Pretty good Aurelien, we are definitely wandering around blind in a labyrinth designed by experts to keep us this way. Too many people think that instant reaction to any stimuli is actual thought, however thinking requires time and consideration.
For my own part I have prejudices which I happily acknowledge; collectivism over insane individualism, peace over war, working within the limits of our environment just to select three from a myriad of preferences and go from there. I look at who is actually trying to help create this preferred imaginary world and go with them. Sad to say it is not the governments West where I live and had imagined were devoted to this as well.
None of them act as they advertise, so I conclude with the benefit of 60 years' experience that they are lying to me. The West needs its nose bloodied as it has totally lost any common sense, but it is going to be a very painful and perhaps a dangerous adjustment to new realities.
In your last paragraph, you sound very much like local activist John Webster (@jw2024).
By the way, the East is sometimes quite good at bringing clarity to complexities. In the 19th century, a Russian scientist sorted out the great chaos of the classification of chemical elements. Marx, being Jewish (that is, of Eastern descent), proved equally instrumental in systematizing social theory, which was later reinforced by the "Asians" Lenin and Stalin.
And of course, in the most complex political issues, one should not disdain explanations from the Kremlin (Moscow): with them, many things become simpler.
This piece would have been better received by me if it hadn't started it by making statements about things that could be obtained and influenced by just watching/listening/reading the BBC. That is that the world's sea levels are increasing, that young children have been adversely affected by covid, that Russian soldiers are being killed by the millions.
Sea levels are increasing but the rate of increase is constant and has been since records have been kept since the 18th century. The deaths or serious injury from covid in young children was and is so low as a percentage its almost unrecordable, however the effect of forced injections of mRNA is another matter entirely. There are independent reports regularly of Russian cemetery activity, they show no abnormal increases.
The rest was a description of something David McGrogan has also been covering, the effect of libertarian society/governments in the West. We need to remember that 7/8ths of the global population live in different societies. With the economic stranglehold of the West, and the US in particular declining and with multi-polarity on the increase, the strains on the libertarian governments will be immense. Under these circumstances violent fractures are a likely outcome.
"Russian soldiers are being killed by the millions".
That is unlikely. (Despite Aurelians strictures in being inclined to the position one is emotionally inclined to), it seems that recent body exchanges between Russia and the Ukraine are in (approximately) figures of several hundreds against tens in favour of Russia, even according to Ukranian sources.
I visit my mother-in-law's grave and observe the "military territories" nearby: they are growing, but, of course, not as quickly as can be seen in Ukrainian videos.. Of the seven people I know at the front (including my cousin), one was killed. Final observation: we don't see any front-line soldiers or disabled people in the cities yet. I can compare all this to the experience of the war in Chechnya.
My conclusion: the losses are obviously significant, but I'd be surprised if they exceed 350,000.
The losses are significant, I don't want to argue with you. But since I don't see anything like that in my city, 700 km from Kyiv, I'll assume you're describing some kind of epicenter of military and volunteer presence. This is indirectly indicated by "Paratrooper's Day," when many veterans of local conflicts take to the streets—it's their holiday.
I'll add that, no matter the losses, the spirit in society is fighting. NATO keeps pressing and pressing, and we have nowhere to retreat. Roughly 70% of the population understands this and is proud that the country is resisting. The rest are apolitical or would prefer Western-style capitalism.
These former Ukrainians are something else! I'm in one of their Telegram groups (https://t.me/konkretnost). I've never seen anything more cheerful, and sometimes even intelligent. They're wonderful. Fighters and patriots, the likes of which you won't find anywhere else in Russia.
By the way, they often hate Lenin and Stalin for handing them over to Ukrainian power.
And yes, "libtards." We also call them "liberahi." My wife has many of them in her family, and my parents are like that, too. Fortunately, they're the exception.
james whelan your comment would have been better received by me if it hadn't started with the typical hysterical and angry climate & COVID conspiracy cut-N-paste denier spaz outs that have been unchanged since residential internet became a thing. I'll bet you were furiously typing within seconds (feel better now?). Go away. You are exactly the type of know-nothing know-it-all who represents much of what has gone wrong with western civilization. I don't blame you, you are a symptom, like your PEDO POTUS, who, like climate change feedback's makes everything worse. Smash your device and get a library card. We (civilized people) are tired of your identity politics dogma. White conservative male Americans along with a few English speaking westerner make up the overwhelming majority of climate deniers and all of the loud cut-N-paste comment denier warriors.
It's a waste of time posting links to climate science - deniers don't read them. This is why instead, I like to throw the undeniable consequences in their face. Here's a quote from the article below - "Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
~
*Rising waters: a practical look at Miami’s future*
"As the director of Social and Sustainable Enterprises at Florida State University, I’ve spent years examining the growing risks of rising sea levels in South Florida. Working alongside graduate research students, we’ve analyzed data from coastal monitoring stations and economic reports, revealing patterns that demand immediate attention from policymakers and residents alike.
The water is rising, and we’re already feeling it
Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes. Last year’s “king tide” season — those extra-high tides between September and November — flooded Miami Beach and downtown streets, disrupting traffic and businesses. These aren’t hurricanes or tropical storms but “sunny-day floods.”
The numbers tell a clear story: Florida’s water levels have risen 8 inches since 1950, and are now rising as much as 1 inch every three years. Scientists project that sea levels could rise 10 to 17 inches higher by 2040 than they were in 2000. That might not sound like much, but every inch counts in a place as flat as Miami.
This hits our wallets hard
Miami’s economy depends heavily on tourism. Visitors generated an estimated $21.1 billion in spending in 2023, supporting thousands of local jobs. But if tourists can’t get to restaurants, shops or hotels when streets flood, that money evaporates, unlike the water. When beaches erode, we lose what brings many visitors here in the first place.
Property values are another concern. In flood-prone areas, home values are starting to level off or drop as insurance costs climb. Some homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums jump significantly — money that could be spent on their families or in local businesses instead.
Small businesses — from waterfront restaurants to marinas — lose money whenever flooding closes roads or keeps customers away. And it’s not just the obvious costs. The whole economy feels it when supply chains get disrupted or workers can’t get to their jobs.
"Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
james go tell those people who are trying to live with rising sea levels that they are wrong and you are right. Ever more sunny day and other sea level rise driven flooding are happening to towns and cities all up and down the Eastern sea board, including at Norfolk and the Naval base, Boston, New York and on and on and on the world over.
"Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
~
*Climate change deniers (Erik the Viking)*
'This little clip seems to be a great metaphor for climate change deniers.'
>> "Sea levels are increasing but the rate of increase is constant."
FALSE. Multiple observational datasets (tide gauges and satellite altimetry) show not only rising global mean sea level (GMSL) but also an accelerating rate of rise over recent decades.
The claim that the mRNA vaccines have caused more damage than COVID itself (acute infections and sequelae combined) is a strong one, let alone “forced injections,” and therefore requires equally strong evidence.
Doubling down and demonstrating your ignorance of the incidence of immune dysregulation among young children after (in some cases repeated) Covid infection isn't helping your case any. Pro tip -- when in a hole, stop digging!
Thank you Aurelian for another informative and provoking essay.
Some of the themes that you discuss here were also explored by the dissident British clinical psychologist David Smail, in a series of books that drew upon clinical experience and social observation, bin his books particularly taking care published in 1987.
Smiles overall argument with that psychology—has served ideologically to detach people from the world we live in, to make us individually responsible for our own misery and to discourage us from trying to change the world rather than just ‘understanding’ our selves. What are too often seen as private predicaments are in fact best understood as arising out of the public structures of society.
The activity of some National Health Service administrators has in recent times undergone a striking change from the concerned, meticulous support of procedures of clinical care once characteristic of them to a kind of swashbuckling managerial bravado in which cuts in services to patients and jobs of staff are made with apparent indifference or even satisfaction. The same people whose conduct not long ago would have been cautious, balanced, concerned for fairness, now speak the hard, almost macho language of ‘the real world’
"The common thread among the major problems of the world today, indeed, is that they just seem too complex for us to even begin to get a grip on them."
The problems are described as "complicated" but that is a cop-out. The problem with the problems is that there are too many entrenched interests that are invested in the existing system and they don't want their slice of the pie touched. They all have their congressman on speed-dial.
The solution, or one solution to this, is the Zionist one, that is, ethnic solidarity above everything else. What the ethnos is perceived to need, the ethnos gets, whatever the means or cost.
The upshot is that no matter how monstrous Israeli actions are, they will be defended by a subset of Jews, because they are Israeli, and those Jews fear that nobody will distinguish between them and the other Jews when push comes to shove. Of course, the Israeli regime cynically exploits this, just as Zionist demands for double standards and special pleading lead to antisemitism, which leads to demands for double standards and special pleading above all else.
Apologies: I would have deleted my previous entry, made half an hour ago, if I could have found a way to do that - I’d accidentally hit the ‘send button’ before giving it a final and much needed edit!
At the risk of testing everyone’s patience, here is the edited version, as it should have originally appeared…
Thank you, Aurelian for another informative and provoking essay.
Some of the themes that you discuss here were also explored in depth by the late dissident British clinical psychologist, David Smail: in a series of landmark books and articles that drew upon his clinical experience, informed by social and political observation and by philosophical and historical analyses.
Smail’s overall thesis was that ‘psychology’ - in both it’s therapeutic and academic forms - has served, in the main, to ideologically detach us from the world in which we live. It has sought to make us individually responsible for our own misery, and to discourage us from trying to change the world as opposed to focusing obsessively upon our ‘inner lives’. He argued that what are too often seen as private predicaments are best understood as arising out of the public structures of our society. He suggested that, rather than more insight into our inner lives, we need greater outsight into our shared social and material environment if we are to understand the main roots of our actions and of our distress.
This extract from ‘Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy’, first published in 1987, gives a flavour of Smail’s thought - ( in this case regarding the Thatcherite introduction of ‘managerialism to the NHS) -and of it’s resonance with your own…
‘The activity of some National Health Service administrators has in recent times undergone a striking change from the concerned, meticulous support of procedures of clinical care once characteristic of them to a kind of swashbuckling managerial bravado in which cuts in services to patients and jobs of staff are made with apparent indifference or even satisfaction. The same people whose conduct not long ago would have been cautious, balanced, concerned for fairness, now speak the hard, almost macho language of ‘the real world’.’
‘They conform to a style and rhetoric which has been sanctioned and endorsed from high above them by governmental power aimed at dismantling public health care. Their negative interest lies in the feeling that if they did not so conform there could be a threat to their jobs, though apart from this there is no tangible advantage to their conduct, and indeed considerable impairment to the moral quality of their work. These are decent people whose conduct springs not from some kind of illusory personal autonomy, but from a social context structured by interest.’
Smail’s critique of the discipline of psychology and of the toxicity of neoliberal society has more relevance than ever.
It has a strong resonance with your own commentaries on the blinkered outlook of much of the professional and managerial classes.
More details can be found at the website of the Midlands Psychology Group, which exists to share and develop David Smail’s ideas:
Thank you, great sense-making! Collective psychosis is what Jung called the phenomenon where unconscious (emotion) has grabbed the rudder. Currently the dream of AI doing all the difficult stuff like war and making things and making choices etc - that is a dream come true to all happy opinion-bubble inhabitants. The decision-makers can say the AI did it, or made me do it.
Some readers may have already read it, for those who didn't: getting a free account is more than worth it. This piece maybe is mostly about the UK, it is applicable everywhere i'd say. And it is as funny as it is stunning. Though the stupidities aren't surprising anymore.
PS. She mentions McLuhan, i would like to - further - point at Andrey Mir (books & substack).
Thank you for the link. Mary Harrington helps me to comprehend what Aurelien is trying to get across about how liberal self-absorption and the substitution of automation for literacy have crushed most people’s ability to comprehend the interconnectedness of our universe. In my 34 years of government service (‘82-‘17 in America) I watched with dismay the incomprehension displayed by the generations born after McLuhan published.
We certainly don’t need any Pope or Commissar to explain the world to us. Harrington’s comparison of Klaus Schwab to the fictional Ernst Stavro Blofeld is as delightful as it is chilling. While Jeffrey Epstein’s main line of business was facilitating tax evasion, it was his post-apocalyptic genius-breeding program that attracted the likes of Bill Gates to his table, a level of villainy that even Ian Fleming might not have imagined. Our “betters” clearly intend to abandon us but they haven’t quite figured out how we low-castes are to be convinced to harvest the caviar and take out the garbage.
Aurelien pricks our prejudices. The only way to cope with his rapier is to remember that you eat, therefore you shit. A crumb of comfort that the whole human species understands....
I don't believe anything i read that came out of French writing, because I no longer speak French. Also spellcheck seems to destroy all meaning anyway
I used to as a child. So I might have believed it then.
I believe in God. Because I'd have been dead long ago without the influence of a Guiding Spirit, or Spirits....
I think Russians have unshakable faith in God, despite some being communists, I prefer the word communalist.
I go with what has the ring of truth, the vibratory sound of the universes....
There are about one hundred thousand and no more than one hundred fifty thousand dead Russians from this war. And like two million dead ukranian souls. Whom are also Russian. No I didn't count them....that is my best understanding from multiple reliable sources.
I spend all day paying attention to know what to believe, but tis easier to know what not to believe, so I definitely don't believe anything in the YouTube ads. Ever.
Ralph Nader said from photographic genocide of population studies that there are like half a million dead Gazans. But I don't believe that was ever a war, only a slaughter.
I believe Eastern Orthodoxy is a fine religion, although mine is bay swimming. Who cares what I believe anyway, how much do I have any power nor ability to effect positive change? Music has lost the strength it might have once held. With the loss of Analog....
This system is designed by the corporations (owners of the government) to maximize complexity, and it is becoming impossible to operate at the micro level. This complexity's purpose is to take advantage of individuals. It is designed to take our money easily, but it is difficult for individuals to get their benefits or cancellations. It is an empire of lies, so it is also impossible for people to get the correct information including high government officials making important decisions like waging war. Their sense of history is based on lies. Therefore their decision making process is faulty. Artificial Intelligence will be used by the corporations to enhance this process and evolve into brainwashing us into just being their slaves.
Communism did have one use (I thank Branko Milanovic for bringing this to my attention) — it was handy in the decolonization process in a great many countries in Asia and Africa.
Unrelated, I would exercise caution regarding the presentation here of the relative value of Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking. If I understand the argument posed here correctly it implies that the latter is required for “the most important” decisions a person faces today, as opposed to the past when the former served its purpose for brute survival. I don’t think this is entirely correct: both kinds of thinking have their place — the challenge is recognizing when to burn the extra cognitive resources required to exercise System 2. Category errors in either direction are at best wasteful and at worst, hazardous. I would also point out that cases where System 2 is strictly necessary represent a tiny fraction of human situations — almost “corner cases” if you will. For the vast majority of people most of the time (now and across the history of the species) System 1 is sufficient — indeed wholly appropriate, especially in social situations, which for a pack animal like ourselves (thinking here more of wolves than donkeys) is almost always. Anyway, proceed with due caution …
For a syllabus teaching thinking skills, I would start basic statistics, so that one could identify if a sample size is adequate, if a study measures what it claims it measures, if the proportions of a graph accurately represent the data, etc. Debate skills including how to argue both sides of a debate, fundamental to seeing that there IS another side. Logic and logical fallacies. But we'd probably have to start with basic literacy and writing skills. Can we throw in a little non-Eurocentric history too?
I will add antropology and sociology: how we think what we think and cultural influences in it. ¿Why you eat beef and not frog, and think that frog is disgusting? Then, when you understand this you can apply it to ideas and more complex explanations of things. If we understand that "you can't think X without the context Y thah makes you able to think X" is an other example. Understand the causes of our ideas, values and actions requires not only logic, requires also how causation works besides cognition on that issues. If you understand that you are unable to think in some topics in your "automatical"and even with "deliberated reflection" way of thinking, then you feel attracted to "epojé" and to ask yourself: "¿why I never think on this?
Marketing, public relations and the Media are beautiful examples of this, but also micro-contexts like the group or friends or collegues, their profession, the values associated, the search of status and social succees.
I mention this because I've seen a lot of dogmatic people talk about logic, stadistics, and cognitive issues that were all the time applying on some topics and confirming their previous thoughts, unable to think really different about some topics, when they thought that they were really criticist, rational and logical people.
Since McLuhan has been name-dropped, I might as well dip my oar in here, particularly as I have been mulling over the way 100-plus years of technology-driven reality-bending have altered the way millions of humans perceive themselves and the world around them, beginning from the early era of cinema to where we have arrived at this point in tech history. In other words, it didn't just happen yesterday with the advent of AI.
I remember as a kid getting annoyed by illustrated stories because they intruded on the use of my own imagination. And, in our post modern bubble-world, where does the inner life of the personal leave off and someone else's lurid, profit driven fever dreams take over? This is not to regurgitate some Matrix pseudo metaphysics, but merely to point out that the intruding effects of a technology-driven for-profit media have altered the way in which we view the mundane world to an alarming degree. Do we notice the aquarium if we are fish?
I don't think that it is correct to say that the modern world (which means actually "the reigning Western worldview") has lost meaning. There has probably never been a society anywhere that so thoroughly believed that everything follows iron-clad laws, which is to say, has meaning. The "mechanical universe" IS "as above, so below," or maybe "as below, so above" -- the same laws govern the earth and the heavens and all things.
What has taken place is not a loss of meaning but a change of meaning, an immanentization of meaning, in which "meaning something" means "relating to something else in a predictable way" instead of "relating to something transcendent."
I don't think that is correct either - in modern science there is no longer an above - there is only 'below' - in other words a mechanistic universe sufficient to itself - there are no 'heavens'. Of course many of the pioneers of quantum physics developed more radical and humanistic ideas of a reality behind the clockwork, but these leanings have been severely dealt with by many of the theoretical technicians who followed them, and who now control the ideas factories.
I don't think this contradicts what I said. The "mechanistic universe sufficient to itself" is still meaning, if by "having meaning" we mean "makes sense." Self-referential meaning.
Which people defend very vigorously and quasi-religiously; they have invested a great deal emotionally in this belief. Hence, there is such determined attack on free will, teleology, consciousness, and so on in pop science quarters. If you were to show that free will exists, their faith would collapse.
“the possibility of “deciding for yourself” is in practice just about subjectively deciding who to believe.”
Not so - there is also the question of ‘credibility’. Sources which have previously proved to be correct to whatever extent may well continue to be so, and possibly be trustworthy in related areas. Then it becomes a matter of judgement as to whether their analyses are similarly credible when or if continued or expanded. Assessment of credibility - as far as one can do this - has to be given recognition as a further step in deciding who to believe.
Of course this is an imperfect situation, and there is a predeliction for believing what you like and agree with, but you have to be able to accept bad news too, or you might as well take up spiritualism.
In the good old days of the 50s-60s, the world was dominated by industrial corporations, with a ruling class that knew very well that their wealth depended on production chains and technique. Thay had a grip on reality, they had to, or they would disappear.
They were ousted as rulers around 1970 in the West (but not in East Asia) when they had to appeal to banks and investors for money, since they couldn't sell everything they produced ("over-production crisis"), and made losses. And these rentiers were in a position to pose conditions. And they were only interested in quick returns.
Rentiers don't bother about production chains, or any reality except the displays in the stock exchange. As Orwell said about the rentiers of his time, they don't need to know how the world is.
And the ruling ideas in a society are the ideas of its ruling class: Only the displays count!
Pretty good Aurelien, we are definitely wandering around blind in a labyrinth designed by experts to keep us this way. Too many people think that instant reaction to any stimuli is actual thought, however thinking requires time and consideration.
For my own part I have prejudices which I happily acknowledge; collectivism over insane individualism, peace over war, working within the limits of our environment just to select three from a myriad of preferences and go from there. I look at who is actually trying to help create this preferred imaginary world and go with them. Sad to say it is not the governments West where I live and had imagined were devoted to this as well.
None of them act as they advertise, so I conclude with the benefit of 60 years' experience that they are lying to me. The West needs its nose bloodied as it has totally lost any common sense, but it is going to be a very painful and perhaps a dangerous adjustment to new realities.
In your last paragraph, you sound very much like local activist John Webster (@jw2024).
By the way, the East is sometimes quite good at bringing clarity to complexities. In the 19th century, a Russian scientist sorted out the great chaos of the classification of chemical elements. Marx, being Jewish (that is, of Eastern descent), proved equally instrumental in systematizing social theory, which was later reinforced by the "Asians" Lenin and Stalin.
And of course, in the most complex political issues, one should not disdain explanations from the Kremlin (Moscow): with them, many things become simpler.
This piece would have been better received by me if it hadn't started it by making statements about things that could be obtained and influenced by just watching/listening/reading the BBC. That is that the world's sea levels are increasing, that young children have been adversely affected by covid, that Russian soldiers are being killed by the millions.
Sea levels are increasing but the rate of increase is constant and has been since records have been kept since the 18th century. The deaths or serious injury from covid in young children was and is so low as a percentage its almost unrecordable, however the effect of forced injections of mRNA is another matter entirely. There are independent reports regularly of Russian cemetery activity, they show no abnormal increases.
The rest was a description of something David McGrogan has also been covering, the effect of libertarian society/governments in the West. We need to remember that 7/8ths of the global population live in different societies. With the economic stranglehold of the West, and the US in particular declining and with multi-polarity on the increase, the strains on the libertarian governments will be immense. Under these circumstances violent fractures are a likely outcome.
"Russian soldiers are being killed by the millions".
That is unlikely. (Despite Aurelians strictures in being inclined to the position one is emotionally inclined to), it seems that recent body exchanges between Russia and the Ukraine are in (approximately) figures of several hundreds against tens in favour of Russia, even according to Ukranian sources.
I visit my mother-in-law's grave and observe the "military territories" nearby: they are growing, but, of course, not as quickly as can be seen in Ukrainian videos.. Of the seven people I know at the front (including my cousin), one was killed. Final observation: we don't see any front-line soldiers or disabled people in the cities yet. I can compare all this to the experience of the war in Chechnya.
My conclusion: the losses are obviously significant, but I'd be surprised if they exceed 350,000.
The losses are significant, I don't want to argue with you. But since I don't see anything like that in my city, 700 km from Kyiv, I'll assume you're describing some kind of epicenter of military and volunteer presence. This is indirectly indicated by "Paratrooper's Day," when many veterans of local conflicts take to the streets—it's their holiday.
I'll add that, no matter the losses, the spirit in society is fighting. NATO keeps pressing and pressing, and we have nowhere to retreat. Roughly 70% of the population understands this and is proud that the country is resisting. The rest are apolitical or would prefer Western-style capitalism.
These former Ukrainians are something else! I'm in one of their Telegram groups (https://t.me/konkretnost). I've never seen anything more cheerful, and sometimes even intelligent. They're wonderful. Fighters and patriots, the likes of which you won't find anywhere else in Russia.
By the way, they often hate Lenin and Stalin for handing them over to Ukrainian power.
And yes, "libtards." We also call them "liberahi." My wife has many of them in her family, and my parents are like that, too. Fortunately, they're the exception.
james whelan your comment would have been better received by me if it hadn't started with the typical hysterical and angry climate & COVID conspiracy cut-N-paste denier spaz outs that have been unchanged since residential internet became a thing. I'll bet you were furiously typing within seconds (feel better now?). Go away. You are exactly the type of know-nothing know-it-all who represents much of what has gone wrong with western civilization. I don't blame you, you are a symptom, like your PEDO POTUS, who, like climate change feedback's makes everything worse. Smash your device and get a library card. We (civilized people) are tired of your identity politics dogma. White conservative male Americans along with a few English speaking westerner make up the overwhelming majority of climate deniers and all of the loud cut-N-paste comment denier warriors.
It's a waste of time posting links to climate science - deniers don't read them. This is why instead, I like to throw the undeniable consequences in their face. Here's a quote from the article below - "Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
~
*Rising waters: a practical look at Miami’s future*
"As the director of Social and Sustainable Enterprises at Florida State University, I’ve spent years examining the growing risks of rising sea levels in South Florida. Working alongside graduate research students, we’ve analyzed data from coastal monitoring stations and economic reports, revealing patterns that demand immediate attention from policymakers and residents alike.
The water is rising, and we’re already feeling it
Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes. Last year’s “king tide” season — those extra-high tides between September and November — flooded Miami Beach and downtown streets, disrupting traffic and businesses. These aren’t hurricanes or tropical storms but “sunny-day floods.”
The numbers tell a clear story: Florida’s water levels have risen 8 inches since 1950, and are now rising as much as 1 inch every three years. Scientists project that sea levels could rise 10 to 17 inches higher by 2040 than they were in 2000. That might not sound like much, but every inch counts in a place as flat as Miami.
This hits our wallets hard
Miami’s economy depends heavily on tourism. Visitors generated an estimated $21.1 billion in spending in 2023, supporting thousands of local jobs. But if tourists can’t get to restaurants, shops or hotels when streets flood, that money evaporates, unlike the water. When beaches erode, we lose what brings many visitors here in the first place.
Property values are another concern. In flood-prone areas, home values are starting to level off or drop as insurance costs climb. Some homeowners are seeing their insurance premiums jump significantly — money that could be spent on their families or in local businesses instead.
Small businesses — from waterfront restaurants to marinas — lose money whenever flooding closes roads or keeps customers away. And it’s not just the obvious costs. The whole economy feels it when supply chains get disrupted or workers can’t get to their jobs.
https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/08/12/miami-sea-level-rise-sunny-day-flooding-king-tides-infrastructure-building-codes-tourism-fsu/
~
"Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
james go tell those people who are trying to live with rising sea levels that they are wrong and you are right. Ever more sunny day and other sea level rise driven flooding are happening to towns and cities all up and down the Eastern sea board, including at Norfolk and the Naval base, Boston, New York and on and on and on the world over.
"Let’s start with what we can all see with our own eyes."
~
*Climate change deniers (Erik the Viking)*
'This little clip seems to be a great metaphor for climate change deniers.'
https://youtu.be/rY-HOYTz-rs
Pity you didn't take into account the sinking of the land around Miami.
The sea is rising a good bit faster than the land is sinking. But in any case, sea level rise is documented in many other locations.
>> "Sea levels are increasing but the rate of increase is constant."
FALSE. Multiple observational datasets (tide gauges and satellite altimetry) show not only rising global mean sea level (GMSL) but also an accelerating rate of rise over recent decades.
The claim that the mRNA vaccines have caused more damage than COVID itself (acute infections and sequelae combined) is a strong one, let alone “forced injections,” and therefore requires equally strong evidence.
I see you have provided none.
I was referring to young children, which you are not. And I didn't 'make a claim'.
Doubling down and demonstrating your ignorance of the incidence of immune dysregulation among young children after (in some cases repeated) Covid infection isn't helping your case any. Pro tip -- when in a hole, stop digging!
Thank you Aurelian for another informative and provoking essay.
Some of the themes that you discuss here were also explored by the dissident British clinical psychologist David Smail, in a series of books that drew upon clinical experience and social observation, bin his books particularly taking care published in 1987.
Smiles overall argument with that psychology—has served ideologically to detach people from the world we live in, to make us individually responsible for our own misery and to discourage us from trying to change the world rather than just ‘understanding’ our selves. What are too often seen as private predicaments are in fact best understood as arising out of the public structures of society.
The activity of some National Health Service administrators has in recent times undergone a striking change from the concerned, meticulous support of procedures of clinical care once characteristic of them to a kind of swashbuckling managerial bravado in which cuts in services to patients and jobs of staff are made with apparent indifference or even satisfaction. The same people whose conduct not long ago would have been cautious, balanced, concerned for fairness, now speak the hard, almost macho language of ‘the real world’
https://midpsy.uk/
"The common thread among the major problems of the world today, indeed, is that they just seem too complex for us to even begin to get a grip on them."
The problems are described as "complicated" but that is a cop-out. The problem with the problems is that there are too many entrenched interests that are invested in the existing system and they don't want their slice of the pie touched. They all have their congressman on speed-dial.
The solution, or one solution to this, is the Zionist one, that is, ethnic solidarity above everything else. What the ethnos is perceived to need, the ethnos gets, whatever the means or cost.
The upshot is that no matter how monstrous Israeli actions are, they will be defended by a subset of Jews, because they are Israeli, and those Jews fear that nobody will distinguish between them and the other Jews when push comes to shove. Of course, the Israeli regime cynically exploits this, just as Zionist demands for double standards and special pleading lead to antisemitism, which leads to demands for double standards and special pleading above all else.
Apologies: I would have deleted my previous entry, made half an hour ago, if I could have found a way to do that - I’d accidentally hit the ‘send button’ before giving it a final and much needed edit!
At the risk of testing everyone’s patience, here is the edited version, as it should have originally appeared…
Thank you, Aurelian for another informative and provoking essay.
Some of the themes that you discuss here were also explored in depth by the late dissident British clinical psychologist, David Smail: in a series of landmark books and articles that drew upon his clinical experience, informed by social and political observation and by philosophical and historical analyses.
Smail’s overall thesis was that ‘psychology’ - in both it’s therapeutic and academic forms - has served, in the main, to ideologically detach us from the world in which we live. It has sought to make us individually responsible for our own misery, and to discourage us from trying to change the world as opposed to focusing obsessively upon our ‘inner lives’. He argued that what are too often seen as private predicaments are best understood as arising out of the public structures of our society. He suggested that, rather than more insight into our inner lives, we need greater outsight into our shared social and material environment if we are to understand the main roots of our actions and of our distress.
This extract from ‘Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy’, first published in 1987, gives a flavour of Smail’s thought - ( in this case regarding the Thatcherite introduction of ‘managerialism to the NHS) -and of it’s resonance with your own…
‘The activity of some National Health Service administrators has in recent times undergone a striking change from the concerned, meticulous support of procedures of clinical care once characteristic of them to a kind of swashbuckling managerial bravado in which cuts in services to patients and jobs of staff are made with apparent indifference or even satisfaction. The same people whose conduct not long ago would have been cautious, balanced, concerned for fairness, now speak the hard, almost macho language of ‘the real world’.’
‘They conform to a style and rhetoric which has been sanctioned and endorsed from high above them by governmental power aimed at dismantling public health care. Their negative interest lies in the feeling that if they did not so conform there could be a threat to their jobs, though apart from this there is no tangible advantage to their conduct, and indeed considerable impairment to the moral quality of their work. These are decent people whose conduct springs not from some kind of illusory personal autonomy, but from a social context structured by interest.’
Smail’s critique of the discipline of psychology and of the toxicity of neoliberal society has more relevance than ever.
It has a strong resonance with your own commentaries on the blinkered outlook of much of the professional and managerial classes.
More details can be found at the website of the Midlands Psychology Group, which exists to share and develop David Smail’s ideas:
https://midpsy.uk/
Thank you, great sense-making! Collective psychosis is what Jung called the phenomenon where unconscious (emotion) has grabbed the rudder. Currently the dream of AI doing all the difficult stuff like war and making things and making choices etc - that is a dream come true to all happy opinion-bubble inhabitants. The decision-makers can say the AI did it, or made me do it.
Why the Great Reset failed Technocrats are getting stupider
https://unherd.com/2025/12/why-the-great-reset-failed/
Some readers may have already read it, for those who didn't: getting a free account is more than worth it. This piece maybe is mostly about the UK, it is applicable everywhere i'd say. And it is as funny as it is stunning. Though the stupidities aren't surprising anymore.
PS. She mentions McLuhan, i would like to - further - point at Andrey Mir (books & substack).
Thank you for the link. Mary Harrington helps me to comprehend what Aurelien is trying to get across about how liberal self-absorption and the substitution of automation for literacy have crushed most people’s ability to comprehend the interconnectedness of our universe. In my 34 years of government service (‘82-‘17 in America) I watched with dismay the incomprehension displayed by the generations born after McLuhan published.
We certainly don’t need any Pope or Commissar to explain the world to us. Harrington’s comparison of Klaus Schwab to the fictional Ernst Stavro Blofeld is as delightful as it is chilling. While Jeffrey Epstein’s main line of business was facilitating tax evasion, it was his post-apocalyptic genius-breeding program that attracted the likes of Bill Gates to his table, a level of villainy that even Ian Fleming might not have imagined. Our “betters” clearly intend to abandon us but they haven’t quite figured out how we low-castes are to be convinced to harvest the caviar and take out the garbage.
Aurelien pricks our prejudices. The only way to cope with his rapier is to remember that you eat, therefore you shit. A crumb of comfort that the whole human species understands....
I don't believe anything i read that came out of French writing, because I no longer speak French. Also spellcheck seems to destroy all meaning anyway
I used to as a child. So I might have believed it then.
I believe in God. Because I'd have been dead long ago without the influence of a Guiding Spirit, or Spirits....
I think Russians have unshakable faith in God, despite some being communists, I prefer the word communalist.
I go with what has the ring of truth, the vibratory sound of the universes....
There are about one hundred thousand and no more than one hundred fifty thousand dead Russians from this war. And like two million dead ukranian souls. Whom are also Russian. No I didn't count them....that is my best understanding from multiple reliable sources.
I spend all day paying attention to know what to believe, but tis easier to know what not to believe, so I definitely don't believe anything in the YouTube ads. Ever.
Ralph Nader said from photographic genocide of population studies that there are like half a million dead Gazans. But I don't believe that was ever a war, only a slaughter.
I believe Eastern Orthodoxy is a fine religion, although mine is bay swimming. Who cares what I believe anyway, how much do I have any power nor ability to effect positive change? Music has lost the strength it might have once held. With the loss of Analog....
End of comment
This system is designed by the corporations (owners of the government) to maximize complexity, and it is becoming impossible to operate at the micro level. This complexity's purpose is to take advantage of individuals. It is designed to take our money easily, but it is difficult for individuals to get their benefits or cancellations. It is an empire of lies, so it is also impossible for people to get the correct information including high government officials making important decisions like waging war. Their sense of history is based on lies. Therefore their decision making process is faulty. Artificial Intelligence will be used by the corporations to enhance this process and evolve into brainwashing us into just being their slaves.
Communism did have one use (I thank Branko Milanovic for bringing this to my attention) — it was handy in the decolonization process in a great many countries in Asia and Africa.
Unrelated, I would exercise caution regarding the presentation here of the relative value of Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking. If I understand the argument posed here correctly it implies that the latter is required for “the most important” decisions a person faces today, as opposed to the past when the former served its purpose for brute survival. I don’t think this is entirely correct: both kinds of thinking have their place — the challenge is recognizing when to burn the extra cognitive resources required to exercise System 2. Category errors in either direction are at best wasteful and at worst, hazardous. I would also point out that cases where System 2 is strictly necessary represent a tiny fraction of human situations — almost “corner cases” if you will. For the vast majority of people most of the time (now and across the history of the species) System 1 is sufficient — indeed wholly appropriate, especially in social situations, which for a pack animal like ourselves (thinking here more of wolves than donkeys) is almost always. Anyway, proceed with due caution …
For a syllabus teaching thinking skills, I would start basic statistics, so that one could identify if a sample size is adequate, if a study measures what it claims it measures, if the proportions of a graph accurately represent the data, etc. Debate skills including how to argue both sides of a debate, fundamental to seeing that there IS another side. Logic and logical fallacies. But we'd probably have to start with basic literacy and writing skills. Can we throw in a little non-Eurocentric history too?
I will add antropology and sociology: how we think what we think and cultural influences in it. ¿Why you eat beef and not frog, and think that frog is disgusting? Then, when you understand this you can apply it to ideas and more complex explanations of things. If we understand that "you can't think X without the context Y thah makes you able to think X" is an other example. Understand the causes of our ideas, values and actions requires not only logic, requires also how causation works besides cognition on that issues. If you understand that you are unable to think in some topics in your "automatical"and even with "deliberated reflection" way of thinking, then you feel attracted to "epojé" and to ask yourself: "¿why I never think on this?
Marketing, public relations and the Media are beautiful examples of this, but also micro-contexts like the group or friends or collegues, their profession, the values associated, the search of status and social succees.
I mention this because I've seen a lot of dogmatic people talk about logic, stadistics, and cognitive issues that were all the time applying on some topics and confirming their previous thoughts, unable to think really different about some topics, when they thought that they were really criticist, rational and logical people.
Since McLuhan has been name-dropped, I might as well dip my oar in here, particularly as I have been mulling over the way 100-plus years of technology-driven reality-bending have altered the way millions of humans perceive themselves and the world around them, beginning from the early era of cinema to where we have arrived at this point in tech history. In other words, it didn't just happen yesterday with the advent of AI.
I remember as a kid getting annoyed by illustrated stories because they intruded on the use of my own imagination. And, in our post modern bubble-world, where does the inner life of the personal leave off and someone else's lurid, profit driven fever dreams take over? This is not to regurgitate some Matrix pseudo metaphysics, but merely to point out that the intruding effects of a technology-driven for-profit media have altered the way in which we view the mundane world to an alarming degree. Do we notice the aquarium if we are fish?
For those unfamiliar with the original, here is the urtext itself: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
McLuhan.org is also not a bad reference e-location to begin this unspooling process. https://mcluhan.org/the-medium-is-the-message/
I don't think that it is correct to say that the modern world (which means actually "the reigning Western worldview") has lost meaning. There has probably never been a society anywhere that so thoroughly believed that everything follows iron-clad laws, which is to say, has meaning. The "mechanical universe" IS "as above, so below," or maybe "as below, so above" -- the same laws govern the earth and the heavens and all things.
What has taken place is not a loss of meaning but a change of meaning, an immanentization of meaning, in which "meaning something" means "relating to something else in a predictable way" instead of "relating to something transcendent."
As some German guy called it, Gestell
I don't think that is correct either - in modern science there is no longer an above - there is only 'below' - in other words a mechanistic universe sufficient to itself - there are no 'heavens'. Of course many of the pioneers of quantum physics developed more radical and humanistic ideas of a reality behind the clockwork, but these leanings have been severely dealt with by many of the theoretical technicians who followed them, and who now control the ideas factories.
The notion of “ideas factories” is almost as horrifying as “memory holes.”
Ugh — more to worry about … 😑
I don't think this contradicts what I said. The "mechanistic universe sufficient to itself" is still meaning, if by "having meaning" we mean "makes sense." Self-referential meaning.
Which people defend very vigorously and quasi-religiously; they have invested a great deal emotionally in this belief. Hence, there is such determined attack on free will, teleology, consciousness, and so on in pop science quarters. If you were to show that free will exists, their faith would collapse.
“the possibility of “deciding for yourself” is in practice just about subjectively deciding who to believe.”
Not so - there is also the question of ‘credibility’. Sources which have previously proved to be correct to whatever extent may well continue to be so, and possibly be trustworthy in related areas. Then it becomes a matter of judgement as to whether their analyses are similarly credible when or if continued or expanded. Assessment of credibility - as far as one can do this - has to be given recognition as a further step in deciding who to believe.
Of course this is an imperfect situation, and there is a predeliction for believing what you like and agree with, but you have to be able to accept bad news too, or you might as well take up spiritualism.
In the good old days of the 50s-60s, the world was dominated by industrial corporations, with a ruling class that knew very well that their wealth depended on production chains and technique. Thay had a grip on reality, they had to, or they would disappear.
They were ousted as rulers around 1970 in the West (but not in East Asia) when they had to appeal to banks and investors for money, since they couldn't sell everything they produced ("over-production crisis"), and made losses. And these rentiers were in a position to pose conditions. And they were only interested in quick returns.
Rentiers don't bother about production chains, or any reality except the displays in the stock exchange. As Orwell said about the rentiers of his time, they don't need to know how the world is.
And the ruling ideas in a society are the ideas of its ruling class: Only the displays count!