"Some things are actually impossible to visualise: our own death is the classic example. But some things are just bigger and more complex than our brains are capable of processing, and the likely progressive disintegration of the world system is one of them”.
An American professor friend attending a health conference in Beijing met the Chinese health minister and, at the behest of a fellow academic of Chinese extraction, the whereabouts of an imprisoned academic.
"I don't think you understand what I do here", replied the Minister. "My first task is to see that 4 billion meals get served every day without anyone being sickened or killed by tainted ingredients. My second is to clean up the shit that follows. After that, I attend to urgent issues”.
The reason the flu season was bad is because the mRNA vaccines have destroyed our immune system. We have all become spike protein factories. Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems.
The vast majority of us are deficient. Many are critically deficient.
Kind of ironic that an article focused on magical thinking engages in its own form of magical thinking. Correlation is not causation. You had a bad flu season, but to assume lack of vaccination was the cause is just an assumption. Besides which, if not fully sterilizing, vaccination will drive viral variations, so apart from the problem of choosing the strain we're vaccinating against, we may be making matters worse by driving variation of the very thing we're trying to prevent. Not a winning strategy, except for the makers of vaccines.
"Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems."
Exactly. Zinc also, which most people are deficient in. Not once however, in the entire covid fiasco did I hear any govt. agency or health institute make that recommendation. They also lied to us about the effectiveness of repurposed drugs and went as far as to threaten the doctors and scientists recommending that approach, even though the 'vaccines' were still a year away. Two of those recommended drugs are so safe that there was no justification at all for not trying them, even if they didn't help much, since there was nothing else available at the time, and repurposing drugs is (or was) the standard approach to dealing with a novel pathogen.
Given all the lies we were told by nearly every party to the covid fiasco, why should we ever trust them again?
Through the whole covid fiasco I was helped immensely by several doctors I found on youtube. Dr John Campbell was an avid proponent of the mRNA vaccine, until he started to see the data on vaccine injuries and excess deaths. His videos with professors of oncology and immunology are extremely troubling. The Doctor at meregenomics has discussed the intricacies of frameshifting and refocusing of igg4 antibodies, as well as the origins of turbo cancers in many videos.Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity pointed out back in 2020 that the furin cleveage site was a clear indication that the covid virus was man made. I also subscribed to Pierre Kory, the author of The War on Ivermectin. Dr Campbell has many videos on ivermectin and fenbendazole. Not only do these antiparasitic drugs have strong anti viral properties,
they are also showing extraordinary promise against many cancers. Check out his videos on fenben and ivermectin.
The only silver lining to covid for me is that, thanks to these brave doctors, who were often heavily censored, I discovered the importance of vitamin D and other supplements. I have been taking zinc with quercetin, nattokinase, NAC, melatonin
and bromelain as well as 12,000 ui of vitamin D.
Once or twice a week I take ivermectin. Since early 2020 I have not been sick for one single day. I was on a boat in Antarctica when almost all the passengers and crew came down with covid, but I had no symptoms.
Since I travel a lot, I was forced to get three mRNA jabs. Unlike many people I
admit that this was a huge error on my part.
For those who do not believe that the virus causes harm, I show them the data on ourwordindata excess mortality, and they are shocked.
Since early 2022, when the pandemic was effectively over, countries in Eastern Europe
where the average vaccine per person was just above 1, excess deaths are barely above zero.
In the USA, where the vaccine rate is about 2.4 per person, the excess deaths are around 9%.
In Western Europe, Canada , Australia and New Zealand, where the vaccine rates are
around 2.7 per person, the excess mortality is around 15%.
In the most highly vaccinated countries of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile
where the average vaccine rate is over 3 per person, the excess mortality is running well over 20 %. This is unheard of outside of times of war.
Unfortunately there no signs that excess mortality is coming down.
One other person to follow is Dr Kevin Mckernan. He was the head of the human genome project at MIT. He is finding extraordinarily high levels of DNA fragments in the Pfizer vaccine, along with the promoter SV 40 which is known to promote cancer. My advice is to get on the supplements I mentioned, and stay on them.
They also appear to attack the spike protein in people with long covid.
In Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
Interesting and a good reminder of the 60s 70s and beyond .Talking of gas and how high the prices are in europe there is a very very simple answer , simple if the comfort and safety of millions of people is your priority and it is to simply repair the gas pipeline from Russia NORD2 and resume the purchase of cheap gas from Russia.Of course that would involve our leaders caring about us and ahowing they do by telling Trump he can keep his expensive shale gas it would also involve our leaders telling Zelenski that Ukraine was better off before it threatened Russia,s safety as it undoubtedly would have done if Ukraine joined NATO.
NATO is finished so lets discard that nonsense.
Repair the gas pipe repair relations with Russia buy their gas and use the money saved on rebuilding Ukraine.
Sure, but magic thinking on the part of government involves having a sincere faith in the power of magic, so actual effective planning such as you describe is superfluous.
Why the absolutely impossible to ignore truths you have described here has been ignored is one of the great mysteries of our time. Wiser minds than mine have written about this wisdom-deficit since before I was born, and I'm 76. Even in my pre-teens, I saw something of this and gravitated to thinkers who did also. As it is, I think of myself in this life as one of the "martyroi" or "witnesses." Forced to watch a horrific catastrophe unfold stage-by-stage and powerless to alter it in any way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Best I can do, I'm afraid. Kudos to you for outlining these truths so powerfully.
It is generational. We have watched it happen. I fancied myself an existentialist in the 1950s when it was all the rage. It has been at least in the back of my mind since. Aurelien wrote two essays about it, A Philosophy for Really Hard Times and I am persuaded he has something. All this is preamble to two points. We have watched the decline of leadership and competence since we were kids. FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle, Stalin were competent leaders surrounded by people who actually knew how to do things. Engineers, electrical, mechanical, or chemical, were leaders in their fields and leaders of industry. Working men had a variety of skills and a well of ingenuity. If something broke down, they fixed it and only if it was beyond their "fix" did they call for help. To where did that attitude disappear? I think it left for China with the Western industrial base to be replaced by "computer jockeys" who know how to ride that "horse"only as long as it stays on the track they habitually follow. That is unfair to all those who wrote the programs and provide tech support, but you take my meaning. Financial "engineering" and a financialized economy is no substitute for the real thing. We had our "birthright" whisked out from under us by flimflam artists and robber barons redux.
I jumped the gun and posted before stating my point about existentialism. Camus was asked what does one do when faced with an absurd world.If this world is not absurd, it is chock full of absurdities. What is one to do? Camus's answer, continue, just go on without hope and without despair. Or, to paraphrase, keep shoveling and do not expect to a pony in that pile of horse manure
And me. The generation of politicians who served in WWII were forced to be competent, or die. They had a fully rounded picture of the world. Since then, the Neo-Liberals have taken over, destroyed the education system and privatised the economy into the hands of similar value-free and competence-free legalised and sanctimonious criminals.
You have touched on existential threats that most of us either outside of any power structure or simply a servant to them will have become familiar with emotionally grappling with as our ruling class have become deluded by the opiate of wealth. As necessity is the mother of invention it is only once enough of the world’s human populations inevitably permanently lose their second gilded age creature comforts that any cultural recreation will be seeded. Until then it is our lot to endure this shrinking of human imaginations and the degradation of place.
The dominative narrative, as pointed out includes, along with its associated trappings, renaming short-sighted to short-term, and then rushing off, the rest of the world in tow, with not the slightest idea of where/what a finish line even is.
Perhaps, I too am falling for the seductive, short-term, 'do something' syndrome so well described in this article, but I do have a belief that the answers to such problems, we are currently facing, due to their size and complexity, are not solvable by any one person, or even by individual organizations, but rather through extensive and deep organizing among and between them.
Helpful nswers can come from anyone, and many ones. Being connected, vocal, strategizing while seeking effective tactics, and yes, acting, are all important in counteracting the dominant narrative. How do we do that organizing?
My reading of the archeological record and history is that the only organizational structure capable of achieving what you propose has been religion. I don't see much appetite for that sort of thing just now, but a calamity big enough might see a resurgence of interest. Christianity is a desert weed, after all ...
Unfortunately, Christianity is among the most intellectually and logically unsatisfactory religions (along with Islam and Judaism). Far better would be one of the Indian or Chinese religions. Even Wicca would be better - at least you might get naked dancing round a campfire! 😳
The succes of a religion is not intellectual or logical. It is the capacity of put together diferents behaviors of society through symbolism. In this case, most of religions (if not all) tend to orient their symbols to the future and create a conformist and dogmatic basic that is capable ob keep social cohesion. Moral acts in a similar way (nationalism, for exemple, that gives to the elites a future goal and a direction). I am atheist, and the idea of God is contradictorial and easily deniable; it is false its existence. However, I appreciate the multiple functions of religions in different spheres (social and individual).
If your 'idea of god' is contradictory and easily deniable, then you have not considered the question in sufficient detail. Of course the idea of a 'father in the sky' whose main desire is to be worshipped, is a ludicrous - even insane idea. But there is much more to the idea than that. I don't personally believe in 'god', but he/she/it is not so easily dismissed.
I mean this: omnipotence, the problem of unnecessary evil and the goodness of God, the problem of the creation of God (if he creates, ¿who create it him?), the studies in atropology that shows that religions evolve from a zoomorfism, to antropomorfism until more abstract ways of conceiving Gods and so on... It is a contradictorily idea, at least in the usual forms of Theology.
It is not a naïve deniable of God. It is base on philosophy and works from other people that I've heard or read.
Any such altruistic endeavour, and agreed, solutions to our complex societal crises can only ever be found through a complex of different voices, and only be initiated once those mature enough to be confident that they are able to think through complex patterns, find each other. Such a group would be able to jettison any of the vast tribe of hot little monkeys on the make who mimic competency.
As this is an organic process its emergence will be unpredictable.
My view is that you resort to magical thinking when real reforms involve subverting your "state ideology," a set of beliefs that holds your society and the legitimacy of the government together. This is not necessarily an Anglo Saxon thing: there are several tons of history that addresses why China failed to modernize in mid to late 19th century as Japan did--and the magical thinking plays a huge part in that story. Their idea was that Western power depended only on the "tactics" and techniques, which could be bought and paid for, but the ultimate goal was to not change anything about the China that was. So millions upon millions went to buying Western arms and ships and hiring alleged Western experts, but with a wilful and deliberate ignorance about how these fit into (non existent) Chinese vision of where it stood in the world--you can't have a vision if your goal is that you don't want to be part of the world that you didn't like, where you are not the center of the universe. Ultimately, the whole thing came to the spectacle where discontented and unhappy masses recruited to cause trouble on promise of literal magic, the so-called Boxers who were told that a combination of Taoist mysticism and Chinese martial arts could somehow neutralize Western technology, because every reform attempt that didn't subvert the state ideology failed. While in a different form, we can almost see the outline of the Western Boxers being mobilized by Empress Dowager Trump on the promise of Capitalist mysticism and Anglo Saxon enterpreneurship that could somehow neutralize the Easterners.
The funny thing, of course, is that, back in old China, too, the politics were cast in a false dualism: the obscurantists rallying to the Boxers vs enlightened and rational "Westernizers." The truth was, of course, different: the real alternative to the Boxers that could actually appeal to the Chinese were various nationalist reformers, most of whom definitely were not exactly "friends of the West," even if they didn't reject Western ideas out of hand, ranging from Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But it took a whole century for them to sort things out (and the process is still ongoing, in fact.) Things will stay in flux for a long time in the West as well and I don't relish the thought.
Very good. I give you a complement: ¿why these ideas opposed to the ones sustained by the State are attacked or denied?
Because these ideas, usually (not always) ara defended by other groups of population that could threat the hegemony of ruling elites (or economical, or cultural elites). I don't know about China, but you can see (repite: I don't know, this is based on a couple of readings) how they attacked the "western ideas" that were sustained, or could be used, by economical elites that could threatened the ruling class. Today, it happen the same: the ideas could threat the position of economical and ruling elites in Western countries.
This one was powerful. It does deserve 3 coffees, or I feel it does.
Please post it on all subreditts dedicated to public servants. I say it as a public servant myself.
Working on issues related with climate change impact on public health, I refused to deal with food security, knowing beforehand that health has no available information, nor agriculture, and that most/all of food production, processing, transport, distribution is in private hands, so I was in no mood to go on wild geese chases. Rumors of the first working group meeting in the undisclosed area fully confirmed my gut feeling and kind of fell under the umbrella of this essay. Scarry as hell.
Humans survive hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands, generally staying within limits. We put rulers in charge and it's just been ten thousand years of overgrowth, misery, slavery, and collapse. I'm starting to think that maybe we're better off running our own lives without rulers.
1. The West in general and the US in particular has been able to half-ass planning because it has been able to rely upon brute force, and to hell with the consequences, those are for the little people to deal with.
2. "Consider, for example, the contrast between the US construction of an international alliance for Gulf War 1,0 and the political shambles of its successor. Whatever you think of the earlier episode, it was skilfully and professionally carried out, and had a simple strategic objective: the creation of a wide international coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, the second episode was pure magical thinking, whereby an invasion would “create the conditions” for a peaceful, democratic pro-American state."
Simply turning Iraq into a failed state was seen as a win, but this could not be said out loud.
3. "Or consider the difference between the shambles of Brexit and the management on the British side of the 1991 European Union negotiations. Whatever you think of British objectives in 1991, they were largely achieved, because the government machine, though weakened, was still capable of acting effectively and turning political aspirations into specific activities. By 2016-19 that machine had largely been destroyed, and even had it not been, the capability for strategic thought had pretty much disappeared from the higher reaches of government. Boris Johnson seemed to think that he could just wave a magic wand and the problem would be resolved."
The UK simply outsourced its military to the United States, following its American Master around like the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Anyway, I have read the theory that the real reason Johnson got cracking with Brexit was to preserve the Five Eyes relationship between MI 6 and the US. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no idea and express no opinion whether or to what extent there is any truth in this.
You argue that the collapse of the West is the result of a lack of strategic thinking attributable to growing infantilism of politicians, and so, broadly speaking, to stupidity, rather than malice.
But there IS strategic thinking underlying the dystopia, and long-term planning IS taking place. The point is, this is /malignant/ planning, engineering the collapse. For an instance relating to the food crisis you are observing, read: https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/global-war-on-farming These policies are not haphazard at all, and not short-term-profit driven. Depopulation by starvation seems to be the deliberate goal. A similar case might be made for many other policies; read for instance: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/
Why are the stooges, counterintuitively, required to be incompetent? Firstly, so that they do not realize the long-term consequences of the decisions they are prompted to make; but more importantly so that, afraid of exposing their ignorance, they rely for all their decisions on the guidance and instruction of shadow advisors. This was evident in the Covid crisis, where any change of course came slowly and haphazardly, with some "decisionmakers" still following yesterday's slogans until their handlers got around to redirecting them; and the media got fed the new "line" last of all, and so lagged behind changes of policy.
I am trying to fight the feeling that it is only my advancing age that makes me embrace this spiel - but it's more than that. I worked in Local Government and ran redevelopment schemes and we achieved things but they took time, organisation and skill. Local Government has been hollowed out now. And there seems to be little practical training remaining. How I envy the Chinese. If I was young again that's where I'd want to be. I am sick to death of our erstaz democracy - fetishised as a thing in itself. We need stability strategic planning and skill - and it has gone. In the past it was achieved only by the mainstream parties all basically agreeing with each other but that has been shattered by the reality of living in a word of 'financialisation' which is about to collapse. I saw it coming a couple of decades ago and retired to the hills. I am kept alive only by curiosity as to how things will turn out.
The West’s almost-complete lack of strategic thinking and planning capacity applies to the whole of the ecological crisis, including the climate crisis
Wendell Berry stated the following 48 years ago: "We must... be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason. We must be prepared to say that enough food, year after year, is possible for a limited number of people, and that this possibility can be preserved only by the steadfast, knowledgeable care of those people."
The entire chapter from The Unsettling Of America is eye opening and what he was alluding to in these paragraphs was sacrificing the world in the name of profits would kill us all.
Too bad humanity took a different path in the 70s.
Did he have any suggestion about how to go about culling the world's population to get to that limited number of "enough"? That is a very chilling concept, from what you have shared.
No, he simply states the path the Department of Agriculture was taking at the time would lead to our destruction and repeats in his own words all the other arguments ecologists have been making about our predicament.
There are a multitude of methods that could be applied past, present, and future to cull the population. They are abstinence, contraception, choosing smaller family sizes (example: 1 child policy of China), stopping immigration (doesn't apply to the world), disease, war, murder, violence, famine, accidents, pollution.
13.5% or 47.4 million Americans already experience food insecurity so seems to me our current predicament might be "resolved" through famine.
Sacrificing everything for short term profit. That is exactly what has happened since Nixon took the US off the gold standard. Fiat currencies based on debt, and the Chicago school of economists.
The West as a whole imitates the US which has hollowed out its economy following the quick buck for its elite. Hudson sums up the irony of the US attacking China because it has followed exactly the same method as the US used to develop it's strength in the 19th and early 20th centuries before it became obsessed by militarism to support the dollar.
Financialisation has killed the West and the only 'strategy' it has left is to try to take the RoW down with it so as to prolong it's own dying years.
Everything described in this essay is as a consequence of following this path.
Spot on. The explosion can't be far away. The most magical thinking of all is simply thinking that you can expand the debt year by year without any impact believing that the rest of the world will keep funding and feeding you. And why bother the hard and complicated task of making things when you can invest in financial 'assets'? Trump is a moron but like any street thief he knows when the gigs up. It is a crime that Government ALLOWS such things to happen. But Aurelien is right: this comes out of believing that everything will be alright if you just leave it alone. Small state, short termism, no strategic vision, no inheritance of skills......
The debt itself doesn't "mean" anything -- it's scribblings on a spreadsheet which, by accounting identity net to zero. What matters are real resources (including labour) and the laws: everything else is downstream from these.
"Too bad humanity took a different path in the 70s." Who is humanity? What alternatives were available to him? Or her, or it? Is it possible to get in touch with the mind of humanity and ask why he, she, or it chose this path?
I've heard of reindeer being introduced to St. Paul's Island. They had no predators, so their population exploded. The result was that their food was eaten up and that forced them to die back. Did the reindeer collective choose the wrong path?
That's natures way of telling you that you made a mistake. Unfortunately she only tells you after you have made it. As Aurelian points out we made it quite a few decades ago, and we should be hearing from nature quite soon. I just hope not to be here when she tells us. But the Club of Rome pointed this out 50 odd years ago. If anyone is interested in learning more about that see:
I speak of the path taken in an airily way. Our predicament has been explained extensively by others much smarter than myself so I won't bother recapping it here.
The path humanity has taken, all of us, some with more power than others, is just a single timeline. Choices made today have effects tomorrow and the next day and 50 years from now as well.
It is easy to imagine many paths that lead to humanities destruction much quicker (nuclear war for example which almost happened many times).
It is harder I think to imagine all the paths that humanity could have chosen that would be more forgiving. For example, are their choices made 50 years ago that would have delayed hitting 1.5C until the year 2100 instead of 2024? I think yes.
Yeah, exactly, it's all far too complicated for people to understand, and it's not at all because people are fed 24/7 propaganda by economic interests and they deliberately absorb it because they don't give a damn about other people's problems.
You can't imagine what it's like when cities with millions of inhabitants become uninhabitable? Look at Ukraine.
You can't imagine how they deal with millions of refugees?
As if the West ever gave a damn about the suffering and hunger in the world, it's that complicated.
Yeah, no shit, dude. If you shut down the energy supply overnight, people won't have a clue how to replace it. Even renewables require so many raw materials that the whole world can never be saved like in some fantasy utopia. Who would have thought that, dude?
For example, you could tear out the entire grid and rebuild it. It wouldn't be fucking impossible. The thing is, it costs a ton of shit. So why would you do that? Because some old fart with magical thinking makes all natural gas extremely expensive? Holy shit.
"Can you imagine, for example, what it would be like for a western city of even a million people to become uninhabitable, either permanently or for a few months"
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is a partial example. The city of New Orleans flooded except for the sliver higher grounds along the Mississippi River when the original settlement began. The other 80% was inundated. It took 5 years to mostly restore the city. Adjacent Jefferson Parish, which included the airport, had minimal flooding but was mostly uninhabitable for months.
The dystopian scenes in the days following of the Super Dome and Convention Center are no longer news, but not forgotten by sensible individuals. Government pretends everything is OK, in spite of repeated abysmal responses, most recently Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Florida and North Carolina.
Kagan likened the West to a garden which Borrel picked up on in an earthly delights sort of a way, as opposed to the other which lurked in the dark threatening jungle, which increasingly refused to give up the resources that in particular Europe has looted to sustain itself for roughly 500 years while bleeding itself dry through bad management, short term policies, disastrously expensive wars & insatiable greed.
We will now pay a high price for not nurturing the garden which through degradation becomes increasingly barren while lacking the means & the know how needed to revitalise it. The party is over & we should expect the killer of a hangover - as Leonard put it " Here it is ".
"Some things are actually impossible to visualise: our own death is the classic example. But some things are just bigger and more complex than our brains are capable of processing, and the likely progressive disintegration of the world system is one of them”.
An American professor friend attending a health conference in Beijing met the Chinese health minister and, at the behest of a fellow academic of Chinese extraction, the whereabouts of an imprisoned academic.
"I don't think you understand what I do here", replied the Minister. "My first task is to see that 4 billion meals get served every day without anyone being sickened or killed by tainted ingredients. My second is to clean up the shit that follows. After that, I attend to urgent issues”.
The reason the flu season was bad is because the mRNA vaccines have destroyed our immune system. We have all become spike protein factories. Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems.
The vast majority of us are deficient. Many are critically deficient.
Kind of ironic that an article focused on magical thinking engages in its own form of magical thinking. Correlation is not causation. You had a bad flu season, but to assume lack of vaccination was the cause is just an assumption. Besides which, if not fully sterilizing, vaccination will drive viral variations, so apart from the problem of choosing the strain we're vaccinating against, we may be making matters worse by driving variation of the very thing we're trying to prevent. Not a winning strategy, except for the makers of vaccines.
"Our governments should be telling us to take vitamin D supplements to support our immune systems."
Exactly. Zinc also, which most people are deficient in. Not once however, in the entire covid fiasco did I hear any govt. agency or health institute make that recommendation. They also lied to us about the effectiveness of repurposed drugs and went as far as to threaten the doctors and scientists recommending that approach, even though the 'vaccines' were still a year away. Two of those recommended drugs are so safe that there was no justification at all for not trying them, even if they didn't help much, since there was nothing else available at the time, and repurposing drugs is (or was) the standard approach to dealing with a novel pathogen.
Given all the lies we were told by nearly every party to the covid fiasco, why should we ever trust them again?
Through the whole covid fiasco I was helped immensely by several doctors I found on youtube. Dr John Campbell was an avid proponent of the mRNA vaccine, until he started to see the data on vaccine injuries and excess deaths. His videos with professors of oncology and immunology are extremely troubling. The Doctor at meregenomics has discussed the intricacies of frameshifting and refocusing of igg4 antibodies, as well as the origins of turbo cancers in many videos.Chris Martenson of Peak Prosperity pointed out back in 2020 that the furin cleveage site was a clear indication that the covid virus was man made. I also subscribed to Pierre Kory, the author of The War on Ivermectin. Dr Campbell has many videos on ivermectin and fenbendazole. Not only do these antiparasitic drugs have strong anti viral properties,
they are also showing extraordinary promise against many cancers. Check out his videos on fenben and ivermectin.
The only silver lining to covid for me is that, thanks to these brave doctors, who were often heavily censored, I discovered the importance of vitamin D and other supplements. I have been taking zinc with quercetin, nattokinase, NAC, melatonin
and bromelain as well as 12,000 ui of vitamin D.
Once or twice a week I take ivermectin. Since early 2020 I have not been sick for one single day. I was on a boat in Antarctica when almost all the passengers and crew came down with covid, but I had no symptoms.
Since I travel a lot, I was forced to get three mRNA jabs. Unlike many people I
admit that this was a huge error on my part.
For those who do not believe that the virus causes harm, I show them the data on ourwordindata excess mortality, and they are shocked.
Since early 2022, when the pandemic was effectively over, countries in Eastern Europe
where the average vaccine per person was just above 1, excess deaths are barely above zero.
In the USA, where the vaccine rate is about 2.4 per person, the excess deaths are around 9%.
In Western Europe, Canada , Australia and New Zealand, where the vaccine rates are
around 2.7 per person, the excess mortality is around 15%.
In the most highly vaccinated countries of Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Chile
where the average vaccine rate is over 3 per person, the excess mortality is running well over 20 %. This is unheard of outside of times of war.
Unfortunately there no signs that excess mortality is coming down.
One other person to follow is Dr Kevin Mckernan. He was the head of the human genome project at MIT. He is finding extraordinarily high levels of DNA fragments in the Pfizer vaccine, along with the promoter SV 40 which is known to promote cancer. My advice is to get on the supplements I mentioned, and stay on them.
They also appear to attack the spike protein in people with long covid.
In Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand
Interesting and a good reminder of the 60s 70s and beyond .Talking of gas and how high the prices are in europe there is a very very simple answer , simple if the comfort and safety of millions of people is your priority and it is to simply repair the gas pipeline from Russia NORD2 and resume the purchase of cheap gas from Russia.Of course that would involve our leaders caring about us and ahowing they do by telling Trump he can keep his expensive shale gas it would also involve our leaders telling Zelenski that Ukraine was better off before it threatened Russia,s safety as it undoubtedly would have done if Ukraine joined NATO.
NATO is finished so lets discard that nonsense.
Repair the gas pipe repair relations with Russia buy their gas and use the money saved on rebuilding Ukraine.
Sure, but magic thinking on the part of government involves having a sincere faith in the power of magic, so actual effective planning such as you describe is superfluous.
Why the absolutely impossible to ignore truths you have described here has been ignored is one of the great mysteries of our time. Wiser minds than mine have written about this wisdom-deficit since before I was born, and I'm 76. Even in my pre-teens, I saw something of this and gravitated to thinkers who did also. As it is, I think of myself in this life as one of the "martyroi" or "witnesses." Forced to watch a horrific catastrophe unfold stage-by-stage and powerless to alter it in any way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Best I can do, I'm afraid. Kudos to you for outlining these truths so powerfully.
I feel very similarly to you. I am 80, and what I have witnessed unfolding has been simply dumbfounding.
I am 88 and I agree in full with eachn of you.
Me too - same generation. Is it a condition?
It is generational. We have watched it happen. I fancied myself an existentialist in the 1950s when it was all the rage. It has been at least in the back of my mind since. Aurelien wrote two essays about it, A Philosophy for Really Hard Times and I am persuaded he has something. All this is preamble to two points. We have watched the decline of leadership and competence since we were kids. FDR, Churchill, De Gaulle, Stalin were competent leaders surrounded by people who actually knew how to do things. Engineers, electrical, mechanical, or chemical, were leaders in their fields and leaders of industry. Working men had a variety of skills and a well of ingenuity. If something broke down, they fixed it and only if it was beyond their "fix" did they call for help. To where did that attitude disappear? I think it left for China with the Western industrial base to be replaced by "computer jockeys" who know how to ride that "horse"only as long as it stays on the track they habitually follow. That is unfair to all those who wrote the programs and provide tech support, but you take my meaning. Financial "engineering" and a financialized economy is no substitute for the real thing. We had our "birthright" whisked out from under us by flimflam artists and robber barons redux.
I jumped the gun and posted before stating my point about existentialism. Camus was asked what does one do when faced with an absurd world.If this world is not absurd, it is chock full of absurdities. What is one to do? Camus's answer, continue, just go on without hope and without despair. Or, to paraphrase, keep shoveling and do not expect to a pony in that pile of horse manure
And me. The generation of politicians who served in WWII were forced to be competent, or die. They had a fully rounded picture of the world. Since then, the Neo-Liberals have taken over, destroyed the education system and privatised the economy into the hands of similar value-free and competence-free legalised and sanctimonious criminals.
You have touched on existential threats that most of us either outside of any power structure or simply a servant to them will have become familiar with emotionally grappling with as our ruling class have become deluded by the opiate of wealth. As necessity is the mother of invention it is only once enough of the world’s human populations inevitably permanently lose their second gilded age creature comforts that any cultural recreation will be seeded. Until then it is our lot to endure this shrinking of human imaginations and the degradation of place.
The dominative narrative, as pointed out includes, along with its associated trappings, renaming short-sighted to short-term, and then rushing off, the rest of the world in tow, with not the slightest idea of where/what a finish line even is.
Perhaps, I too am falling for the seductive, short-term, 'do something' syndrome so well described in this article, but I do have a belief that the answers to such problems, we are currently facing, due to their size and complexity, are not solvable by any one person, or even by individual organizations, but rather through extensive and deep organizing among and between them.
Helpful nswers can come from anyone, and many ones. Being connected, vocal, strategizing while seeking effective tactics, and yes, acting, are all important in counteracting the dominant narrative. How do we do that organizing?
My reading of the archeological record and history is that the only organizational structure capable of achieving what you propose has been religion. I don't see much appetite for that sort of thing just now, but a calamity big enough might see a resurgence of interest. Christianity is a desert weed, after all ...
Unfortunately, Christianity is among the most intellectually and logically unsatisfactory religions (along with Islam and Judaism). Far better would be one of the Indian or Chinese religions. Even Wicca would be better - at least you might get naked dancing round a campfire! 😳
The succes of a religion is not intellectual or logical. It is the capacity of put together diferents behaviors of society through symbolism. In this case, most of religions (if not all) tend to orient their symbols to the future and create a conformist and dogmatic basic that is capable ob keep social cohesion. Moral acts in a similar way (nationalism, for exemple, that gives to the elites a future goal and a direction). I am atheist, and the idea of God is contradictorial and easily deniable; it is false its existence. However, I appreciate the multiple functions of religions in different spheres (social and individual).
If your 'idea of god' is contradictory and easily deniable, then you have not considered the question in sufficient detail. Of course the idea of a 'father in the sky' whose main desire is to be worshipped, is a ludicrous - even insane idea. But there is much more to the idea than that. I don't personally believe in 'god', but he/she/it is not so easily dismissed.
I mean this: omnipotence, the problem of unnecessary evil and the goodness of God, the problem of the creation of God (if he creates, ¿who create it him?), the studies in atropology that shows that religions evolve from a zoomorfism, to antropomorfism until more abstract ways of conceiving Gods and so on... It is a contradictorily idea, at least in the usual forms of Theology.
It is not a naïve deniable of God. It is base on philosophy and works from other people that I've heard or read.
Heaven forbid!
Any such altruistic endeavour, and agreed, solutions to our complex societal crises can only ever be found through a complex of different voices, and only be initiated once those mature enough to be confident that they are able to think through complex patterns, find each other. Such a group would be able to jettison any of the vast tribe of hot little monkeys on the make who mimic competency.
As this is an organic process its emergence will be unpredictable.
My view is that you resort to magical thinking when real reforms involve subverting your "state ideology," a set of beliefs that holds your society and the legitimacy of the government together. This is not necessarily an Anglo Saxon thing: there are several tons of history that addresses why China failed to modernize in mid to late 19th century as Japan did--and the magical thinking plays a huge part in that story. Their idea was that Western power depended only on the "tactics" and techniques, which could be bought and paid for, but the ultimate goal was to not change anything about the China that was. So millions upon millions went to buying Western arms and ships and hiring alleged Western experts, but with a wilful and deliberate ignorance about how these fit into (non existent) Chinese vision of where it stood in the world--you can't have a vision if your goal is that you don't want to be part of the world that you didn't like, where you are not the center of the universe. Ultimately, the whole thing came to the spectacle where discontented and unhappy masses recruited to cause trouble on promise of literal magic, the so-called Boxers who were told that a combination of Taoist mysticism and Chinese martial arts could somehow neutralize Western technology, because every reform attempt that didn't subvert the state ideology failed. While in a different form, we can almost see the outline of the Western Boxers being mobilized by Empress Dowager Trump on the promise of Capitalist mysticism and Anglo Saxon enterpreneurship that could somehow neutralize the Easterners.
The funny thing, of course, is that, back in old China, too, the politics were cast in a false dualism: the obscurantists rallying to the Boxers vs enlightened and rational "Westernizers." The truth was, of course, different: the real alternative to the Boxers that could actually appeal to the Chinese were various nationalist reformers, most of whom definitely were not exactly "friends of the West," even if they didn't reject Western ideas out of hand, ranging from Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai Shek to Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But it took a whole century for them to sort things out (and the process is still ongoing, in fact.) Things will stay in flux for a long time in the West as well and I don't relish the thought.
Very good. I give you a complement: ¿why these ideas opposed to the ones sustained by the State are attacked or denied?
Because these ideas, usually (not always) ara defended by other groups of population that could threat the hegemony of ruling elites (or economical, or cultural elites). I don't know about China, but you can see (repite: I don't know, this is based on a couple of readings) how they attacked the "western ideas" that were sustained, or could be used, by economical elites that could threatened the ruling class. Today, it happen the same: the ideas could threat the position of economical and ruling elites in Western countries.
This one was powerful. It does deserve 3 coffees, or I feel it does.
Please post it on all subreditts dedicated to public servants. I say it as a public servant myself.
Working on issues related with climate change impact on public health, I refused to deal with food security, knowing beforehand that health has no available information, nor agriculture, and that most/all of food production, processing, transport, distribution is in private hands, so I was in no mood to go on wild geese chases. Rumors of the first working group meeting in the undisclosed area fully confirmed my gut feeling and kind of fell under the umbrella of this essay. Scarry as hell.
Humans survive hundreds of thousands of years in egalitarian bands, generally staying within limits. We put rulers in charge and it's just been ten thousand years of overgrowth, misery, slavery, and collapse. I'm starting to think that maybe we're better off running our own lives without rulers.
1. The West in general and the US in particular has been able to half-ass planning because it has been able to rely upon brute force, and to hell with the consequences, those are for the little people to deal with.
2. "Consider, for example, the contrast between the US construction of an international alliance for Gulf War 1,0 and the political shambles of its successor. Whatever you think of the earlier episode, it was skilfully and professionally carried out, and had a simple strategic objective: the creation of a wide international coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. By contrast, the second episode was pure magical thinking, whereby an invasion would “create the conditions” for a peaceful, democratic pro-American state."
Simply turning Iraq into a failed state was seen as a win, but this could not be said out loud.
3. "Or consider the difference between the shambles of Brexit and the management on the British side of the 1991 European Union negotiations. Whatever you think of British objectives in 1991, they were largely achieved, because the government machine, though weakened, was still capable of acting effectively and turning political aspirations into specific activities. By 2016-19 that machine had largely been destroyed, and even had it not been, the capability for strategic thought had pretty much disappeared from the higher reaches of government. Boris Johnson seemed to think that he could just wave a magic wand and the problem would be resolved."
The UK simply outsourced its military to the United States, following its American Master around like the little yappy dog that follows Spike The Bulldog in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Anyway, I have read the theory that the real reason Johnson got cracking with Brexit was to preserve the Five Eyes relationship between MI 6 and the US. FULL DISCLOSURE: I have no idea and express no opinion whether or to what extent there is any truth in this.
You argue that the collapse of the West is the result of a lack of strategic thinking attributable to growing infantilism of politicians, and so, broadly speaking, to stupidity, rather than malice.
But there IS strategic thinking underlying the dystopia, and long-term planning IS taking place. The point is, this is /malignant/ planning, engineering the collapse. For an instance relating to the food crisis you are observing, read: https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/global-war-on-farming These policies are not haphazard at all, and not short-term-profit driven. Depopulation by starvation seems to be the deliberate goal. A similar case might be made for many other policies; read for instance: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/09/investigative-reports/sustainable-debt-slavery/
As for the politicians being stupid, this is again not a chance outcome, but an engineered negative selection. The qualities sought are, first, a lack of conscience; second, susceptibility to kompromat, which is usually deliberately induced ( https://annas-archive.org/md5/5967a5e571548cf8dec233a6e7d1c1f3 ); and third, incompetence, especially with regard to one's area of decision-making. It is that last aspect that you are observing. The negative selection is no longer done unofficially within political organizations, but through global cadre organizations such as the YGL: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2022/08/investigative-reports/the-kissinger-continuum-the-unauthorized-history-of-the-wefs-young-global-leaders-program/
Why are the stooges, counterintuitively, required to be incompetent? Firstly, so that they do not realize the long-term consequences of the decisions they are prompted to make; but more importantly so that, afraid of exposing their ignorance, they rely for all their decisions on the guidance and instruction of shadow advisors. This was evident in the Covid crisis, where any change of course came slowly and haphazardly, with some "decisionmakers" still following yesterday's slogans until their handlers got around to redirecting them; and the media got fed the new "line" last of all, and so lagged behind changes of policy.
For an incisive diagnosis of the mental disorder affecting today's political stooges, read this brilliant article by a psychologist: https://gaiusbaltar.substack.com/p/what-is-wrong-with-the-western-political
I am trying to fight the feeling that it is only my advancing age that makes me embrace this spiel - but it's more than that. I worked in Local Government and ran redevelopment schemes and we achieved things but they took time, organisation and skill. Local Government has been hollowed out now. And there seems to be little practical training remaining. How I envy the Chinese. If I was young again that's where I'd want to be. I am sick to death of our erstaz democracy - fetishised as a thing in itself. We need stability strategic planning and skill - and it has gone. In the past it was achieved only by the mainstream parties all basically agreeing with each other but that has been shattered by the reality of living in a word of 'financialisation' which is about to collapse. I saw it coming a couple of decades ago and retired to the hills. I am kept alive only by curiosity as to how things will turn out.
The West’s almost-complete lack of strategic thinking and planning capacity applies to the whole of the ecological crisis, including the climate crisis
Wendell Berry stated the following 48 years ago: "We must... be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason. We must be prepared to say that enough food, year after year, is possible for a limited number of people, and that this possibility can be preserved only by the steadfast, knowledgeable care of those people."
The entire chapter from The Unsettling Of America is eye opening and what he was alluding to in these paragraphs was sacrificing the world in the name of profits would kill us all.
Too bad humanity took a different path in the 70s.
Did he have any suggestion about how to go about culling the world's population to get to that limited number of "enough"? That is a very chilling concept, from what you have shared.
No, he simply states the path the Department of Agriculture was taking at the time would lead to our destruction and repeats in his own words all the other arguments ecologists have been making about our predicament.
There are a multitude of methods that could be applied past, present, and future to cull the population. They are abstinence, contraception, choosing smaller family sizes (example: 1 child policy of China), stopping immigration (doesn't apply to the world), disease, war, murder, violence, famine, accidents, pollution.
13.5% or 47.4 million Americans already experience food insecurity so seems to me our current predicament might be "resolved" through famine.
Will it be any more or less 'chilling' when nature itself enforces the consequences?
Sacrificing everything for short term profit. That is exactly what has happened since Nixon took the US off the gold standard. Fiat currencies based on debt, and the Chicago school of economists.
The West as a whole imitates the US which has hollowed out its economy following the quick buck for its elite. Hudson sums up the irony of the US attacking China because it has followed exactly the same method as the US used to develop it's strength in the 19th and early 20th centuries before it became obsessed by militarism to support the dollar.
Financialisation has killed the West and the only 'strategy' it has left is to try to take the RoW down with it so as to prolong it's own dying years.
Everything described in this essay is as a consequence of following this path.
Spot on. The explosion can't be far away. The most magical thinking of all is simply thinking that you can expand the debt year by year without any impact believing that the rest of the world will keep funding and feeding you. And why bother the hard and complicated task of making things when you can invest in financial 'assets'? Trump is a moron but like any street thief he knows when the gigs up. It is a crime that Government ALLOWS such things to happen. But Aurelien is right: this comes out of believing that everything will be alright if you just leave it alone. Small state, short termism, no strategic vision, no inheritance of skills......
The debt itself doesn't "mean" anything -- it's scribblings on a spreadsheet which, by accounting identity net to zero. What matters are real resources (including labour) and the laws: everything else is downstream from these.
"Too bad humanity took a different path in the 70s." Who is humanity? What alternatives were available to him? Or her, or it? Is it possible to get in touch with the mind of humanity and ask why he, she, or it chose this path?
I've heard of reindeer being introduced to St. Paul's Island. They had no predators, so their population exploded. The result was that their food was eaten up and that forced them to die back. Did the reindeer collective choose the wrong path?
That's natures way of telling you that you made a mistake. Unfortunately she only tells you after you have made it. As Aurelian points out we made it quite a few decades ago, and we should be hearing from nature quite soon. I just hope not to be here when she tells us. But the Club of Rome pointed this out 50 odd years ago. If anyone is interested in learning more about that see:
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/2025-a-civilizational-tipping-point
PS Sorry if this becomes a double post - there was some kind of glitch on the page.
I speak of the path taken in an airily way. Our predicament has been explained extensively by others much smarter than myself so I won't bother recapping it here.
The path humanity has taken, all of us, some with more power than others, is just a single timeline. Choices made today have effects tomorrow and the next day and 50 years from now as well.
It is easy to imagine many paths that lead to humanities destruction much quicker (nuclear war for example which almost happened many times).
It is harder I think to imagine all the paths that humanity could have chosen that would be more forgiving. For example, are their choices made 50 years ago that would have delayed hitting 1.5C until the year 2100 instead of 2024? I think yes.
The answer is indeed 'yes' - see link in my post above.
1.339 / 5.000
What a waste of time, old man.
Yeah, exactly, it's all far too complicated for people to understand, and it's not at all because people are fed 24/7 propaganda by economic interests and they deliberately absorb it because they don't give a damn about other people's problems.
You can't imagine what it's like when cities with millions of inhabitants become uninhabitable? Look at Ukraine.
You can't imagine how they deal with millions of refugees?
Look at Jordan with their refugee camps cross-financed by Europe or the Greeks https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/fortress-greece
As if the West ever gave a damn about the suffering and hunger in the world, it's that complicated.
Yeah, no shit, dude. If you shut down the energy supply overnight, people won't have a clue how to replace it. Even renewables require so many raw materials that the whole world can never be saved like in some fantasy utopia. Who would have thought that, dude?
For example, you could tear out the entire grid and rebuild it. It wouldn't be fucking impossible. The thing is, it costs a ton of shit. So why would you do that? Because some old fart with magical thinking makes all natural gas extremely expensive? Holy shit.
"Can you imagine, for example, what it would be like for a western city of even a million people to become uninhabitable, either permanently or for a few months"
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is a partial example. The city of New Orleans flooded except for the sliver higher grounds along the Mississippi River when the original settlement began. The other 80% was inundated. It took 5 years to mostly restore the city. Adjacent Jefferson Parish, which included the airport, had minimal flooding but was mostly uninhabitable for months.
The dystopian scenes in the days following of the Super Dome and Convention Center are no longer news, but not forgotten by sensible individuals. Government pretends everything is OK, in spite of repeated abysmal responses, most recently Hurricane Helene in 2024 in Florida and North Carolina.
Kagan likened the West to a garden which Borrel picked up on in an earthly delights sort of a way, as opposed to the other which lurked in the dark threatening jungle, which increasingly refused to give up the resources that in particular Europe has looted to sustain itself for roughly 500 years while bleeding itself dry through bad management, short term policies, disastrously expensive wars & insatiable greed.
We will now pay a high price for not nurturing the garden which through degradation becomes increasingly barren while lacking the means & the know how needed to revitalise it. The party is over & we should expect the killer of a hangover - as Leonard put it " Here it is ".
https://cdn.thecollector.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/bosch-garden-of-earthly-delights-featured-2.jpg