons I may get into later, your historical arguments are strawman fallacies. All of those political disasters that you list occur(ed) within a functioning civilization.
Mad Max, OTOH, is chaotic system collapse. What is chaotic system collapse? Sudden death. The human body is a hyper complex trillion-fold culture of cells. In that specific sense it is a perfect analogy to this nuclear powered, finance capitalist, synthetic food civilization. And, as we know, sudden death does indeed occur in human beings. It frequently happens with people with comorbidities and I'm sure you agree that this civilization has multiple comorbidities in play right now.
If you are inclined towards honor then you will publicly retract, here, your irresponsible, Pollyanna logical fallacy that chaotic system collapse is a trope.
Au contraire! Chaotic collapse is already in process. Whilst this 'Hollywood' styled event may well apply in the case of an asteroid strike or #MAD, it is almost certainly not the case that everybody will start eating each other as Fast Eddy has suggested above (ignoring the other right-wing rabbit-hole his brain has disappeared down).
The fact that you think that current events constitute chaotic collapse tells me that you should be lurking rather than thinking you have something worthwhile to contribute. And you can't call Eddy right wing because he doesn't advocate for any politics; your doing so just belies your own triggered liberalism.
Um, Patrick, how about a whole lot less of everything except hard physical labor, of which there will be a whole lot more. A trying combination wouldn't you say?
There - done. Thank you for that stimulating thought exercise. Can't believe it took til 2024 for us to carry it out.
Yes but that's only because they lived below Dunbar's Number and didn't run structural game surpluses... because they lived below Dunbar's Number, in a virtuous cycle. Welcome to animism.
We can't try that again because the game population is nearly non-existent relative to the human population. And over the next decade or two the hunting pressure on the remaining game is going to be insane. 50 years from now some survivors will indeed try to live in balance again with what remains.
More likely over the next couple decades is two modes of ancestral diet subsistence: strongholding pastoralism and former stronghold pastoralists who abandoned strongholding for mobile herding out in the wildlands which, in some fortunate instances may even be just rotating oneself around the old stronghold because civilization receded from the area enough to enable it.
You’re amazing. Thank you for your writing. I think we need to start to the best of our ability right? I think you have a strong argument. We need to make it even easier for people to grasp
No old friend, you can't actually strongly advise against it when in the first place you gave up on preparing out of weakness. You can only weakly advise against it.
See how that works? That's how life actually works, Eddy. There's nothing inherently wrong with the choice to stop preparing -- that's anybody's prerogative -- but life doesn't actually allow one to have one's cake and eat it, too.
Your advice is out of weakness. Therefore you can only offer it weakly.
Instead of banging one's head against the wall like a stupid donkey... when the facts change... I change my mind...
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
As I've reminded you before, I was the one who, years ago, alerted you to the grid-dependent cooling systems of the spent fuel pools Pandora's Box. So the facts changed for me before they ever changed for you.
B, here, along with seemingly everyone else in this square, conspiracy averse commentariat, cannot brook the idea that a proverbial someone is driving this proverbial civilizational bus because they are hung up on their squareness as rationalized by their obviously (according to basic structuralism) false patterning that hierarchical societies are self-organizing; that for some unexplained reason, top-down societies behave like bottom -up societies. LOL. As if all agricultural operations aren't fully-managed operations.
But you, FE, being an otherwise
discerning, thinking man's conspiracy theorist like myself, *don't* have that square stick up your ass, *and* your famous UEP(?) theory *does* have a legitimate rationale behind it *but* you refuse to return me the honor by acknowledging that *my* 5yr old Non-public Degrowth Agenda theory (DA) with well-proven predictive powers and a *better* rationale behind it, has *major* theoretical consequences for your UEP(?), the most relevant one being that the now-imminent but long-predicted (by the DA) and carefully, transnationally managed Big Nuclear Scare is specifically designed for one purpose, and that purpose being *the* raison d'etre of the DA in the first place, which is to create the global political will for the decommissioning and disposal of the global nuclear power industry... because the managers of the industrial People Farm put their pants on one leg at a time just like us.
Even with my numerous predictions coming to fruition apparently out of nowhere, you refuse to see because when the going got tough on your homestead, you pussied the fuck out. And that was *before* you learned about the spent fuel pools so cogitate on that good buddy.
And for anyone else reading this, welcome to the big leagues. If you're standing still on your collapse theory then you're falling behind. What else is new?
Point me to somewhere spent fuel has been removed from the ponds and stored as you mention.
Then point me to where thorium is happening on a commercially viable scale...
You just bleat on with more nonsense
Anyhow there will be no need to worry about the ponds cuz your neighbours and anyone with half a tank of fuel will be ripping your face off raiding your veg patch and raping your wife and daughters
Prepping only makes you a target for the desperate starving hordes
A 12 yr old could be made to understand the futility of this idiocy
I remember reading the "Limits to Growth" study when it came out (c. 1972). This fascination with computer modeling is part of why I became a Systems Analyst. I actually believed the findings which, among other things, implicated CO2. I was probably about 18 at the time and I suppose you could say that was my "woke" period. In the following years I began to understand that the report came from the Club of Rome which was just part of the constellations of globalist NGO's: the UN, WHO, WEF, Blackrock etc. I had an awakening and began to understand the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields) and what these globalist NGO's really wanted was collectivist control of the entire planet. So pardon me if I am skeptical of the "Recalibration23" project. Just as we never had significant "global warming" or "global cooling" I doubt that resources (oil) will diminish as fast as they predict. We probably have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy . . . perhaps even Tesla's "free energy." As the Beatles once said "tomorrow never knows."
The real problem, at the moment, is to stop the entire globalist agenda. And to that end I cobbled together what I call the "Put People First Agenda." You can read through all of the current planks in my latest essay.
Share widely and make sure you watch the embedded video: "Here's How Illegals Are Voting in America."
It is now abundantly clear that the 2024 Presidential Election is not a fair and free election. What we are now witnessing is a globalist Democrat Party coup against the American People fueled by a massive attempt to register Illegal Aliens to vote while keeping other ineligible voters (including dead voters) on the voting rolls. This, in turn, allows massive ballot harvesting, of ineligible voters, in order to flip the election toward a Harris win.
Why a Harris win will rightfully foment a 2nd American Revolution
The Globalist Democrats have illegally gamed the system for a fraudulent Harris win
Boy, you really bring out the nut-jobs, Honest Sorcerer!
And if we truly "have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy", and if "the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields)", we'll just wait until some 90 of those years have passed before thinking about maybe doing something.
Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution. That won't change with a hundred extra years of fossil sunlight.
"Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution."
Boy Jan, as far as I can see. that is a huge claim on the nature and fundamentals of evolutionary biology that, as far as I can see, is not based in Reason. Yet you dropped it like it was in your bag.
How do you begin to defend that statement to myself who believes he can easily falsify it?
I think B's repeated warning about nuclear war is the most likely outcome. War has always been about one nation wanting resources that are in another nation. It has always been "civilization's" knee-jerk go-to strategy, and it's happening now. Take the Ukraine Proxy War. Europe has used up all it's coal, petroleum, natural gas, and uranium. Russia has all these resources. But instead of admitting that they are out of energy resources; the UK, NATO (backed by the US) reflexively create a war to try and access more of these scarce energy resources. The same thing is emerging in China. The US is using up its sources of rare metals needed for IT and weapons. China has these reserves. Instead of being upfront about our resource predicament, the US government and military is making up a story about protecting democracy in Taiwan to justify provoking a war.
I suggest we have a contest to think of who can think of a sillier way to end the human experiment. I don’t think I can come up with one right now. But surely there are some? Sometimes one needs a little gallows humor…
It's encouraging to see your list of actions. So many writers are great at explaining the problem, but few perform the hard work to develop potentially viable responses to our situation. They can imply that capitalism is evil or that we need to stop using fossil fuels, but that can never happen without an agreed-upon plan that most of humanity buys into. That requires a deep understanding of reality and human consciousness and using that to change our collective behavior. Thanks!
And then in the comments, we have someone rallying against the "globalist agenda" by promoting 100 more years of rampant consumerism. I guess if "putting people first" got us into this dilemma, it can surely get us out of it, no?
POOF! Somewhere in hell, a puff of steam is all that remains of an imaginary snowball moment.
And yet, here we are, with dogs and frogs and water fleas, all adapting to the higher background radiation level around Chernobyl. Yet there was certainly a human toll that Janet Sherman thinks may eventually cost 900,000 lives.
Your personal history makes your comment even stranger and more disturbing.
If life adapts more quickly to radiation than previously thought, great (although I have serious doubts about that, and there's no telling what the radiation impacts would be from multiple or even dozens of simultaneous nuclear power plant meltdowns in a collapse scenario).
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is other than to be contrarian and/or provide fodder for the pro-nuclear agenda.
That demands that we examine evidence that may well be contrary to our Weltsicht, rather than dismiss it or bury it, as zealots do.
That often results in new questions. How many dogs (and frogs, and water fleas) died prematurely from radiation effects before this emergent trait evolved? And how many human babies are we willing to sacrifice to I-131-related sudden infant death before "radiation-hardened" humans evolve?
Those are the questions that are buried by the nuclear zealots. Dr. Ernest Sternglass calculated that Three Mile Island resulted in about 400 "excess infant deaths", but the regulatory agencies insist "the public was never in any danger".
So I welcome studies such as this, as they invite inevitable "yeabuts" that keep poking holes in the pro-nuclear arguments.
The point of the comment was not, "See? Nuclear isn't all that bad!" It was actually, "For this to have happened, what else had to happen?"
Evolution depends on mutation, heritability, and selection. Articles like this point out the first such event, leading people to ask about the other two.
You are missing the point. The nuclear experiment was launched without the consent of the public. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that fateful decision. "Mad" scientists and techno-utopians love to dump new technologies onto the world without longitudinal data about the harms. Because they know it's difficult if not impossible to prove direct causation. Who's side are you on? Really? And, remind me about the point of your original comment?
Jan, WADR you jumped to conclusions regarding radiation hardened dogs. The article you linked to is trash journalism. Clickbait. The actual study that the trash journalism linked to made explicitly clear numerous times that it was not a study capable of ascertaining any type of radiation hardening.
As to hardening itself, there are degrees, as A.D. Riggle was right to point out; mammals tolerating a core meltdown at a single plant in a highly functioning industrial economy and mammals tolerating a cascading collapse of a global nuclear industry are obviously two different things altogether.
Thanks, Ben. One big issue I have with Jan's comment (which I didn't mention previously) is that Jan seems to legitimize the "act now, cover up harms later" approach of the corporatocracy/government/military-industrial complex.
Instead of placing the burden of proof (of safety) on the nuclear industry, Jan seems to accept the idea that the burden of proof (of harm) belongs to the public. This is the kind of upside-down world the corporatocracy has normalized.
In any case, the risks and harms of nuclear are well established, and they are (or at least should be, to any sane populace) unacceptable. So, we should demand nothing less than a complete shutdown and remediation of the entire nuclear power industry (to say nothing of nuclear weapons, which are the pinnacle of human insanity).
Yet this issue is not even on most people's radar. It's bizarre. I suspect that's only because thus far we've had the fossil energy to maintain nuclear power plants and prevent more catastrophes from occurring than already have. But that time is quickly coming to an end.
You are aware that Chernobyl is entombed (and retombed recently)... and that spent fuel ponds were not involved...
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
Thanks for the accurate analysis of our dilemma. I summarize it thus: too many humans using too many natural resources and producing to much pollution, including GHGs and global heating, the 6th Extinction. The ONLY solution appears to be happening spontaneously in cyberspace and with what's left of "common sense": 47% of Americans surveyed by PEW reported that they DO NOT intend to reproduce. Even with one child (on ave.) families, it will take 4 generations to get back to the population of 1950, 2.5B. We are 3,000 times more numerous than were our last ecologically balanced and self-sustaining iteration: the migratory Hunter-Gatherer/pastoralist clans/bands. Full description in the free online e-book PDF, "Stress R Us". God help us and the rest of life on this once glorious orb.
Just increase welfare and benefits, to increase consumption. Also export to the new BRI countries, by creating high paid jobs in those countries, by subsidising professional social jobs, such as schools, teachers, road-builders etc.
Over-capacity with a highly educated population is easier to deal with than what the West is facing.
China's only real problem is the housing bubble, which they did fuck up in.
I always find questionable such analyses that don't also compare to the accurate problems the West is facing, as though it's only China, and we can all wave and cheer from the sidelines.
What China is looking at is peanuts to the next financial crisis about to hit the West, 2008 on steroids.
I don't believe the Chinese are facing "The ATMS about to be turned off", which is how banks described the 2008 situation.
China can also market 'second homes' to foreigners, an approach they have largely ignored so far, but will occur to them at some point.
In 10 or so years, once the Eurasian Heartland has fully formed, it will be only place on Earth with (Industrial) energy and resources; the US's suicidal shale oil will have completely collapsed, along with its military-backed Empire and control of the ME.
With the highest SoL on the planet, China will be a magnet for professional and retired immigration.
All snarkiness aside, Japan's falling fertility is not a voluntary phenomenon but rather a fact of the natural consequence of societal collapse, and it follows that human social groupings naturally trend toward a total number of members inclusive of 150 or less, the "Dunbar number", long studied by Oxford anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and author Sir Robin Dunbar. Governments and corporate overlords decry this phenomenon as it flies in the face of the Capitalistic drive for growth, even as it has far outgrown the capacity of natural resources to support more humans on this depleted, overwhelmed planet.
Sorry, Eddy, but I don't fly, use Twitter or FB, and believe that we should spare the rest of the universe from our contagion. Just look at what we've done to this place!
The predicament is characterized by near maximum dialectical conflict between a host of primitive archetypal pairs.
The one-many dialectic is fundamental. Fundamental in that every other dialectical pair is determined in a significant way by scale dependency, and the relative balance between the individual and the collective, and between individual groups and the collective of all groups.
Simultaneously, we witness 1) selfish game theoretic competition for declining and mutually exclusive shares of biocapacity between subglobal agents being maximized, and 2) "Solutions" to this predicament requiring a corresponding maximization of cooperation between such agents.
Rationality, is the means by which internal contradictions to each archetype are resolved, and by which transcendent syntheses across these pairs is reached; Both in principle a priori, and in actuality, a posteriori, via recursive and convergent conflict between better and better approximations to the ideal synthesis.
The Universe, with its unparalleled dark sense of humour, has seen fit to maximize human Irrationality (unsublimated will to power) at the moment that rationality is required to plot an objective and intersubjectivley agreed upon path out of its predicament.
From perhaps an even more fundamental dialectical perspective, we could define our current predicament as the conflict between of will to power and rationality; between unsublimated will to power over others, and between sublimated will to power over oneself via the exercise of reason.
This is the most important theme regarding Collapse, so I appreciate you exploring it. On the theme itself I will only say for the moment that the organized rationality for which you are implicitly advocating is in fact actively operating right now and right under your nose. It is hiding in plain sight. If you'd like to hear more just ask.
I believe that creative tension is the friction whereupon intelligence finds the traction necessary for advancing. This is why I engage constructive criticism as my general MO. Constructive criticism, however, requires the willingness of the recipient.
Firstly, if you are going to write at such a high level of density then ideally you want to have the requisite feel for such writing; failing that, you need to write more carefully and, in your case, much more carefully. No inappropriate commas, no jumbled syntax, no grammatical errors. The higher the level, the better the execution, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of the density in the first place, and then some.
What you say about the universe is not based on Reason and therefore undermines your comment. Anything not based in Reason is inaccurate because Reason is simply what we call the accurate patterning of cause and effect.
Per your offer, I would like to ask more of this organized rationality you speak of.
I should premise this by asserting, per Hegel, that the rational is real and the real is rational; That the necessary foundations of existence are rational, and organized rationally.
Both the flourishing of complex civilization, and the collapse (reorganization) of civilization have rational ontological forms, thus your assertion that organized rationality is operating unsensed, hidden in plain sight is superfluous, since all processes are fundamentally organized rationally.
Psychosis itself, within the human, is fundamentally organized rationally, but the experience of psychosis is not.
Disease is the disorganization of the rational, self-organizing function.
Appreciate your interest. If you wouldn't mind skimming through this comment thread again, you'll see that numerous times now I've touched upon the organized rationality of which I spoke. I just think that if you did that, and you're still interested, then you'd have some specific questions to ask. Thanks KM.
A difficult but necessary read. I have always opted for the more 'prepper' style of dealing with collapse. Less in the hyper-indivisualistic hoarding of goods way, and more in the making connections and building community resiliency way. Just last week I joined the board of our local seed library, where a mere 1% of our tiny island's population stewards enough seed to keep us all alive if the worst comes. This weekend indigenous community members led workshops on how to harvest deer (an abundant resource here). It's small and grassroots but gives me hope.
Correct. He is not stating that. The human population will reduce to between 1 to 2 billion. And probably balance out between 500 million to 1 billion within the next couple of centuries.
And what concrete is? Sustainable housing is materials made with locally sourced materials obtained through muscle power. Industrial civilization is what is the problem.
Jan Steinman replied to your comment on The Civilizational Hospice Protocol.
Boy, you really bring out the nut-jobs, Honest Sorcerer! And if we truly "have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy", and if "the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields)", we'll just wait until some 90 of those years have passed before thinking about maybe doing something. Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution. That won't change with a hundred extra years of fossil sunlight.
=====
Jan, you should read through ALL of my recent essays. I did not mean to imply we should wait 100 years by the way. That strikes me as a strawman argument because I didn't say it. But at the same time there is no reason to embrace EV's, Autonomous Vehicles, the Green New Deal, ESG's, SDG's and all the other "non-solutions" from the UN, WHO, WEF etc. The fact is there is no man made, Anthropogenic Climate Change. These globalist NGO's are pushing Climate Change for global control and not for the betterment of humanity. They are also responsible for Mass Immigration into the US, EU and other countries. That is the primary reason Trump won by the way. 62% of the American People favor Mass Deportation as do I. Same goes for most citizens within the EU. So before making your silly claims, about my writings, perhaps you should read a few of my essays. Just saying.
You failed to predict the outcome of the 2024 US election. Next time, try reading what you cut & paste into the comment section of other people's work.
That isn't quite accurate. What I really said, in the 2 essays preceding the election, is the razor thin polling, between Trump and Harris, made no sense because Trump was about 10 points ahead on the most important issues: immigration and the economy. Given that I had expected Trump to be ahead in the polling and the concern was the Democrats were going to try to fix the election for a Harris win. As it turned out Trump won both popular and electoral votes which showed the polling did not accurately measure where Americans stood . . . which was for Trump. I also said there would be a 2nd American Revolution if Harris won because their globalist agenda had to be stopped. Had Harris won the borders would have stayed open and the "Green Agenda" would have moved forward. Hopefully Trump follows through on his promises.
As I recall, the polls were wrong in 2016 and 2020.
Other issues:
1. Trump's victory in the popular vote is closer than the electoral vote count. In that sense the presidential election is rigged and always has been.
2. Ballots are not counted by hand. Only a small % are audited. With machine tabulation, there is no evidence of vote counts one way or another. Confidence in the results is entirely a matter of trust.
So Trump's victory is a narrow one in terms of the popular vote. The American electorate is split. That is not conducive for a revolution, but rather a civil war.
But I digress...
Readers of this blog realize the Green Agenda is woefully insufficient to address ecological overshoot. Whether it is pushed forward or abandoned is irrelevant. The decline of civilization is unavoidable.
Bottom line, Trump won. Also there is no Anthropogenic Climate change so no need for a Green Agenda which is really the globalists attempt to control every aspect of our lives. Finally we are not in a civil war -- one group against another. We are in the midst of a Global 2nd American Revolution pitting globalists against us Anti-globalists. All of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights is being shredded internationally. And THAT must be stopped.
If Americans were engaged in violent conflict, it would be in the form of a civil war. You are not a majority as you seem to believe. You are not united.
Bottom line, modernity is coming to an end. At that point, violence will be a product of individual survival. Globalism will be a fading memory. Global tyrants will have been replaced with local ones. The Bill of Rights replaced with the law of the jungle. You can call that a "revolution" if you want.
It's a pleasant wishlist for a happy, polite decline. Knowing that what's coming isn't happy and polite, how does the list change? That is, what's the mindset look like for the impact that we actually *will* encounter? I'm sure this was a cathartic exercise for you, but even you admit it's entirely fictional. I'm not demanding that you prophesy the future. I'm just suggesting that you collect all of the "sure things" that we know are extremely likely and make a new list.
That said, I did enjoy the article. Thanks!
We are experiencing the decline... which will at some point morph into a total collapse.
When we reach that point this happens https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/financial-system-supply-chain-cross and 8+ billion humans will be on the dark streets... without any food.
Doomsday preppers will be set upon and murdered https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Your neighbour will rip your face off in a battle over a can of tuna as he desperately tries to keep his children from starving...and for good measure he'll rape your daughters after you are out of the way.
Of course cannibalism will be a thing... but only as long as there is some meat on the bones to be scraped off and consumed... that won't be for long though because starvation tends to reduce bodies to skin and bone.
Anyone who someone survives the initial phase - which I cannot imagine lasting more than a few months... will then face the cancer causing toxins that spew from the spent fuel ponds ... see https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Does anyone really want to have to go through all of that hell - only to die from cancer???
Fortunately something has been done to ensure the suffering is reduced to a bare minimum https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
Surely ya'll didn't think they injected that shit into your bodies to keep you from dying from covid hahaha.... nor did they do it for the $$$$.
This is all about prepping you to be exterminated. Now thank Dr Fauci for doing the right thing ... and pre-empting all that nasty stuff
I think we have a few differences of opinion there, Eddy.
Feel free to explain where I've got it wrong
Thanks Eddy - but history demonstrates that your projections are highly unlikely. Even during the Ukranian Holdomor, and East-African famines, the kind of behaviour you describe remained rare, as it is now in Gaza, Palestine. This 'Mad-Max' collapse trope cannot go uncritically unchallenged.
While my expectation is not immediate Mad Max, and for reasons I may get into later, your historical arguments are strawman fallacies. All of those political disasters that you list occur(ed) within a functioning civilization.
Mad Max, OTOH, is chaotic system collapse. What is chaotic system collapse? Sudden death. The human body is a hyper complex trillion-fold culture of cells. In that specific sense it is a perfect analogy to this nuclear powered, finance capitalist, synthetic food civilization. And, as we know, sudden death does indeed occur in human beings. It frequently happens with people with comorbidities and I'm sure you agree that this civilization has multiple comorbidities in play right now.
If you are inclined towards honor then you will publicly retract, here, your irresponsible, Pollyanna logical fallacy that chaotic system collapse is a trope.
Au contraire! Chaotic collapse is already in process. Whilst this 'Hollywood' styled event may well apply in the case of an asteroid strike or #MAD, it is almost certainly not the case that everybody will start eating each other as Fast Eddy has suggested above (ignoring the other right-wing rabbit-hole his brain has disappeared down).
The fact that you think that current events constitute chaotic collapse tells me that you should be lurking rather than thinking you have something worthwhile to contribute. And you can't call Eddy right wing because he doesn't advocate for any politics; your doing so just belies your own triggered liberalism.
Um, Patrick, how about a whole lot less of everything except hard physical labor, of which there will be a whole lot more. A trying combination wouldn't you say?
There - done. Thank you for that stimulating thought exercise. Can't believe it took til 2024 for us to carry it out.
Maybe. Our distant ancestors, the hunter gatherer types, worked far less than we do today. Maybe we try that again.
Yes but that's only because they lived below Dunbar's Number and didn't run structural game surpluses... because they lived below Dunbar's Number, in a virtuous cycle. Welcome to animism.
We can't try that again because the game population is nearly non-existent relative to the human population. And over the next decade or two the hunting pressure on the remaining game is going to be insane. 50 years from now some survivors will indeed try to live in balance again with what remains.
More likely over the next couple decades is two modes of ancestral diet subsistence: strongholding pastoralism and former stronghold pastoralists who abandoned strongholding for mobile herding out in the wildlands which, in some fortunate instances may even be just rotating oneself around the old stronghold because civilization receded from the area enough to enable it.
We'll see. I imagine we'll get back to the Dunbar level soon enough, one way or another.
We either kill capitalism or it WILL KILL US😞
You’re amazing. Thank you for your writing. I think we need to start to the best of our ability right? I think you have a strong argument. We need to make it even easier for people to grasp
Prepping will only make you a target for the hordes... I strongly advise against it https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
No old friend, you can't actually strongly advise against it when in the first place you gave up on preparing out of weakness. You can only weakly advise against it.
See how that works? That's how life actually works, Eddy. There's nothing inherently wrong with the choice to stop preparing -- that's anybody's prerogative -- but life doesn't actually allow one to have one's cake and eat it, too.
Your advice is out of weakness. Therefore you can only offer it weakly.
Instead of banging one's head against the wall like a stupid donkey... when the facts change... I change my mind...
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/fast-eddy-tours-delusistan/
As we know ... most people refuse to change their minds... because they are donkeys... you are one of them
As I've reminded you before, I was the one who, years ago, alerted you to the grid-dependent cooling systems of the spent fuel pools Pandora's Box. So the facts changed for me before they ever changed for you.
B, here, along with seemingly everyone else in this square, conspiracy averse commentariat, cannot brook the idea that a proverbial someone is driving this proverbial civilizational bus because they are hung up on their squareness as rationalized by their obviously (according to basic structuralism) false patterning that hierarchical societies are self-organizing; that for some unexplained reason, top-down societies behave like bottom -up societies. LOL. As if all agricultural operations aren't fully-managed operations.
But you, FE, being an otherwise
discerning, thinking man's conspiracy theorist like myself, *don't* have that square stick up your ass, *and* your famous UEP(?) theory *does* have a legitimate rationale behind it *but* you refuse to return me the honor by acknowledging that *my* 5yr old Non-public Degrowth Agenda theory (DA) with well-proven predictive powers and a *better* rationale behind it, has *major* theoretical consequences for your UEP(?), the most relevant one being that the now-imminent but long-predicted (by the DA) and carefully, transnationally managed Big Nuclear Scare is specifically designed for one purpose, and that purpose being *the* raison d'etre of the DA in the first place, which is to create the global political will for the decommissioning and disposal of the global nuclear power industry... because the managers of the industrial People Farm put their pants on one leg at a time just like us.
Even with my numerous predictions coming to fruition apparently out of nowhere, you refuse to see because when the going got tough on your homestead, you pussied the fuck out. And that was *before* you learned about the spent fuel pools so cogitate on that good buddy.
And for anyone else reading this, welcome to the big leagues. If you're standing still on your collapse theory then you're falling behind. What else is new?
Point me to somewhere spent fuel has been removed from the ponds and stored as you mention.
Then point me to where thorium is happening on a commercially viable scale...
You just bleat on with more nonsense
Anyhow there will be no need to worry about the ponds cuz your neighbours and anyone with half a tank of fuel will be ripping your face off raiding your veg patch and raping your wife and daughters
Prepping only makes you a target for the desperate starving hordes
A 12 yr old could be made to understand the futility of this idiocy
=====
I remember reading the "Limits to Growth" study when it came out (c. 1972). This fascination with computer modeling is part of why I became a Systems Analyst. I actually believed the findings which, among other things, implicated CO2. I was probably about 18 at the time and I suppose you could say that was my "woke" period. In the following years I began to understand that the report came from the Club of Rome which was just part of the constellations of globalist NGO's: the UN, WHO, WEF, Blackrock etc. I had an awakening and began to understand the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields) and what these globalist NGO's really wanted was collectivist control of the entire planet. So pardon me if I am skeptical of the "Recalibration23" project. Just as we never had significant "global warming" or "global cooling" I doubt that resources (oil) will diminish as fast as they predict. We probably have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy . . . perhaps even Tesla's "free energy." As the Beatles once said "tomorrow never knows."
The real problem, at the moment, is to stop the entire globalist agenda. And to that end I cobbled together what I call the "Put People First Agenda." You can read through all of the current planks in my latest essay.
2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point (01/22/2024)
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point
=====
The revolution is officially called off. LOL
Share widely and make sure you watch the embedded video: "Here's How Illegals Are Voting in America."
It is now abundantly clear that the 2024 Presidential Election is not a fair and free election. What we are now witnessing is a globalist Democrat Party coup against the American People fueled by a massive attempt to register Illegal Aliens to vote while keeping other ineligible voters (including dead voters) on the voting rolls. This, in turn, allows massive ballot harvesting, of ineligible voters, in order to flip the election toward a Harris win.
Why a Harris win will rightfully foment a 2nd American Revolution
The Globalist Democrats have illegally gamed the system for a fraudulent Harris win
https://brucecain.substack.com/p/why-a-harris-win-will-rightfully
=====
Boy, you really bring out the nut-jobs, Honest Sorcerer!
And if we truly "have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy", and if "the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields)", we'll just wait until some 90 of those years have passed before thinking about maybe doing something.
Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution. That won't change with a hundred extra years of fossil sunlight.
Then we have the morons who even if I show them this ... they will still believe this global warning insanity https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-three-pillars-of-bullshit
Take your pick - tell the fools that we are out of energy and everyone is going to die...
Or tell them oil is destroying the climate... so we need to ditch and adopt EVs and solar panels...
Most people will vote for Door Number Two - they love a bit of hopium
"Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution."
Boy Jan, as far as I can see. that is a huge claim on the nature and fundamentals of evolutionary biology that, as far as I can see, is not based in Reason. Yet you dropped it like it was in your bag.
How do you begin to defend that statement to myself who believes he can easily falsify it?
But Harris didn't win...
Exactly. People are beyond the bullshit.
I think B's repeated warning about nuclear war is the most likely outcome. War has always been about one nation wanting resources that are in another nation. It has always been "civilization's" knee-jerk go-to strategy, and it's happening now. Take the Ukraine Proxy War. Europe has used up all it's coal, petroleum, natural gas, and uranium. Russia has all these resources. But instead of admitting that they are out of energy resources; the UK, NATO (backed by the US) reflexively create a war to try and access more of these scarce energy resources. The same thing is emerging in China. The US is using up its sources of rare metals needed for IT and weapons. China has these reserves. Instead of being upfront about our resource predicament, the US government and military is making up a story about protecting democracy in Taiwan to justify provoking a war.
Europe was buying Russian energy until the US interfered. This was none of their business, yet they interfered.
Triggering a nuclear war over Ukraine would be a silly end to the human experiment.
I suggest we have a contest to think of who can think of a sillier way to end the human experiment. I don’t think I can come up with one right now. But surely there are some? Sometimes one needs a little gallows humor…
Invent a device that can convert the Earth's atmosphere (oxygen & nitrogen) into laughing gas?
Vaccinate them with a Death Shot https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
Call it an Anti-Ageing Vaccine.
Here you go https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
It would make sense to add a coup de grace to this https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-ultimate-extinction-plan-uep
To mop up the survivors so they don't eat each other
It's encouraging to see your list of actions. So many writers are great at explaining the problem, but few perform the hard work to develop potentially viable responses to our situation. They can imply that capitalism is evil or that we need to stop using fossil fuels, but that can never happen without an agreed-upon plan that most of humanity buys into. That requires a deep understanding of reality and human consciousness and using that to change our collective behavior. Thanks!
Somewhere in hell, a snowball is laughing at you.
And then in the comments, we have someone rallying against the "globalist agenda" by promoting 100 more years of rampant consumerism. I guess if "putting people first" got us into this dilemma, it can surely get us out of it, no?
POOF! Somewhere in hell, a puff of steam is all that remains of an imaginary snowball moment.
"we might as well go up in nuclear flames"
Meanwhile, the dogs and frogs of Chernobyl are adapting.
https://www.iflscience.com/why-are-the-dogs-of-chernobyl-undergoing-rapid-evolution-77028
It blows mind that there are actually apologists for radioactive waste. But here you are, Jan Steinman!
I would in no way call myself an "apologist for radioactive waste".
I almost died when the Fermi I liquid metal fast breeder reactor melted in SE Michigan. I've been an anti-nuclear activist ever since!
https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/John%20G.%20Fuller%20-%20We%20Almost%20Lost%20Detroit.pdf
And yet, here we are, with dogs and frogs and water fleas, all adapting to the higher background radiation level around Chernobyl. Yet there was certainly a human toll that Janet Sherman thinks may eventually cost 900,000 lives.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/the-children-of-chernobyl-2861027
Your personal history makes your comment even stranger and more disturbing.
If life adapts more quickly to radiation than previously thought, great (although I have serious doubts about that, and there's no telling what the radiation impacts would be from multiple or even dozens of simultaneous nuclear power plant meltdowns in a collapse scenario).
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is other than to be contrarian and/or provide fodder for the pro-nuclear agenda.
Above all, I'm science-minded.
That demands that we examine evidence that may well be contrary to our Weltsicht, rather than dismiss it or bury it, as zealots do.
That often results in new questions. How many dogs (and frogs, and water fleas) died prematurely from radiation effects before this emergent trait evolved? And how many human babies are we willing to sacrifice to I-131-related sudden infant death before "radiation-hardened" humans evolve?
Those are the questions that are buried by the nuclear zealots. Dr. Ernest Sternglass calculated that Three Mile Island resulted in about 400 "excess infant deaths", but the regulatory agencies insist "the public was never in any danger".
So I welcome studies such as this, as they invite inevitable "yeabuts" that keep poking holes in the pro-nuclear arguments.
The point of the comment was not, "See? Nuclear isn't all that bad!" It was actually, "For this to have happened, what else had to happen?"
Evolution depends on mutation, heritability, and selection. Articles like this point out the first such event, leading people to ask about the other two.
You are missing the point. The nuclear experiment was launched without the consent of the public. Now we are dealing with the consequences of that fateful decision. "Mad" scientists and techno-utopians love to dump new technologies onto the world without longitudinal data about the harms. Because they know it's difficult if not impossible to prove direct causation. Who's side are you on? Really? And, remind me about the point of your original comment?
Appreciate your comments.
Jan, WADR you jumped to conclusions regarding radiation hardened dogs. The article you linked to is trash journalism. Clickbait. The actual study that the trash journalism linked to made explicitly clear numerous times that it was not a study capable of ascertaining any type of radiation hardening.
As to hardening itself, there are degrees, as A.D. Riggle was right to point out; mammals tolerating a core meltdown at a single plant in a highly functioning industrial economy and mammals tolerating a cascading collapse of a global nuclear industry are obviously two different things altogether.
Thanks, Ben. One big issue I have with Jan's comment (which I didn't mention previously) is that Jan seems to legitimize the "act now, cover up harms later" approach of the corporatocracy/government/military-industrial complex.
Instead of placing the burden of proof (of safety) on the nuclear industry, Jan seems to accept the idea that the burden of proof (of harm) belongs to the public. This is the kind of upside-down world the corporatocracy has normalized.
In any case, the risks and harms of nuclear are well established, and they are (or at least should be, to any sane populace) unacceptable. So, we should demand nothing less than a complete shutdown and remediation of the entire nuclear power industry (to say nothing of nuclear weapons, which are the pinnacle of human insanity).
Yet this issue is not even on most people's radar. It's bizarre. I suspect that's only because thus far we've had the fossil energy to maintain nuclear power plants and prevent more catastrophes from occurring than already have. But that time is quickly coming to an end.
All anyone needs to know about spent fuel https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
You are aware that Chernobyl is entombed (and retombed recently)... and that spent fuel ponds were not involved...
There are 4000 Spent Fuel Ponds Around the Globe…
If you don’t cool the spent fuel, the temperature will rise and there may be a swift chain reaction that leads to spontaneous combustion–an explosion and fire of the spent fuel assemblies. Such a scenario would emit radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Pick your poison. Fresh fuel is hotter and more radioactive, but is only one fuel assembly. A pool of spent fuel will have dozens of assemblies.
One report from Sankei News said that there are over 700 fuel assemblies stored in one pool at Fukushima. If they all caught fire, radioactive particles—including those lasting for as long as a decade—would be released into the air and eventually contaminate the land or, worse, be inhaled by people. “To me, the spent fuel is scarier. All those spent fuel assemblies are still extremely radioactive,” Dalnoki-Veress says.
It has been known for more than two decades that, in case of a loss of water in the pool, convective air cooling would be relatively ineffective in such a “dense-packed” pool. Spent fuel recently discharged from a reactor could heat up relatively rapidly to temperatures at which the zircaloy fuel cladding could catch fire and the fuel’s volatile fission product, including 30-year half-life Cs, would be released. The fire could well spread to older spent fuel. The long-term land-contamination consequences of such an event could be significantly worse than those from Chernobyl. Source
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary called it “the devil’s scenario.” Two weeks after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing three nuclear reactors to melt down and release radioactive plumes, officials were bracing for even worse. They feared that spent fuel stored in pools in the reactor halls would catch fire and send radioactive smoke across a much wider swath of eastern Japan, including Tokyo. Source
Estimates of the cancer burden in Europe from radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident Source (Note: The Chernobyl accident was relatively minor, involved no spent fuel ponds, and was controlled by pouring cement onto the reactor. This was breaking down so a few years back they re-entombed.)
“However, many of the radioactive elements in spent fuel have long half-lives. For example, plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and plutonium-240 has a half-life of 6,800 years. Because it contains these long half-lived radioactive elements, spent fuel must be isolated and controlled for thousands of years.” Source
It does not matter how remote you are, the jet stream and ocean currents will circulate these toxic cancer-causing substances around the globe. They will be picked up by convection and pour deadly rain on your crop and water supply.
Nobody survives the collapse of civilization. This will be an extinction event.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
Jan - you are old... you are going to die soon one way or the other... why do you waste your time pulling weeds?
Thanks for the accurate analysis of our dilemma. I summarize it thus: too many humans using too many natural resources and producing to much pollution, including GHGs and global heating, the 6th Extinction. The ONLY solution appears to be happening spontaneously in cyberspace and with what's left of "common sense": 47% of Americans surveyed by PEW reported that they DO NOT intend to reproduce. Even with one child (on ave.) families, it will take 4 generations to get back to the population of 1950, 2.5B. We are 3,000 times more numerous than were our last ecologically balanced and self-sustaining iteration: the migratory Hunter-Gatherer/pastoralist clans/bands. Full description in the free online e-book PDF, "Stress R Us". God help us and the rest of life on this once glorious orb.
Japan is leading the charge to lower population.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp9z2pp80nyo
And their economy is going to collapse because of it... China is following their lead
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/overcapacity-and-price-wars/
Just increase welfare and benefits, to increase consumption. Also export to the new BRI countries, by creating high paid jobs in those countries, by subsidising professional social jobs, such as schools, teachers, road-builders etc.
Over-capacity with a highly educated population is easier to deal with than what the West is facing.
China's only real problem is the housing bubble, which they did fuck up in.
I always find questionable such analyses that don't also compare to the accurate problems the West is facing, as though it's only China, and we can all wave and cheer from the sidelines.
What China is looking at is peanuts to the next financial crisis about to hit the West, 2008 on steroids.
I don't believe the Chinese are facing "The ATMS about to be turned off", which is how banks described the 2008 situation.
China can also market 'second homes' to foreigners, an approach they have largely ignored so far, but will occur to them at some point.
In 10 or so years, once the Eurasian Heartland has fully formed, it will be only place on Earth with (Industrial) energy and resources; the US's suicidal shale oil will have completely collapsed, along with its military-backed Empire and control of the ME.
With the highest SoL on the planet, China will be a magnet for professional and retired immigration.
All snarkiness aside, Japan's falling fertility is not a voluntary phenomenon but rather a fact of the natural consequence of societal collapse, and it follows that human social groupings naturally trend toward a total number of members inclusive of 150 or less, the "Dunbar number", long studied by Oxford anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and author Sir Robin Dunbar. Governments and corporate overlords decry this phenomenon as it flies in the face of the Capitalistic drive for growth, even as it has far outgrown the capacity of natural resources to support more humans on this depleted, overwhelmed planet.
Don't fret... Elon is going to fly us to Mars once we completely burn out the Earth
Lol, of course you're being snarky there, lmoa. He'd be considerably better off creating a colony on Antartica, it has 1000x the survivability.
If Musk really wants to live on Mars - I have serious doubts - then he should go in the first wave.
Sorry, Eddy, but I don't fly, use Twitter or FB, and believe that we should spare the rest of the universe from our contagion. Just look at what we've done to this place!
The predicament is characterized by near maximum dialectical conflict between a host of primitive archetypal pairs.
The one-many dialectic is fundamental. Fundamental in that every other dialectical pair is determined in a significant way by scale dependency, and the relative balance between the individual and the collective, and between individual groups and the collective of all groups.
Simultaneously, we witness 1) selfish game theoretic competition for declining and mutually exclusive shares of biocapacity between subglobal agents being maximized, and 2) "Solutions" to this predicament requiring a corresponding maximization of cooperation between such agents.
Rationality, is the means by which internal contradictions to each archetype are resolved, and by which transcendent syntheses across these pairs is reached; Both in principle a priori, and in actuality, a posteriori, via recursive and convergent conflict between better and better approximations to the ideal synthesis.
The Universe, with its unparalleled dark sense of humour, has seen fit to maximize human Irrationality (unsublimated will to power) at the moment that rationality is required to plot an objective and intersubjectivley agreed upon path out of its predicament.
From perhaps an even more fundamental dialectical perspective, we could define our current predicament as the conflict between of will to power and rationality; between unsublimated will to power over others, and between sublimated will to power over oneself via the exercise of reason.
KM
This is the most important theme regarding Collapse, so I appreciate you exploring it. On the theme itself I will only say for the moment that the organized rationality for which you are implicitly advocating is in fact actively operating right now and right under your nose. It is hiding in plain sight. If you'd like to hear more just ask.
I believe that creative tension is the friction whereupon intelligence finds the traction necessary for advancing. This is why I engage constructive criticism as my general MO. Constructive criticism, however, requires the willingness of the recipient.
Firstly, if you are going to write at such a high level of density then ideally you want to have the requisite feel for such writing; failing that, you need to write more carefully and, in your case, much more carefully. No inappropriate commas, no jumbled syntax, no grammatical errors. The higher the level, the better the execution, otherwise it defeats the whole purpose of the density in the first place, and then some.
What you say about the universe is not based on Reason and therefore undermines your comment. Anything not based in Reason is inaccurate because Reason is simply what we call the accurate patterning of cause and effect.
I'd like to see you grow your thinking.
Per your offer, I would like to ask more of this organized rationality you speak of.
I should premise this by asserting, per Hegel, that the rational is real and the real is rational; That the necessary foundations of existence are rational, and organized rationally.
Both the flourishing of complex civilization, and the collapse (reorganization) of civilization have rational ontological forms, thus your assertion that organized rationality is operating unsensed, hidden in plain sight is superfluous, since all processes are fundamentally organized rationally.
Psychosis itself, within the human, is fundamentally organized rationally, but the experience of psychosis is not.
Disease is the disorganization of the rational, self-organizing function.
Appreciate your interest. If you wouldn't mind skimming through this comment thread again, you'll see that numerous times now I've touched upon the organized rationality of which I spoke. I just think that if you did that, and you're still interested, then you'd have some specific questions to ask. Thanks KM.
A difficult but necessary read. I have always opted for the more 'prepper' style of dealing with collapse. Less in the hyper-indivisualistic hoarding of goods way, and more in the making connections and building community resiliency way. Just last week I joined the board of our local seed library, where a mere 1% of our tiny island's population stewards enough seed to keep us all alive if the worst comes. This weekend indigenous community members led workshops on how to harvest deer (an abundant resource here). It's small and grassroots but gives me hope.
let me know your thoughts https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/the-utter-futility-of-doomsday-prepping
This is complete utopia. But at least you know it.
:/
I doubt that wood could be a truly renewable material for a civilization of 8 billion.
Everyone living today will one day die. We won’t always be 8 billion. That number can reduce quickly or slowly, or not at all and then very quickly.
We can make choices in how we get there.
Correct. He is not stating that. The human population will reduce to between 1 to 2 billion. And probably balance out between 500 million to 1 billion within the next couple of centuries.
Then let's discuss this in a couple of centuries. Until then it is misleading and environmentally destructive to suggest that wood is a renewable.
And what concrete is? Sustainable housing is materials made with locally sourced materials obtained through muscle power. Industrial civilization is what is the problem.
=====
Jan Steinman replied to your comment on The Civilizational Hospice Protocol.
Boy, you really bring out the nut-jobs, Honest Sorcerer! And if we truly "have a good 100 years to find a new sustainable source of energy", and if "the CO2 (.04 percent of the atmosphere) was not a problem (it increases food yields)", we'll just wait until some 90 of those years have passed before thinking about maybe doing something. Some 300,000 years of evolution has formed us to always — ALWAYS — pursue the easiest solution. That won't change with a hundred extra years of fossil sunlight.
=====
Jan, you should read through ALL of my recent essays. I did not mean to imply we should wait 100 years by the way. That strikes me as a strawman argument because I didn't say it. But at the same time there is no reason to embrace EV's, Autonomous Vehicles, the Green New Deal, ESG's, SDG's and all the other "non-solutions" from the UN, WHO, WEF etc. The fact is there is no man made, Anthropogenic Climate Change. These globalist NGO's are pushing Climate Change for global control and not for the betterment of humanity. They are also responsible for Mass Immigration into the US, EU and other countries. That is the primary reason Trump won by the way. 62% of the American People favor Mass Deportation as do I. Same goes for most citizens within the EU. So before making your silly claims, about my writings, perhaps you should read a few of my essays. Just saying.
You failed to predict the outcome of the 2024 US election. Next time, try reading what you cut & paste into the comment section of other people's work.
That isn't quite accurate. What I really said, in the 2 essays preceding the election, is the razor thin polling, between Trump and Harris, made no sense because Trump was about 10 points ahead on the most important issues: immigration and the economy. Given that I had expected Trump to be ahead in the polling and the concern was the Democrats were going to try to fix the election for a Harris win. As it turned out Trump won both popular and electoral votes which showed the polling did not accurately measure where Americans stood . . . which was for Trump. I also said there would be a 2nd American Revolution if Harris won because their globalist agenda had to be stopped. Had Harris won the borders would have stayed open and the "Green Agenda" would have moved forward. Hopefully Trump follows through on his promises.
As I recall, the polls were wrong in 2016 and 2020.
Other issues:
1. Trump's victory in the popular vote is closer than the electoral vote count. In that sense the presidential election is rigged and always has been.
2. Ballots are not counted by hand. Only a small % are audited. With machine tabulation, there is no evidence of vote counts one way or another. Confidence in the results is entirely a matter of trust.
So Trump's victory is a narrow one in terms of the popular vote. The American electorate is split. That is not conducive for a revolution, but rather a civil war.
But I digress...
Readers of this blog realize the Green Agenda is woefully insufficient to address ecological overshoot. Whether it is pushed forward or abandoned is irrelevant. The decline of civilization is unavoidable.
Bottom line, Trump won. Also there is no Anthropogenic Climate change so no need for a Green Agenda which is really the globalists attempt to control every aspect of our lives. Finally we are not in a civil war -- one group against another. We are in the midst of a Global 2nd American Revolution pitting globalists against us Anti-globalists. All of the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights is being shredded internationally. And THAT must be stopped.
If Americans were engaged in violent conflict, it would be in the form of a civil war. You are not a majority as you seem to believe. You are not united.
Bottom line, modernity is coming to an end. At that point, violence will be a product of individual survival. Globalism will be a fading memory. Global tyrants will have been replaced with local ones. The Bill of Rights replaced with the law of the jungle. You can call that a "revolution" if you want.
We can be excellent at descriptive analysis - what has happened
We can be reasonably good at predictive analysis - what’s likely to happen
We are dangerously bad at prescriptive analysis - what we should (or can) do about it
Thank you B
All the mitigation suggestions from B require the overthrow of Capitalism to put in place, clearly then collapse is the only realistic scenario!
https://kevinhester.live/2019/06/24/navigating-hospice-at-the-edge-of-extinction/