'I think we are about to experience the Crunch Event that has worried me for some time: a head-on collision between really serious economic and social problems and the ever-diminishing capability of governments to deal with them.'
As someone who worked in Government at the interface between operations and strategy I fully agree with this. I came to the conclusion that some kind of collapse was increasingly likely. Urban areas will be the most unstable of places - so I got out.
Conflict will be chaotic and MAY chrystalise into some form of 'political' coherence - but I doubt it. The most vulnerable of people are those that can't do 'practical' things for themselves (or have the capacity or resources to do such things as grow food with the planning and lead times that takes) and those who are 'victims' and have dropped below the survival safety line (the really - and increasing - poor).
I did do a number of community survival plans but people saw these things as a 'hobby' rather than necessary for survival. Perhaps a crisis will force people to work together.
The thing about Iran is that it has highlighted (for those that didn't know) the critical reliance on oil in energy generation which has stimulated the rogue USA to try and dominate the worlds energy markets as a way of maintaining global dominance. It is not neceassry to have a conscious plan to embark on this approach. To people like Trump it seems obvious because in the moment it is. And that's the point - its a teleology inflicted on us by practical reality at this historic juncture. We have a world where we need energy to survive in a form we never did before.
In China they thought about this decades ago and are planning for it. We in Britain acknowledged it - but then 'events' (and the hollowing out of Government) have thrown us off course and the thing that strikes me at this very moment is the absence and consequent irony of any real discussion about how we could strive for energy security and retreat from oil. Instead people reach for the Holy Grail - some miracle like fusion that will solve all our problems. It might - but not in the time scales we need to understand.
Today I am thinking of inventing a 'winter onesy' that can keep me warm in dark nights from October to March. The woodburner is great - but you need a lot of wood to fuel it. I live in an area where there is a lot of it BUT chopping it down and sawing it up and seasoning it takes energy and planning....and if everybody did it there wouldn't be any wood left. I think that the future could very well be shit....but then, I don't read Aurelien just to cheer me up.
I empathize with your angst. Over the years I’ve made a kind of peace with the Rocky Horror of it all by finding like-minded thinkers on the Internet, some of whom are actually worthwhile. Jem Bendell’s position paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy is where I started back in 2018. Made a reasonably happy doomster out of me.
"if your theory that Covid was a hoax is true, how do you think the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria managed to coordinate their actions and their propaganda so well, along with a hundred and fifty other countries"
What the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria did during so called Covid has ZERO relevance to whether the whole thing was a hoax (sic), where we'd have to define what hoax means.
What certainly WAS a hoax, was the allegation there there was a pandemic of a viral disease. That's bullshit par excellence, and instead of the above question, one might ask themselves whether "a pandemic of a deadly disease that is mostly asymptomatic, nobody knows they're having it, and they have to get tested using a fraudulent procedure to find out (while the allegedly disease has all the symptoms of the common cold)" makes any sense.
Yes, exactly. They died from the "hoax". People died from hysteria that was whipped up, they died from the idiotic countermeasures, they died from the even more idiotic medical protocols, they died from psychosomatic response to all that. Many people died from the experimental shots too.
They sure as hell did not die from an alleged novel virus.
The evidence of the aforestated is damning and most comprehensive.
Precisely. You BELIEVED, and still do, in a pandemic of a deadly disease and all your thinking revolves therearound. Hence, you ignore not only common sense that, if you had any, would tell you that if there were no attendants picking up dead bodies from the streets and carting them off to the nearest makeshift morgue, and the 'pandemic' is nothing but doctored statistics, but also scientific evidence that disproves all of the allegations of a pandemic, there was no pandemic.
You've made up your mind and decided to BELIEVE the official narrative, chiefly because if was delivered via a vector that's highly trusted, perhaps the most trusted entity in society - the man in the white coat, the doctor, the medical profession.
Cognitive dissonance prevents you from even considering research done by the likes of Denis Rancourt, which not only clearly refutes all of the convid horseshit, but also shows that the excess deaths that occurred were cause by government malfeasance, whether directly, through idiotic medical protocols, or secondarily, though depriving aged people of contact with others and other similar phenomena.
Indeed, belief is a strong force liable to have a severe psychosomatic response that can kill a person. Check out the German New Medicine, which classifies, in a scientific fashion, the impact various psychological states have on health.
Yes - and you 'believed' something different. Something which would have to involve the collusion in an insane conspiracy of literally hundreds of thousands of health professionals at every level.
The conclusion we have to draw from what you say is that if you 'believe' something, it is valid, but if other people 'believe' something different it's an obvious lie.
You need to get your head sorted out - if it's not too late.
(What you say about 'belief' being a factor in some deaths is true, for a minority of suggestible people, but not on the scale you postulate, which indicates to me a degree of both gullibility and insanity).
Absolutely NOT. I don't 'believe' (sic) anything. I rely on empirical observations and hard facts and data, all of which clearly demonstrate that all the alleged claims of an alleged pandemic were a giant crock of shit. If you don't believe your own eyes and your own experience (which clearly showed that nothing extraordinary was happening, other than media-whipped hysteria), you could check such sources as euromomo, eurostat, and other statistical sources elsewhere. They were all showing that nothing extraordinary was taking place. That's AT THE TIME CONVID WAS HAPPENING. The evidence today is overwhelming. You only refuse to acknowledge any of it because you don't want to admit that you've been had (severe cognitive dissonance).
No insance conspiracy was taking place among hundreds of thousands of health professionals at every level (sic). The collusion with the convid crap on the part of health professionals is easily explicable - the medical profession is extremely regulated, where everybody must adhere to lege artis protocols passed in top-down manner. Whoever would diverge from protocols imposed by top-level authorities can be prosecuted for malfeasance or worse, especially if something goes wrong. Most health professionals will not dare, but there were quite a few who called out the utter crap; you were probably too busy triple masking and injecting yourself to notice.
Don't tell me that I need to get my head sorted out. You're thoroughly fucked up covidiot who hasn't allowed his effed up self to examine HARD FACTS to realize how people have been scammed. You got no leg to stand on!
In my previous post, I provided you with a link to SCIENTIFIC ANALYSES AND SCIENTIFIC DATA regarding all of the aforesaid. There are tons of other sources that say pretty much the same thing. Acquaint yourself therewith and stop yapping about belief this, belief that, and belief the other fucking thing. If you can disprove any of the HARD FACTS, I'm all ears. Otherwise, it's time for you covidiots to shut up.
Respectfully: whether or not it was a hoax is irrelevant to the points made by the OP. Without prejudice as to whether you're right, essentially the nature of Covid is a side issue.
As I mentioned in my post, the author makes very good points, but ... Can a person who has such a malinformed view of one aspect of reality be trusted with their assessment of another issue?
Thanks. As a general point, this kind of issue, which you express very well, is one with which I too struggle!
My *own* solution is to be relaxed about making "all or nothing" judgements, while remaining critical. After all, we ourselves can always change our minds. Conversely, we can always hope others can change theirs - just as my own is repeatedly changed by interaction with others expressing arguments or perspectives (or experiences) I hadn't previously encountered or imagined. :)
Plus, taken to its logical extreme applied to all topics, I don't want to end up in a permanent minority of one versus the rest of the world! ;)
The above article is highly interesting, the points well argued, the text coherent within itself. It's just that the reference to convid rang a warning bell somewhere in the back of my head.
This is the sort of derangement which led the members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists in the Boxer Rebellion to believe that through specific spiritual rituals and martial arts training, they could achieve supernatural immunity to bullets and cannons.
Thanks Paul, I was thinking much the same thing, and wondering if the author took the vaxx. Rather than attempt to wring significance out of such peripheral countries as Nicaragua, where a few WHO-greased palms could spawn a propaganda campaign, look at China, Russia, and Iran. They did not adopt (let alone mandate) the mRNA vaxx. You think that they're scientifically illiterate?
COVID was a hoax par excellance, the biggest scam in history. It was obvious some two weeks into the alleged pandemic, but I can see that it might have taken longer for some people to realize they're being had. Understandable, it came from the left field through a very cleverly selected vector - the medical profession, the DOCTOR, perhaps the most trusted entity in society. Anyway, there is so much analysis out there today, such a body of scientific research clearly refuting all of the shite that was being peddled back then, that it's hard to believe that anyone would take the plandemic seriously anymore. It was so patently absurd and batshit crazy.
Now, the point is - can a person who hasn't been able to see though such an obvious crock of shit be trusted in their assessment of other issues, eh? Not sure ...
Did you know what they did in Mexico City for Swine Flu in 2009? In the West the whole operation was trial run in 2009 but they stopped just short of full on pandemic measures...with the exception of Mexico city. They went all the way there. AI doesn't bring it up but masking was strongly encouraged. I don't think they were arresting people for not masking. Wolfgang Wodarg was in the German parliament at the time and called the whole thing out. He got some investigations going but it went nowhere. He was the first person I went looking for in March 2020. He is still alive and was immediately speaking out agasinst it.
AI summary..
"Mexico City implemented strict lockdown measures in April 2009 during the swine flu (H1N1) outbreak to curb the virus's spread. The government suspended dine-in services at restaurants, closed schools, entertainment venues, and non-essential businesses, and discouraged large gatherings. Public places like museums, theaters, and churches were shut down, and professional sports events were held without spectators"
I think you have badly misunderstood McGilchrist if you believe the current detachment from reality of many leaders is a "right-brained" phenomenon or that the right hemisphere requires a "reality check" from the left to "get anything done." In fact I wonder if you have read him at all; if you had, it would be clear to you that evidence has shown the right hemisphere is quite capable of acting positively in accordance with reality in the absence of input from the left, but the reverse is simply not true.
I agree with you. Aurelien's description is nearly 90 degrees from McGilchrist's theory. The weaknesses he attributes to the right brain - the tendency to take the map for the territory, to expect reality to conform with one's symbolic representation - is on the contrary a symptom of left brain dominance.
McGilchrist says that the fundamental difference is attention. The left and the right hemisphere attend to the world in different ways. The right brain attends to the world through presence. It deals directly with experience. Imagine lying in the grass in the warm light of the setting sun. Your thoughts are not words, only presence and a feeling of wholeness, the boundary between yourself and the world dissolved. This is your right brain.
A rainbow appears. At first you smile at the colour, then you start to count and name the bands. Red, orange, yellow... are there really seven? Now you are in your left brain. Where before you experienced the presence of the world, now you represent it with colours, numbers and concepts.
The left brain never deals directly with experience, only with representations, abstractions, symbols, words. For the right brain the world is primarily a whole, and every part is related to every other. For the left there exist only discreet objects. For the right brain the world is animate and alive. For the left brain there is no life, only things to be manipulated.
The left hemisphere's ability to manipulate abstractions is incredibly powerful. It is rational - but not reasonable. It has no sense of the whole into which the pieces fit. In his book McGilchrist shows a drawing of a bicycle by a patient with right brain damage. It shows only three circles connected by lines - the wheels, perhaps, and the gear, but it is hard to say because they are all the same size and the relationships are not clear. The left hemisphere seized on a few details, ignored the rest, and has no understanding of the whole.
In McGilchrist's account, patients with right brain damage are often devastatingly dysfunctional. Patients with left brain damage in contrast are relatively close to normal, albeit with weakness in certain areas. The proper relation of the left and right hemispheres is not integration and equality, but right dominance with delegation to the left for specific domains where it is more powerful. The right is anchored in reality (or experience, as close as one can get) and sees the big picture: the left knows only how. The danger is that the right is capable of understanding the uses of the left: but the left, so focused, so narrow, so blinkered, has no comprehension for the right. To the left, the right is irrational, a hindrance to its monomaniacal manipulations.
The Master and His Emissary is a brilliant book. The most interesting parts are in the latter half where McGilchrist explores right vs left brain thinking in poetry, music, art, politics and elsewhere. To me, the left hemisphere, with its view of the world as flat dead representations to be manipulated, is captured best by a painting Turin Spring by Giorgio De Chirico. The fascist mind in a single image.
"If the left-brain running by itself is inadequate, the same is even more true of the right brain operating alone, without the reality check its partner should be providing. Actually researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal—these are left brain activities, and they require organisation, thought and application. That is why, I think, we have seen so many wild, even ludicrous, statements about the wars of the last few years by politicians and pundits. These people are prisoners of right-brain thinking, utterly divorced from any mechanism for assessing reality."
It is the left hemisphere, not the right, that disregards reality. From The Master and His Emissary:
"In repeated situations, in subject after subject, when syllogisms with false premises, such as ‘All trees sink in water; balsa is a tree; balsa wood sinks in water’ . . . The right hemisphere dismisses the false premises and deductions as absurd. But the left hemisphere sticks to the false conclusion, replying calmly to the effect that ‘that's what it says here.’
"In the left-hemisphere situation, it prioritises the system, regardless of experience: it stays within the system of signs. Truth, for it, is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with. ‘That's what it says here.’ So it corresponds with itself: in other words, it coheres. The right hemisphere prioritises what it learns from experience: the real state of existing things ‘out there’. For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of being ‘true’ to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.
The activities that Aurelien proposes - "researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal" - are operations within an abstract rational system. This is why they are indeed likely to be biased towards the left hemisphere - and why they are likely to disregard evidence and diverge from reality.
The failings that Aurelien associates with right hemisphere bias are in fact tendencies of the left hemisphere. It is precisely the left's tendency towards abstraction and re-presentation that allows it to deny reality (denial, McGilchrist says, is a specialty of the left hemisphere).
Aurelien writes:
"the right brain draws no hard and fast distinctions between reality and imagination, or even dreams . . . the truth is what we want it to be, the truth is what makes us comfortable, we believe the myth rather than the reality, and anyway what’s the difference? . . . Such thinking cannot be challenged by facts, because it is not based on deduction from facts, but on their selection to support a mythological or symbolic narrative that appeals to the thinker."
In fact it is the left hemisphere, not the right, that insists on its own reality and resorts to denial and anger when it is contradicted. But what if our facts are selective approximations and our abstractions are imperfect? Then deduction may take us away from reality, not towards it. And it is the essential nature of facts and abstractions to be partial. We expect reality to adhere to our conceptions of reason and consistency. We are often disappointed. Even when our reasoning is air-tight, reality often fails to live up to our theories. It seems to me that this appeal to deduction and facts amounts to more left-brain thinking to overcome the dysfunctions of left-brain dominance.
Things have become much worse since Gallipoli. About a decade ago I attended a national juvenile justice conference focused on adolescent brain development and the science supports your intuition. Learning from lived experience has been supplanted by passive consumption of scripted pablum. The left-brain has atrophied and the dreamy right-brain has taken over. The effects of television-watching and gaming/social media on human brain development cannot be overstated. I suspect that Americans were quite vulnerable to believing that the scripted character that Mark Burnett created for “The Apprentice” was a real person.
We must also consider the effects of urbanization and global population growth. The human population has exploded from 2.5 billion to 8.25 billion since my birth in the mid-1950’s. Recent UN data tells us that the vast majority of people only survive because they live in urban (45%) or semi-urban (36%) settings. Fewer than 20% live in conditions described as “rural” by the UN. Urbanized populations are highly dependent on petrochemical infrastructure for their very survival and lack the left-brain skills to survive without it.
I was fortunate to attend one of those 1970’s “alternative” universities before eventually studying the law. I was effectively without access to television between the age of 18 and 25. During my government service spanning four decades people would often come to me for advice because I was oddly “left-brain dominant.” I took my pension at 60 and moved to the country where I supervised the construction of an energy efficient compound with a large greenhouse, extensive vegetable and herb beds, and a small orchard. We’re restricted from raising animals but I’ve befriended local farmers who provide us with meat, fish, and eggs. We still need electricity to pump our well and gasoline to gather supplies and mow, but we’re hopeful that the collapse won’t be total.
Gallipoli is just a microcosm of WW1 which demonstrates how the ruling class managed to kill off millions of human beings with the accompanying suffering of the survivors, and WW1 was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
‘The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown.’
Sums what we are all facing nicely.
As for looking to the disorganised criminals who have bought our state infrastructure like Trump, Gates, Ellison, Epstein’s associates or Bezos - why did any one in high government positions choose to believe these nude Kings who who so obviously coined their self-professed business and profit making abilities off of cheap money created by neoliberal’s financial deregulation and the hard work and oppression of others ? Fools blinded by greed.
‘Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked’
Al Capone ran effective food distribution operations during the depression, but not at the required scale. The pictures from that era of people lined up to get food were often of his operations.
Interesting historical detail. If the Trump Family or fellow Maxwell-Epstein global mobsters were interested in such social good they would not have cut food stamps, medicaid and women’s healthcare. Capone was from a very different background and age. Our criminal ruling class are far more Old Empire roués than poor kids made good, however much Fox News may spin and twist their stories otherwise.
Isn't it a really just a case of lies versus some semblance of truth. We live in a world swimming in lies. The Iran situation is submerged by lies which ebb and flow every time Trump or Netanyahu open their mouths. Never mind Rubio or Hegseth.
Today I read a piece by Ken Klippenstein who is a democrat leaning independent journalist posting on Substack. Normally he is anti-Trump and critical of the Iran mess. But today he produced something right out of the CIA narrative. Apparently all the Israeli bombing and more recently the US strikes have been designed to take out individuals associated with the security and civil control organisations in Iran and have been so successful that they are now down to the local area people and that the security forces have been forced to advertise posts for 12 year olds.
The comments from almost entirely US folk who must usually be sympathetic to Klipperstein's normal position were almost all full of relief that after all the US IS winning and all will be right with the world.
How the same people can justify this after previously condemning the killing of young girls and obviously bombing civilians because they can't reach the military underground is significant.
Klippenstein maybe believes what he has been fed by his 'sources', he says he has checked certain elements, maybe he knows they are lies and has been lent on to change his narrative.
No one will ever know because its not unusual, its totally normal in this post factual world we live in.
I don't know if its absolute bunkum, I suspect it is but I don't know and doubt anyone reading this does either.
Just a small example of why the sea of pervasive lies in which we swim mean we 'know' almost nothing about anything anymore.
Which is exactly where 'they' want us to be, I forget who said something along the lines regarding the CIA and the US public in the 1960s that they will know when their propaganda has worked when no-one will believe anything and simultaneously can be told to believe anything. Of course Eric Blair said the same sort of thing decades before.
We can all fall for some narratives even when we don't fall for others. One very common one in European journalists is to disbelieve all the anti-Iran narratives while believing all the anti-Russia narratives! As these military adventures become more and more closely linked, it's going to be amusing watching their tortuous reasoning and cognitive dissonance. Oddly, I find some of the best antidotes for the modern US narratives are declassified CIA documents and US Army documents (so long as the material is authored by field-grade officers, given that all flag/general officer promotions have always been politicized as mandated by law).
If you read all the comments and in particular KK's response to some you will see that the 'april fool' comment is not aimed at his article. He is serious in reporting what he has been fed and what he had been able to independently verify.
Something I wrote years ago, about western elites and their ineptitude in dealing with the physical world:
These people don't live in The Real World.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kittens this week and pay for cat litter and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself."
Yeah, I've seen it coming a long way off. So I have invested in a a vegetable garden, knowledge of herbal medicines and foraging in the wild. People ask me whether my vegetable patch won't be vulnerable in a food crisis. At first I worried about that, as well. But the people who will be affected first, and most, by any sort of food crisis: the urban poor, they do not know how to cook and they do not know what to do with raw vegetables. Sit them in a garden full of veg and they will starve. During the Holodomor in Ukrain the country was stripped bare of wild edible roots. Now, if a food crisis will emerge, those of us who know what to look for will have ample pickings. Many, many people will die from lack of instant food, and lack of knowledge of real food.
It is challenging just to determine what one can do on an individual basis let alone what can be done on a macro level requiring impossible organizational challenges. Just moving to a rural area is challenging to analyze for a city dweller weighing the advantages and disadvantages (like finances, job, friends and neighbors, costs of moving, access to medical care and taking care of sick loved ones, etc.)
Interesting as always, but isn't the left brain / right brain dichotomy now thought to be a huge over-simplification ? See e.g. https://tinyurl.com/349ux9vx
My thought exactly! Either way, the real story here is the (operational) disconnect between policy (with or without strategy!) and execution (tactics).
It's pretty obvious when you look at operational military doctrines that the Western approach has collapsed, compared to the eternally "intellectually disciplined" Russian (and now Iranian) approaches, but do you think the same applies to business and political operational methods? In other words, do you think Russia and China will cope better with the 21st century crisis operationally?
Well inevitable crunch is here. It only needed a catalyst, like a chemical reaction, to produce the excited state that then decays into the product. The product has been the subject of many science fiction stories ( naturally the SF thinkers figured this inevitability out long ago). Cities cannot survive as such, people will have to get out. Small communities are best. Low population density cheap resources and arable land. Anyway, I'm sure you have read the stories. But time for a Ministry of Food, again.
Maybe the question that should be asked isn't how to win the Iran war but if the US should?
Would the Middle East, the world and the US be better off by just saying "OK, we lost" and leaving than by fighting on, even if they could win, which they probably can't?
"Maybe the question that should be asked isn't how to win the Iran war but if the US should?"
No.
"Would the Middle East, the world and the US be better off by just saying "OK, we lost" and leaving than by fighting on, even if they could win, which they probably can't?"
'In his conception the left brain, which is concerned with precision and detail, should be the servant of the right brain, which deals in the “big picture” and is capable of setting objectives. He argues that the left-brain with its technocratic orientation has become increasingly and dangerously powerful in recent times. I would add that this increase in power is not necessarily experienced in the same way in all cultures, and that in the West it is very far advanced indeed. Why is this?'
In terms of fighting wars, here is a more granular exploration of that idea which reaches the opposite conclusion:
Notes on Military Education Approaches in Russia and the United States [i]
Yes, of course it is possible to use electricity from renewables to make nitrogen fertilizers. Plant-microbial symbionts do it, and it can be done technically. The problem is cost: https://doi.org/10.1039/d5gc06782k
'I think we are about to experience the Crunch Event that has worried me for some time: a head-on collision between really serious economic and social problems and the ever-diminishing capability of governments to deal with them.'
As someone who worked in Government at the interface between operations and strategy I fully agree with this. I came to the conclusion that some kind of collapse was increasingly likely. Urban areas will be the most unstable of places - so I got out.
Conflict will be chaotic and MAY chrystalise into some form of 'political' coherence - but I doubt it. The most vulnerable of people are those that can't do 'practical' things for themselves (or have the capacity or resources to do such things as grow food with the planning and lead times that takes) and those who are 'victims' and have dropped below the survival safety line (the really - and increasing - poor).
I did do a number of community survival plans but people saw these things as a 'hobby' rather than necessary for survival. Perhaps a crisis will force people to work together.
The thing about Iran is that it has highlighted (for those that didn't know) the critical reliance on oil in energy generation which has stimulated the rogue USA to try and dominate the worlds energy markets as a way of maintaining global dominance. It is not neceassry to have a conscious plan to embark on this approach. To people like Trump it seems obvious because in the moment it is. And that's the point - its a teleology inflicted on us by practical reality at this historic juncture. We have a world where we need energy to survive in a form we never did before.
In China they thought about this decades ago and are planning for it. We in Britain acknowledged it - but then 'events' (and the hollowing out of Government) have thrown us off course and the thing that strikes me at this very moment is the absence and consequent irony of any real discussion about how we could strive for energy security and retreat from oil. Instead people reach for the Holy Grail - some miracle like fusion that will solve all our problems. It might - but not in the time scales we need to understand.
Today I am thinking of inventing a 'winter onesy' that can keep me warm in dark nights from October to March. The woodburner is great - but you need a lot of wood to fuel it. I live in an area where there is a lot of it BUT chopping it down and sawing it up and seasoning it takes energy and planning....and if everybody did it there wouldn't be any wood left. I think that the future could very well be shit....but then, I don't read Aurelien just to cheer me up.
I empathize with your angst. Over the years I’ve made a kind of peace with the Rocky Horror of it all by finding like-minded thinkers on the Internet, some of whom are actually worthwhile. Jem Bendell’s position paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy is where I started back in 2018. Made a reasonably happy doomster out of me.
Interesting angle, some real good points.
However, as regards ...
"if your theory that Covid was a hoax is true, how do you think the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria managed to coordinate their actions and their propaganda so well, along with a hundred and fifty other countries"
What the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria did during so called Covid has ZERO relevance to whether the whole thing was a hoax (sic), where we'd have to define what hoax means.
What certainly WAS a hoax, was the allegation there there was a pandemic of a viral disease. That's bullshit par excellence, and instead of the above question, one might ask themselves whether "a pandemic of a deadly disease that is mostly asymptomatic, nobody knows they're having it, and they have to get tested using a fraudulent procedure to find out (while the allegedly disease has all the symptoms of the common cold)" makes any sense.
Check out Denis Rancourt (denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=1&name=covid) for an authoritative scientific rejection of the convid fraud.
Sorry, but I can’t agree about this. I had friends and family members who died from this “hoax”.
Yes, exactly. They died from the "hoax". People died from hysteria that was whipped up, they died from the idiotic countermeasures, they died from the even more idiotic medical protocols, they died from psychosomatic response to all that. Many people died from the experimental shots too.
They sure as hell did not die from an alleged novel virus.
The evidence of the aforestated is damning and most comprehensive.
https://boomfinanceandeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/covid-median-age-of-death-85-5-years-more-americans-may-have-died-from-covid-19-injections-than-in-wwi-wwii-and-the-vietnam-war-combined-cdc-finally-admits-covid-19-vaccine-caused-injuries-aut/
https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=1&name=covid
"People died from hysteria that was whipped up"
Wow! Powerful stuff, that hysteria. I'll have to learn to control my rising Trump-driven panic.
Maybe you should read the article again - some appropriate and valid points are made there about beliefs.
Precisely. You BELIEVED, and still do, in a pandemic of a deadly disease and all your thinking revolves therearound. Hence, you ignore not only common sense that, if you had any, would tell you that if there were no attendants picking up dead bodies from the streets and carting them off to the nearest makeshift morgue, and the 'pandemic' is nothing but doctored statistics, but also scientific evidence that disproves all of the allegations of a pandemic, there was no pandemic.
You've made up your mind and decided to BELIEVE the official narrative, chiefly because if was delivered via a vector that's highly trusted, perhaps the most trusted entity in society - the man in the white coat, the doctor, the medical profession.
Cognitive dissonance prevents you from even considering research done by the likes of Denis Rancourt, which not only clearly refutes all of the convid horseshit, but also shows that the excess deaths that occurred were cause by government malfeasance, whether directly, through idiotic medical protocols, or secondarily, though depriving aged people of contact with others and other similar phenomena.
Indeed, belief is a strong force liable to have a severe psychosomatic response that can kill a person. Check out the German New Medicine, which classifies, in a scientific fashion, the impact various psychological states have on health.
Resources:
https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=1&name=covid
https://boomfinanceandeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/covid-median-age-of-death-85-5-years-more-americans-may-have-died-from-covid-19-injections-than-in-wwi-wwii-and-the-vietnam-war-combined-cdc-finally-admits-covid-19-vaccine-caused-injuries-aut/
Yes - and you 'believed' something different. Something which would have to involve the collusion in an insane conspiracy of literally hundreds of thousands of health professionals at every level.
The conclusion we have to draw from what you say is that if you 'believe' something, it is valid, but if other people 'believe' something different it's an obvious lie.
You need to get your head sorted out - if it's not too late.
(What you say about 'belief' being a factor in some deaths is true, for a minority of suggestible people, but not on the scale you postulate, which indicates to me a degree of both gullibility and insanity).
Absolutely NOT. I don't 'believe' (sic) anything. I rely on empirical observations and hard facts and data, all of which clearly demonstrate that all the alleged claims of an alleged pandemic were a giant crock of shit. If you don't believe your own eyes and your own experience (which clearly showed that nothing extraordinary was happening, other than media-whipped hysteria), you could check such sources as euromomo, eurostat, and other statistical sources elsewhere. They were all showing that nothing extraordinary was taking place. That's AT THE TIME CONVID WAS HAPPENING. The evidence today is overwhelming. You only refuse to acknowledge any of it because you don't want to admit that you've been had (severe cognitive dissonance).
No insance conspiracy was taking place among hundreds of thousands of health professionals at every level (sic). The collusion with the convid crap on the part of health professionals is easily explicable - the medical profession is extremely regulated, where everybody must adhere to lege artis protocols passed in top-down manner. Whoever would diverge from protocols imposed by top-level authorities can be prosecuted for malfeasance or worse, especially if something goes wrong. Most health professionals will not dare, but there were quite a few who called out the utter crap; you were probably too busy triple masking and injecting yourself to notice.
Don't tell me that I need to get my head sorted out. You're thoroughly fucked up covidiot who hasn't allowed his effed up self to examine HARD FACTS to realize how people have been scammed. You got no leg to stand on!
In my previous post, I provided you with a link to SCIENTIFIC ANALYSES AND SCIENTIFIC DATA regarding all of the aforesaid. There are tons of other sources that say pretty much the same thing. Acquaint yourself therewith and stop yapping about belief this, belief that, and belief the other fucking thing. If you can disprove any of the HARD FACTS, I'm all ears. Otherwise, it's time for you covidiots to shut up.
Respectfully: whether or not it was a hoax is irrelevant to the points made by the OP. Without prejudice as to whether you're right, essentially the nature of Covid is a side issue.
Yes and no.
As I mentioned in my post, the author makes very good points, but ... Can a person who has such a malinformed view of one aspect of reality be trusted with their assessment of another issue?
Thanks. As a general point, this kind of issue, which you express very well, is one with which I too struggle!
My *own* solution is to be relaxed about making "all or nothing" judgements, while remaining critical. After all, we ourselves can always change our minds. Conversely, we can always hope others can change theirs - just as my own is repeatedly changed by interaction with others expressing arguments or perspectives (or experiences) I hadn't previously encountered or imagined. :)
Plus, taken to its logical extreme applied to all topics, I don't want to end up in a permanent minority of one versus the rest of the world! ;)
I agree with that completely.
The above article is highly interesting, the points well argued, the text coherent within itself. It's just that the reference to convid rang a warning bell somewhere in the back of my head.
You're right about the atomization of society, where people have been divided by a myriad of dichotomies - most of them false, inane, or outright idiotic - and where it's just about impossible to find a person perfectly synced with your views. This is probably by design, so that people always have more to fight about than to agree on, to prevent them from joining forces and give the powers that be the kind of treatment citizens in my home town traditionally have (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague#/media/File:Liebscher,_Adolf_-_Svr%C5%BEen%C3%AD_kon%C5%A1el%C5%AF_s_Novom%C4%9Bstsk%C3%A9_radnice_30._%C4%8Dervence_1419.jpg).
In other words, gotta focus on what we can agree on than vice versa.
Absolutely right!!!
This is the sort of derangement which led the members of the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists in the Boxer Rebellion to believe that through specific spiritual rituals and martial arts training, they could achieve supernatural immunity to bullets and cannons.
Good luck to you.
Check out the false analogy fallacy and, while you're at it, acquire basic general understanding of the principles of (logical) thinking.
Whatever your society did has zero relevance to anything to do with any of the aforestated.
Thanks Paul, I was thinking much the same thing, and wondering if the author took the vaxx. Rather than attempt to wring significance out of such peripheral countries as Nicaragua, where a few WHO-greased palms could spawn a propaganda campaign, look at China, Russia, and Iran. They did not adopt (let alone mandate) the mRNA vaxx. You think that they're scientifically illiterate?
COVID was a hoax par excellance, the biggest scam in history. It was obvious some two weeks into the alleged pandemic, but I can see that it might have taken longer for some people to realize they're being had. Understandable, it came from the left field through a very cleverly selected vector - the medical profession, the DOCTOR, perhaps the most trusted entity in society. Anyway, there is so much analysis out there today, such a body of scientific research clearly refuting all of the shite that was being peddled back then, that it's hard to believe that anyone would take the plandemic seriously anymore. It was so patently absurd and batshit crazy.
Now, the point is - can a person who hasn't been able to see though such an obvious crock of shit be trusted in their assessment of other issues, eh? Not sure ...
https://boomfinanceandeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/04/01/covid-median-age-of-death-85-5-years-more-americans-may-have-died-from-covid-19-injections-than-in-wwi-wwii-and-the-vietnam-war-combined-cdc-finally-admits-covid-19-vaccine-caused-injuries-aut/
https://denisrancourt.ca/categories.php?id=1&name=covid
Did you know what they did in Mexico City for Swine Flu in 2009? In the West the whole operation was trial run in 2009 but they stopped just short of full on pandemic measures...with the exception of Mexico city. They went all the way there. AI doesn't bring it up but masking was strongly encouraged. I don't think they were arresting people for not masking. Wolfgang Wodarg was in the German parliament at the time and called the whole thing out. He got some investigations going but it went nowhere. He was the first person I went looking for in March 2020. He is still alive and was immediately speaking out agasinst it.
AI summary..
"Mexico City implemented strict lockdown measures in April 2009 during the swine flu (H1N1) outbreak to curb the virus's spread. The government suspended dine-in services at restaurants, closed schools, entertainment venues, and non-essential businesses, and discouraged large gatherings. Public places like museums, theaters, and churches were shut down, and professional sports events were held without spectators"
We did nothing wrong!!!
https://abcnews.com/Health/SwineFlu/swine-flu-pandemic-world-health-organization-scientists-linked/story?id=10829940
I think you have badly misunderstood McGilchrist if you believe the current detachment from reality of many leaders is a "right-brained" phenomenon or that the right hemisphere requires a "reality check" from the left to "get anything done." In fact I wonder if you have read him at all; if you had, it would be clear to you that evidence has shown the right hemisphere is quite capable of acting positively in accordance with reality in the absence of input from the left, but the reverse is simply not true.
I agree with you. Aurelien's description is nearly 90 degrees from McGilchrist's theory. The weaknesses he attributes to the right brain - the tendency to take the map for the territory, to expect reality to conform with one's symbolic representation - is on the contrary a symptom of left brain dominance.
McGilchrist says that the fundamental difference is attention. The left and the right hemisphere attend to the world in different ways. The right brain attends to the world through presence. It deals directly with experience. Imagine lying in the grass in the warm light of the setting sun. Your thoughts are not words, only presence and a feeling of wholeness, the boundary between yourself and the world dissolved. This is your right brain.
A rainbow appears. At first you smile at the colour, then you start to count and name the bands. Red, orange, yellow... are there really seven? Now you are in your left brain. Where before you experienced the presence of the world, now you represent it with colours, numbers and concepts.
The left brain never deals directly with experience, only with representations, abstractions, symbols, words. For the right brain the world is primarily a whole, and every part is related to every other. For the left there exist only discreet objects. For the right brain the world is animate and alive. For the left brain there is no life, only things to be manipulated.
The left hemisphere's ability to manipulate abstractions is incredibly powerful. It is rational - but not reasonable. It has no sense of the whole into which the pieces fit. In his book McGilchrist shows a drawing of a bicycle by a patient with right brain damage. It shows only three circles connected by lines - the wheels, perhaps, and the gear, but it is hard to say because they are all the same size and the relationships are not clear. The left hemisphere seized on a few details, ignored the rest, and has no understanding of the whole.
In McGilchrist's account, patients with right brain damage are often devastatingly dysfunctional. Patients with left brain damage in contrast are relatively close to normal, albeit with weakness in certain areas. The proper relation of the left and right hemispheres is not integration and equality, but right dominance with delegation to the left for specific domains where it is more powerful. The right is anchored in reality (or experience, as close as one can get) and sees the big picture: the left knows only how. The danger is that the right is capable of understanding the uses of the left: but the left, so focused, so narrow, so blinkered, has no comprehension for the right. To the left, the right is irrational, a hindrance to its monomaniacal manipulations.
The Master and His Emissary is a brilliant book. The most interesting parts are in the latter half where McGilchrist explores right vs left brain thinking in poetry, music, art, politics and elsewhere. To me, the left hemisphere, with its view of the world as flat dead representations to be manipulated, is captured best by a painting Turin Spring by Giorgio De Chirico. The fascist mind in a single image.
Aurelien writes:
"If the left-brain running by itself is inadequate, the same is even more true of the right brain operating alone, without the reality check its partner should be providing. Actually researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal—these are left brain activities, and they require organisation, thought and application. That is why, I think, we have seen so many wild, even ludicrous, statements about the wars of the last few years by politicians and pundits. These people are prisoners of right-brain thinking, utterly divorced from any mechanism for assessing reality."
It is the left hemisphere, not the right, that disregards reality. From The Master and His Emissary:
"In repeated situations, in subject after subject, when syllogisms with false premises, such as ‘All trees sink in water; balsa is a tree; balsa wood sinks in water’ . . . The right hemisphere dismisses the false premises and deductions as absurd. But the left hemisphere sticks to the false conclusion, replying calmly to the effect that ‘that's what it says here.’
"In the left-hemisphere situation, it prioritises the system, regardless of experience: it stays within the system of signs. Truth, for it, is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with. ‘That's what it says here.’ So it corresponds with itself: in other words, it coheres. The right hemisphere prioritises what it learns from experience: the real state of existing things ‘out there’. For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of being ‘true’ to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.
The activities that Aurelien proposes - "researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal" - are operations within an abstract rational system. This is why they are indeed likely to be biased towards the left hemisphere - and why they are likely to disregard evidence and diverge from reality.
The failings that Aurelien associates with right hemisphere bias are in fact tendencies of the left hemisphere. It is precisely the left's tendency towards abstraction and re-presentation that allows it to deny reality (denial, McGilchrist says, is a specialty of the left hemisphere).
Aurelien writes:
"the right brain draws no hard and fast distinctions between reality and imagination, or even dreams . . . the truth is what we want it to be, the truth is what makes us comfortable, we believe the myth rather than the reality, and anyway what’s the difference? . . . Such thinking cannot be challenged by facts, because it is not based on deduction from facts, but on their selection to support a mythological or symbolic narrative that appeals to the thinker."
In fact it is the left hemisphere, not the right, that insists on its own reality and resorts to denial and anger when it is contradicted. But what if our facts are selective approximations and our abstractions are imperfect? Then deduction may take us away from reality, not towards it. And it is the essential nature of facts and abstractions to be partial. We expect reality to adhere to our conceptions of reason and consistency. We are often disappointed. Even when our reasoning is air-tight, reality often fails to live up to our theories. It seems to me that this appeal to deduction and facts amounts to more left-brain thinking to overcome the dysfunctions of left-brain dominance.
Interesting musings on right-brain dominance.
Things have become much worse since Gallipoli. About a decade ago I attended a national juvenile justice conference focused on adolescent brain development and the science supports your intuition. Learning from lived experience has been supplanted by passive consumption of scripted pablum. The left-brain has atrophied and the dreamy right-brain has taken over. The effects of television-watching and gaming/social media on human brain development cannot be overstated. I suspect that Americans were quite vulnerable to believing that the scripted character that Mark Burnett created for “The Apprentice” was a real person.
We must also consider the effects of urbanization and global population growth. The human population has exploded from 2.5 billion to 8.25 billion since my birth in the mid-1950’s. Recent UN data tells us that the vast majority of people only survive because they live in urban (45%) or semi-urban (36%) settings. Fewer than 20% live in conditions described as “rural” by the UN. Urbanized populations are highly dependent on petrochemical infrastructure for their very survival and lack the left-brain skills to survive without it.
I was fortunate to attend one of those 1970’s “alternative” universities before eventually studying the law. I was effectively without access to television between the age of 18 and 25. During my government service spanning four decades people would often come to me for advice because I was oddly “left-brain dominant.” I took my pension at 60 and moved to the country where I supervised the construction of an energy efficient compound with a large greenhouse, extensive vegetable and herb beds, and a small orchard. We’re restricted from raising animals but I’ve befriended local farmers who provide us with meat, fish, and eggs. We still need electricity to pump our well and gasoline to gather supplies and mow, but we’re hopeful that the collapse won’t be total.
Gallipoli is just a microcosm of WW1 which demonstrates how the ruling class managed to kill off millions of human beings with the accompanying suffering of the survivors, and WW1 was supposed to be the war to end all wars.
‘The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown.’
Sums what we are all facing nicely.
As for looking to the disorganised criminals who have bought our state infrastructure like Trump, Gates, Ellison, Epstein’s associates or Bezos - why did any one in high government positions choose to believe these nude Kings who who so obviously coined their self-professed business and profit making abilities off of cheap money created by neoliberal’s financial deregulation and the hard work and oppression of others ? Fools blinded by greed.
‘Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked’
Warren Buffett
Al Capone ran effective food distribution operations during the depression, but not at the required scale. The pictures from that era of people lined up to get food were often of his operations.
Interesting historical detail. If the Trump Family or fellow Maxwell-Epstein global mobsters were interested in such social good they would not have cut food stamps, medicaid and women’s healthcare. Capone was from a very different background and age. Our criminal ruling class are far more Old Empire roués than poor kids made good, however much Fox News may spin and twist their stories otherwise.
Before this War
Iran didn't control the Straits of Hormuz. Now it does.
Before this war, Iranian oil was sanctioned. Now it's not. Iranians are selling their oil to the Chinese.
Before this war, Iran was not building a nuclear bomb. - Now it definitely will.
Before this war, US bases in the Gulf were described as assets. Now they're clearly liabilities.
Before this war, inflation was declining around the world. - It is now rising.
Before this war, growth was rising around the world. It’s now falling.
Before this war, stock markets were rising. - They're now falling.
Before this war, bond prices were stable. Now they are falling and interest rates are accelerating.
These are the facts, despite what President Tump and the MSM may say
Isn't it a really just a case of lies versus some semblance of truth. We live in a world swimming in lies. The Iran situation is submerged by lies which ebb and flow every time Trump or Netanyahu open their mouths. Never mind Rubio or Hegseth.
Today I read a piece by Ken Klippenstein who is a democrat leaning independent journalist posting on Substack. Normally he is anti-Trump and critical of the Iran mess. But today he produced something right out of the CIA narrative. Apparently all the Israeli bombing and more recently the US strikes have been designed to take out individuals associated with the security and civil control organisations in Iran and have been so successful that they are now down to the local area people and that the security forces have been forced to advertise posts for 12 year olds.
The comments from almost entirely US folk who must usually be sympathetic to Klipperstein's normal position were almost all full of relief that after all the US IS winning and all will be right with the world.
How the same people can justify this after previously condemning the killing of young girls and obviously bombing civilians because they can't reach the military underground is significant.
Klippenstein maybe believes what he has been fed by his 'sources', he says he has checked certain elements, maybe he knows they are lies and has been lent on to change his narrative.
No one will ever know because its not unusual, its totally normal in this post factual world we live in.
I don't know if its absolute bunkum, I suspect it is but I don't know and doubt anyone reading this does either.
Just a small example of why the sea of pervasive lies in which we swim mean we 'know' almost nothing about anything anymore.
Which is exactly where 'they' want us to be, I forget who said something along the lines regarding the CIA and the US public in the 1960s that they will know when their propaganda has worked when no-one will believe anything and simultaneously can be told to believe anything. Of course Eric Blair said the same sort of thing decades before.
We can all fall for some narratives even when we don't fall for others. One very common one in European journalists is to disbelieve all the anti-Iran narratives while believing all the anti-Russia narratives! As these military adventures become more and more closely linked, it's going to be amusing watching their tortuous reasoning and cognitive dissonance. Oddly, I find some of the best antidotes for the modern US narratives are declassified CIA documents and US Army documents (so long as the material is authored by field-grade officers, given that all flag/general officer promotions have always been politicized as mandated by law).
Kudos for your Orwell reference!
If you look at the comments on Klippenstein's post you will see the first comment saying, "April Fools" from Ken K.
If you read all the comments and in particular KK's response to some you will see that the 'april fool' comment is not aimed at his article. He is serious in reporting what he has been fed and what he had been able to independently verify.
Something I wrote years ago, about western elites and their ineptitude in dealing with the physical world:
These people don't live in The Real World.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Tweet of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "How do I feed the kittens this week and pay for cat litter and make the rent?" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably rifa, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, his upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself."
Good one, for once FF.
Yeah, I've seen it coming a long way off. So I have invested in a a vegetable garden, knowledge of herbal medicines and foraging in the wild. People ask me whether my vegetable patch won't be vulnerable in a food crisis. At first I worried about that, as well. But the people who will be affected first, and most, by any sort of food crisis: the urban poor, they do not know how to cook and they do not know what to do with raw vegetables. Sit them in a garden full of veg and they will starve. During the Holodomor in Ukrain the country was stripped bare of wild edible roots. Now, if a food crisis will emerge, those of us who know what to look for will have ample pickings. Many, many people will die from lack of instant food, and lack of knowledge of real food.
It is challenging just to determine what one can do on an individual basis let alone what can be done on a macro level requiring impossible organizational challenges. Just moving to a rural area is challenging to analyze for a city dweller weighing the advantages and disadvantages (like finances, job, friends and neighbors, costs of moving, access to medical care and taking care of sick loved ones, etc.)
Interesting as always, but isn't the left brain / right brain dichotomy now thought to be a huge over-simplification ? See e.g. https://tinyurl.com/349ux9vx
Could it be more symbolically true than technically accurate, that is, a metaphor for opposite-but-complimentary modes of thinking?
My thought exactly! Either way, the real story here is the (operational) disconnect between policy (with or without strategy!) and execution (tactics).
It's pretty obvious when you look at operational military doctrines that the Western approach has collapsed, compared to the eternally "intellectually disciplined" Russian (and now Iranian) approaches, but do you think the same applies to business and political operational methods? In other words, do you think Russia and China will cope better with the 21st century crisis operationally?
Like we need more complexity.
No.
One of your very best. Thank you.
Well inevitable crunch is here. It only needed a catalyst, like a chemical reaction, to produce the excited state that then decays into the product. The product has been the subject of many science fiction stories ( naturally the SF thinkers figured this inevitability out long ago). Cities cannot survive as such, people will have to get out. Small communities are best. Low population density cheap resources and arable land. Anyway, I'm sure you have read the stories. But time for a Ministry of Food, again.
Maybe the question that should be asked isn't how to win the Iran war but if the US should?
Would the Middle East, the world and the US be better off by just saying "OK, we lost" and leaving than by fighting on, even if they could win, which they probably can't?
"Maybe the question that should be asked isn't how to win the Iran war but if the US should?"
No.
"Would the Middle East, the world and the US be better off by just saying "OK, we lost" and leaving than by fighting on, even if they could win, which they probably can't?"
Yes.
'In his conception the left brain, which is concerned with precision and detail, should be the servant of the right brain, which deals in the “big picture” and is capable of setting objectives. He argues that the left-brain with its technocratic orientation has become increasingly and dangerously powerful in recent times. I would add that this increase in power is not necessarily experienced in the same way in all cultures, and that in the West it is very far advanced indeed. Why is this?'
In terms of fighting wars, here is a more granular exploration of that idea which reaches the opposite conclusion:
Notes on Military Education Approaches in Russia and the United States [i]
Military Education - the key to modern command
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/notes-on-military-education-approaches?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1105422&post_id=192635568&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6mos7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Yes, of course it is possible to use electricity from renewables to make nitrogen fertilizers. Plant-microbial symbionts do it, and it can be done technically. The problem is cost: https://doi.org/10.1039/d5gc06782k
Here my usual italian translation (sorry for the delay due to Easter Holydays...):
"Non Riesco a Organizzarmi.
Come dimostrato dalla crisi iraniana."
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2026/04/non-riesco-organizzarmi-come-dimostrato.html