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Irish Government Wants Pre-Election Pact With Tech Giants To Counter Online “Disinformation”

A move that raises accusations of manipulating Big Tech’s power.

Many governments around the world are no longer at least pretending they don’t see Big Tech as a major political asset, or that they will not try to use that asset to their advantage. Instead, this behavior is slowly being normalized – albeit always qualified as a democracy-preserving, rather than undermining policy.

In other words, something driven by the need to combat “disinformation” and not what critics suspect it is – the need to harness and control the massive reach, influence, and power of major social platforms.

Judging by reports out of Ireland, it is among those countries, with big words like “supercharged disinformation threats to democracy” flying around as the government looks to use what some might call “supercharged fearmongering” to secure no less than a “pre-election pact with tech giants.”

Some of this is yet to be enacted through the Electoral Reform Act, so in the meanwhile Big Tech representatives have been summoned to a meeting, via lobbyists representing them, Technology Ireland, to discuss the said “threats.”

The Electoral Reform Act is supposed to formalize new rules for both platforms and those buying ads, while during the meeting, set to take place in late April, tech companies will be expected to sign “the Irish Election Integrity Accord.”

A letter signed by Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien and Minister of State Malcolm Noonan explained that the Accord will be new, but based on the Electoral Reform Act from 2022, and always focusing on “disinformation,” and advertising. What the giants are expected to sign up to is “a set of principles for the sector and the state to work by to safeguard our democracy over these crucial next few months.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Details Have Come to Light About Feds’ Surveillance of Everyone That Watched Certain YouTube Videos

Recently, it came to light that US courts are issuing orders to YouTube (Google) to hand over user information – a previously unreported form of dragnet investigation. And now additional details about the practice are emerging.

Forbes broke the story last month after seeing documents that showed a court order covering all YouTube users who watched certain videos over a period of time. Personal data required by law enforcement in these cases was very detailed.

Regarding Google users – that’s information from their Google accounts (name, address, phone number and records, online payments history, IP address, etc…), while everybody else visiting URLs listed in the order had their IP addresses surrendered.

A one-year gag order made sure Google could not make any of this publicly known, and now we’re hearing about it because that time period has expired.

However, the actual documents that the original article was based on were not published at that time; now, reports say they have been made available on the Bluesky platform.

The order covers the first 8 days of 2023, and three apparently obscure and in and of themselves harmless YouTube videos (the target of the investigation was a person suspected of illegal activity, while the video’s URLs were “exchanged” during communication between undercover investigators and their target).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVIII–Collapse: Just Like Boiling A Frog


Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVIII

January 2, 2023 (original posting date)

Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Collapse: Just Like Boiling A Frog

As I continue to work on my multipart contemplation regarding our energy future (Part 1; Part 2), thought I would throw out this ‘brief’ one that shares my comment on the most recent post by The Honest Sorcerer, whose writing in general continues to parallel my own (probably not surprising given the increasing evidence regarding the trends in the topic(s) we discuss).


Great article. As the saying goes: it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future[1]. We mostly look at current trends and extrapolate them into the future, believing that tomorrow will unfold much like today — and we do this for pretty sound reasons but mostly because our primate brains have extreme difficulty comprehending complex systems and their nonlinear feedback loops and emergent phenomena. In a time of flux/chaos/transition, such an approach is not always such a good strategy — to say little about all the Black Swans circling overhead[2].

One of the places I default to when hoping to give some certainty to the future (something homo sapiens strongly desire[3]) is the past. This is likely because of my ‘brief’ educational background and work in pre/history (aka archaeology)[4].

While technology has dramatically changed some aspects of how we re/act (i.e., adapt) to our changing environment through our problem-solving abilities, we tend to follow a similar path to our distant ancestors by way of leveraging our tools and ingenuity to help us survive and adapt (agriculture being perhaps the big one that resulted in food surpluses, sedentary lifestyles, exponentially increasing populations, and eventually organizational structures that led to differential access to resources, sociopolitical complexity and, perhaps finally, territorial competition[5]); but these solely human abilities can only take us so far in a world of biogeochemical limits — particularly when the energy required to sustain all our complexities have encountered significant diminishing returns and resulted in catastrophic ecological systems breakdown.

Mix in cognitive and social psychology, biological principles, and physical limits and laws, and we humans can more or less get a better picture of the path(s) we are likely to take in our societal evolutionary journey. One only need review the business-as-usual scenario painted by Meadows et al. in The Limits to Growth for a fairly accurate longer-term prediction of how a world with hard limits will unfold[6].

Based upon all previous experiments with complex societies over the past ten millennia or so, ‘collapse’ appears unavoidable. This decline in complexity (which is what ‘collapse’ is when one gets right down to it and ignores all the emotional baggage we’ve tied to the term) manifests itself in less; less in terms of: social differentiation/stratification; occupational specialization; centralised control by political elite; behavioural control/regimentation; investment in the epiphenomena of complexity — i.e., monumental architecture, artistic and literary development; flow of information between groups; sharing, trading and redistribution of resources; and, coordination between polities[7]. This is a simplification (or Great Simplification as Nate Hagens has termed it[8]) of our adaptive complexities, something that likely would have happened much sooner had we not leveraged fossil fuels to hyper-complexify human adaptations and extend/expand — temporarily — the planet’s carrying capacity for homo sapiens.

Given how far we’ve overshot our natural environmental carrying capacity and consequently degraded our much needed environments and ecological systems — and overexploited virtually every corner of our planet — this inevitable simplification may actually end up being even more dramatic than previous experiments as Catton has pointed out in Overshoot[9].

The journey to this endgame of a substantially simpler future is sure to be the hard part. Increasing geopolitical tensions between competing polities for scarcer resources is sure to occur. Concomitantly, the ruling caste is certain to tighten their grip on their domestic populations by way of authoritarian tendencies (e.g., behavioural and narrative control via increased mass surveillance, militarisation of police, media influence). We are going to witness a continuing breakdown of ecological systems and environmental degradation yet be told these are temporary or reflective of ‘natural’ change. Our Ponzi-type financial/monetary/economic systems are going to be further manipulated from their current highly-manipulated states and any ‘temporary’ deviations from the economy-is-great narrative will be blamed on some evil ‘other’ rather than our own ruling caste and their ongoing machinations.

Like the story about being able to boil a frog alive because of minute temperature changes that go unnoticed, we may miss the little steps that take us to an entirely different world than the one we currently exist within and accept that everything is ‘normal’ despite evidence to the contrary. The ruling caste has learned to be quite adept in manipulating our beliefs about life and their abilities to ‘protect’ us.

All of this said, the future is both unknowable and unpredictable. It will hold many surprises, particularly for the vast majority of people who are just struggling to get through another day/week/year and tend to defer to the ‘authority’ figures that promise them this, that, and everything…


[1] See this.

[2] See this.

[3] See this.

[4] Although my career was in education, I spent a handful of years in university studying and practising archaeology — graduating with a Master of Arts in the subject.

[5] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[6] See this.

[7] See this.

[8] See this.

[9] See this.

The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign

The Peacock Joins The Smear Campaign

If “misinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny is the best hit artist NBC News has left on its roster, it might be time to shutter the network

NBC’s Brandy Zadrozny wrote:

After over a year, the House committee investigating researchers and their work on disinformation… has yet to produce tangible results. Public hearings have not yielded actionable evidence that the federal government has been weaponized… There have been no legal wins and no legislation has been passed.

Zadrozny in the same article said that “until recently,” people like Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Elon Musk and I have been “extraordinarily successful” in fighting what we call the “censorship machine,” adding, “in the past two years, government efforts to respond to disinformation have been shuttered.” Yet the same efforts, in the same time period, yielded “no tangible results.” This is NBC News. Who edits these people?

Regarding “no legal wins and no legislation”: as Jordan’s Committee noted Monday, the House passed “The Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act” last year, and the Censorship Accountability Act recently passed in Committee. If you want to argue a bill not yet signed into law doesn’t count as “passed” legislation, fine, but “no legal wins”? The Murthy v. Missouri censorship lawsuit before the Supreme Court is there because four federal judges already ruled government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are likely in violation of the First Amendment.

Does NBC mean “no legal wins,” except the ones that sent the issue to the Supreme Court?

Those cases came in addition to a long list of developments, like the NIH freezing a $150 million content-flagging program, the shutdown of “Singing Censor” Nina Jankowicz’s infamous Disinformation Governance Board idea, even cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) budget, all of which are at the center of innumerable mawkish media freakouts over the recent slowing of state censorship programs…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange

Chris Hedges: The Crucifixion of Julian Assange

British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health deteriorates. This is the point.
The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Mr. Fish

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Oh Say Can You See?

Oh Say Can You See?

“A modern nuc can fit in the trunk of a car. When millions of people can walk across our border with impunity what do you think the chances are we would catch something that size?” — Sam Faddi

That’s Sam Faddis, retired CIA (quote didn’t quite fit in block).

Who among you was not impressed seeing the sudden and total collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge after getting its pylon bonked by the container ship Dali a few hours before the dawn’s early light in Baltimore harbor? In America’s ongoing death-of-a-thousand-cuts, that one literally severed a major artery, but it may take a while to know how badly the wounded colossus known as the USA is bleeding out.

“Joe Biden” emerged from his crypt pronto to state that the federal government would pony-up the cost of building the bridge back better, meant to reassure the public, you’d suppose. But perhaps the real reason was to obviate an otherwise requisite investigation of the crash by ship-owner Grace Ocean’s insurance company — since legal wrangling over responsibility would add more years to the already years-long estimated bridge replacement time-frame. And Gawd knows what else they might discover about how the darn thing came to pass. . . rumors of a Ukrainian captain at the Dali’shelm. . . stuff that the ruling intel blob might not want to get out there, especially given the still-murky role of the joint USA-UK black-op blobs in the Moscow Crocus Theater Massacre just a week earlier.

The Crocus op, you understand, was probably the worst clusterfuck qua Three Stooges blob operational procedure in memory, since four of the six surviving Tajiki shooters were nabbed in a car enroute to the Ukraine border (where they would’ve been whacked into silence, since they failed to martyr themselves at the scene-of-the-crime)…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different…


Today’s Contemplation: And Now For Something Completely Different…

January 1, 2023 (original posting date)

A corner of our property after a typical February snowstorm.

As I work upon the multi-part series regarding my thoughts on our energy future, thought I would throw together something a little different for this initial contemplation of 2023.


My journey down the rabbit’s hole of Peak Oil and related energy/societal issues began more than a decade ago after watching the documentary Collapse featuring the late Michael Ruppert. The information presented seemed to mesh closely with my educational background in biology and archaeology — particularly the rise and fall of complex societies. My thinking about virtually everything shifted significantly shortly afterward. The typical Kubler-Ross grieving process was followed with much denial, bargaining, and anger until I finally reached acceptance and really began to explore ways to better understand our predicament and to help others along that road as well.

The first method of talking to people about my appreciation/understanding of what we were facing did not go very well, perhaps because I was still overly ‘enthusiastic’ about my ‘discovery/enlightenment’. It took a while but I’ve learned to mostly reign in that ‘preaching’ tendency and offer ‘insights’ only if asked directly or the topic has been raised by others. My understanding of things still doesn’t sit well with most people, but I have grown to appreciate why — we have a host of cognitive/psychological mechanisms that keep us from holding anxiety-provoking thoughts for very long, if at all.

The second way I dealt with my new perspective was more cathartic in nature. I have always enjoyed writing. I’ve found it a pleasing and somewhat more precise method to both explain my understanding of our world and work out this understanding by way of the feedback I receive and reflection upon it (primarily during the process as I edit and rework the wording for greater clarity). Speaking — particularly in public venues — is not something I find that I can do with much confidence or clarity, although others tell me I do fine (I did, after all, spend 25 years in a career that demanded lots of it and pursue some voluntary leadership positions that required it). Writing is my chosen and preferred method of communication outside of my immediate circle of family and a couple of close friends/acquaintances. I leave it up to readers to conclude whether I do it well or not.

Anyways, I thought I would share some fictional prose. It is a chapter I wrote some years ago as I began putting together Olduvai IV: Courage, a follow-up to my first three novels. Writing on this book has come to a stop for a variety of reasons, mostly because I lost the motivation to continue it as I transitioned into non-fictional writing and have begun to enjoy it and I have grown to believe I need to be ‘acting’ on my altered belief system rather than simply thinking/reflecting upon it so have put much greater effort into personal actions — especially as it comes to learning about and practising food production.

Without further ado, here is the link to a PDF file of a chapter of Olduvai IV: Courage that has never been seen before.

Please keep in mind that this was written at least 6 years ago before some of the chaos of the last few years occurred and when my understanding was different than now, which is pertinent since I attempted to weave current events into my story and many of my ‘predictions’ of what might take place in an unknowable future are completely off the mark — such is the difficulty of making predictions, especially if they are about the future!

I may, depending upon feedback, share the other chapters I’ve already written (or mostly written) in the future. Difficult to predict…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVII–Limitless, ‘Clean’ Energy: More Magical Thinking


Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVII

December 29, 2022 (original posting date)

Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Limitless, ‘Clean’ Energy: More Magical Thinking

A brief contemplation that shares my comment on the latest post by The Honest Sorcerer regarding the recent fusion energy ‘breakthrough’ that has been making the rounds on many media sites. My current ‘bias’, given my last post, has me viewing this particular topic in a focused way that I outline below.


You’ve hit the nail on the head of the dominant narrative and mass magical thinking that goes on in our world around notions of limitless and ‘clean’ energy: given time (and funding/resources), our human ingenuity and technological prowess can ‘solve’ any problem thrown our way. Limits imposed by our existence on a finite planet are minuscule compared to our unfettered imaginations and abilities provided by our opposable thumbs. Finite limits? Meh. Ecological destruction? Who cares. Global collapse? Nothing to see, look over here…

And you ask a pertinent question: “Who in their sane minds approved the budget for all this?!”

I think energy analyst Art Berman highlights the nefarious actors that have done just this (see here). As he argues, not only are the claims about the ‘breakthrough’ a big nothing burger (since the energy-return-on-investment is about 0.005, or basically zero) but the announcement just happened to coincide with an announcement by the U.S. Congress to fund to the tune of $624 million this type of research.

Given the ties to the military that lay in the shadows of the event and the media propaganda about this fusion energy ‘miracle’ that ignores this connection, we should all be asking some hard, critical questions. Like: is this all just a form of ‘money laundering’ by the government to divert funding in a roundabout way to its military while marketing it as ‘energy research’; and, is this just a funnelling of wealth to the elite that own/control the industries necessary to carry out the work? (Questions that should also be asked about the billions (if not trillions) of dollars heading to Ukraine, NATO, various military and quasi-military establishments around the globe; as well as all the other ‘clean/green’ energy research and industries.)

This certainly plays into one of the themes I’ve been writing about: the actions of our ruling caste is driven by the primary goal of controlling/expanding the wealth-generation/-extraction systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power and prestige. Having control (or at minimum overriding influence) of the politicians/government aids this immensely.

Mix this up with the competition between polities that occurs (and is discussed by archaeologist Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies; and that I have just written about here) and one can well imagine the shenanigans that goes on amongst politicians (i.e., those allocating a society’s resources in the name of ‘citizen prosperity’), industrialists (i.e., those that ‘own’ the needed industries and resources), and the media (i.e., those that own the propaganda machinery and guide/influence societal narratives) to fund ‘research’ (especially military-oriented) and other wealth-extraction/-generation systems in the name of citizen welfare.

But let’s be frank, the ruling caste cares not one iota for the hoi polloi or the ecological systems destruction this pursuit is causing. Their concern is to maintain the rigged game with them at the apex of the pyramid (an apt description given the entire scheme is little more than a gargantuan Ponzi-like structure predicated upon infinite growth on a finite planet). And as Tainter concludes regarding the peer polity competition that arises as an epiphenomenon of this:

“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.”


Sick Of It All

Sick Of It All

Every week, usually once or twice, I sit down to put onto paper my thoughts about the market. And every week, my disgust not only for the rigged system that encompasses our equity markets, but also for the sound of my own whining, grows exponentially.

When I sit down to perfunctorily prattle on about how nothing makes sense and how I constantly see things the polar opposite of 99% of everybody else in the world of finance every week, I usually wonder two things.

First, I wonder whether or not today will finally be the day that I capitulate, get bullish on the stock market, and start bowing religiously to a statue of Stephanie Kelton.

“I should know, I’ve followed a few!” – Arthur

After all, the incessant price moves higher in Bitcoin are part of what triggered me to eventually reassess my thought process on the cryptocurrency. And even though I got bullish for reasons other than price, why couldn’t the same happen with equities?

Second, I try to conceptualize exactly how fast the universe can, and will, make a total ass out of me by crashing markets 50% in 15 minutes in the days, hours, minutes, or probably even seconds after I’d have such a shift in sentiment.

Which is why, like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I will continue to forge forward, exasperated, regardless of the inconvenient fact that I have no arms or legs left. But don’t let anybody ever tell you that my spirit was easy to break.

“The Black Knight always triumphs!”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wealth Gap And The Road To Serfdom

Wealth Gap And The Road To Serfdom

One of the most interesting conundrums is the surging wealth gap in America. Despite two of the largest bull markets in history since 1980, most Americans struggle with making ends meet and are unprepared for retirement. Such a reality starkly differs from the belief that rising asset prices benefit the masses.

For example, in a recent St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank analysis, total household wealth was $139.1 trillion, covering 131 million families. Of that total wealth, 74% was owned by just 13.2 million families, or roughly 10% of the population.

Wealth Distribution

Notably, this measure of wealth includes the equity of the family’s home. While home equity is essential, it is not readily spendable without taking on debt to extract the value. Therefore, Americans’ “liquid wealth” is far more unequally distributed. However, such is hard to fathom given the endless parade of media and social media influencers extolling the virtues of “building wealth through investing.”

Interestingly, that survey came after the Government injected nearly $5 trillion into the economy, a massive surge in deficit spending, and the Fed’s $120 billion monthly injections doubled asset prices from the March 2020 lows. Unsurprisingly, in February, Fidelity published its latest analysis showing the number of retirement accounts with balances of more than $1 million surged toward a record. To wit:

The number of seven-figure 401(k) accounts at Fidelity Investments jumped 20% in 2023’s final quarter to 422,000, marking a sharp recovery from the previous quarter’s 7.7% drop.

Gains in the stock market helped swell retirement balances last year as the S&P 500 advanced 24% following 2022’s 19% decline. The impressive run was powered in large part by the so-called “Magnificent 7” stocks that now make up roughly 30% of the market-cap weighted S&P 500 Index. The only time when the ranks of 401(k) millionaires at Fidelity was higher was in 2021’s fourth quarter, when there were 442,000 such accounts. Elsewhere, the number of seven-figure IRAs is at a record 391,600 accounts.” – Bloomberg

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVI–Energy Future, Part 2: Competing Polities and Geopolitical Stress


Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXVI

December 28, 2022 (original posting date)

Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Energy Future, Part 2: Competing Polities and Geopolitical Stress

Part 2 of my multi-part contemplation on our energy future.


It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
-various attributions (e.g., Niels Bohr, Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, Mark Twain, Nostradamus)

As I argued in Part 1, energy underpins everything including human societal complexities. And the more energy humans have at their disposal, the greater the complexities and their concomitant ‘quality of life’ (not for all, but for those with greatest access/exposure)[1]. Being a ‘finite’ resource, the difficulty (impossibility?) in sustaining this ‘prosperity’ is self-evident — or at least it should be[2].

As walking, talking apes that communicate via stories we have weaved many tales of how we will sustain our complex living arrangements and the energy ‘slaves’ that make this possible[3]. In our quest to reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts we have, for the most part, ignored/denied the implications of dwindling resources — especially energy — and the implications of this for our future[4].

The more dominant and mainstream narratives argue we can or will transition to low-/zero-carbon technologies with nary a hiccup[5]. Our ingenuity guarantees this — or at least the snake oil salesmen marketing their wares and standing to profit handsomely from these tales do[6].

While I believe we will indeed attempt this (primarily because the ruling caste that guides/influences the narratives that we tend to believe in and allocates our society’s resources towards actions/efforts that helps to meet their overarching goal — the control/expansion of the wealth-/extraction-generating systems that provide their revenue streams and thus positions of power/prestige — will make it so), all it will likely accomplish (besides creating some comforting stories to share and huge profits for our already insanely wealthy few) will be the exacerbation of our fundamental predicament: ecological overshoot[7].

This means the speeding up of the drawdown of our resources (both ‘non-renewable’ and ‘renewable’) and the magnification of the concomitant ecological systems destruction[8] — more on this in a future post.

Speeding up the drawdown of resources (especially some that are only or primarily found in far-off locations from the sociopolitical centres that ‘require’ them to support their complexities, and ‘controlled’ by others) feeds into another unfortunate propensity of human complex societies: competition between polities.

In their detailed computer analyses of how a species that pursues growth on a finite planet might fair in a future of biogeochemical limitations, Meadows et al. highlight that two of the symptoms of overshooting the natural environmental carrying capacity are increasing conflicts over resources/sinks and declining respect for government as it uses its ‘power’ to maintain/increase the share of declining ‘wealth’ for the ruling elite — primarily by disproportionately allocating resources towards its military and industry, and away from the majority of its citizens[9].

And while his focus is upon pre/historical sociopolitical collapse, as opposed to ecological systems collapse (although ecological breakdown certainly has contributed to past societal collapses), archaeologist Joseph Tainter argues in his text The Collapse of Complex Societies that past collapses have occurred in two different political situations: a dominant state in isolation or as part of a cluster of peer polities[10]. With global travel and communication, the isolated dominant state has disappeared and only competitive peer polities now exist.

Such polities tend to get caught up in spiralling competitive investments as they seek to outmaneuver each other in their quest for control/influence and evolve greater complexity together. The polities caught up in this competition increasingly experience declining marginal returns on their investments in this strategy and must divert ever-increasing amounts of energy/resources leading to increasing economic weakness — especially for those outside of the ruling caste.

Withdrawing from this spiral or collapsing is not an option without risking being subsumed by a competitor. It is this trap of competition that will continue to drive the pursuit of complexity regardless of human/environmental costs and the impact upon dwindling resources. Incentives and economic reserves can support this situation for a lengthy period, as witnessed by the Roman and Mayan experiences where centuries of diminishing returns were endured, but not forever.

Ever-increasing costs and ever-decreasing marginal returns typify peer polities in competition. This ends in either domination by one state and a new energy subsidy, or collapse of all. As Tainter concludes:

“Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.” (p. 214)

It would seem one of the consequences of our diminished energy future will be increased tension between competing polities. And this competition will be primarily about energy/resource reserves. In fact, a number of analysts have predicted that the globe is heading for (or is already engaged in) significant geopolitical stressors, if not resource wars[11].

William Catton Jr. also discusses this trajectory towards increasing geopolitical tension in Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change[12]. He argues that we are fated to continue our self-destructive proclivities as long as we fail to understand them. While we have learned to be civil over the centuries, particularly since the leveraging of fossil fuels began and net surplus energy has led to an explosion of growth and ‘wealth’, the concomitant population irruption and the pressure compounded by technology have led to a degradation of these relationships and have become increasingly competitive.

Humans have reacted in pressure-increasing ways that has created a further diminishing of carrying capacity making our overshoot situation even worse. War-like rhetoric has increased as population pressures have. Wars are a useful leverage point for the ruling caste to target the ‘other’ as redundant, as opposed to ourselves who ‘deserve’ our energy-intensive way of life and the resources required to maintain it.

“In a habitat that was not growing any larger, the continuing increase in either our numbers, our activities, or our equipment would ultimately induce more and more antagonism. Our routine pursuit of legitimate aspirations as individual human beings, as breathing, eating, drinking, traveling, working, playing and reproducing organisms, would increasingly entail mutual interference.” (p. 224)

Here we have competition over finite resources that is leading to a quickening of the drawdown of these resources. These diminishing resources are being allocated to this spiralling pursuit of competition while the consequences — both economic deterioration for the majority of humans and ecological destruction of the planet — are ignored/denied and/or rationalised away by way of narratives that argue the very instruments of our demise (increasingly complex and resource-dependent technologies) must be pursued with all the expediency we can muster.

Our conundrum is becoming ever-more wicked in its complexity.

In Part 3 I will explore some of the issues for human societies of this increasing geopolitical competition.


[1] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[2] Fossil fuels are finite in the sense that the flow from the existing stocks in the form of extraction far, far exceeds their replenishment rate which is estimated at millions of years. See this.

[3] See this, this, and/or this.

[4] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[5] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[6] See this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[7] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[8] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[9] See this and/or this.

[10] See this and/or this.

[11] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[12] See this and/or this.

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXV–Energy Future, Part 1


Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXV

December 21, 2022 (original posting date)

Chitchen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Energy Future, Part 1

A short introductory contemplation to a multipart one on our energy future[1].


It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
-various attributions (e.g., Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra, Mark Twain)

Energy[2]. It is the fundamental component necessary for all physical, chemical, and biological processes. So life…hell, the universe appears impossible without it[3].

While all forms of energy are ultimately important to human life, it is the bioenergetic and food energy aspects that are perhaps most salient[4]. For human complex societies that require energy inputs to ‘power’/support the organisational structures that help to create and sustain our varied and numerous complexities, it is the transformation of various energy sources into ‘usable’ forms that is vital[5].

As Vaclav Smil writes at the beginning of his 2017 text, Energy and Civilization: A History:

“Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to get anything done. Universal manifestations of these transformations range from the enormous rotations of galaxies to thermo- nuclear reactions in stars. On Earth they range from the terra-forming forces of plate tectonics that part ocean floors and raise new mountain ranges to the cumulative erosive impacts of tiny raindrops (as the Romans knew, gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo — A drop of water hollows a stone not by force but by continually dripping). Life on Earth — despite decades of attempts to catch a meaningful extraterrestrial signal, still the only life in the universe we know of — would be impossible without the photosynthetic conversion of solar energy into phytomass (plant biomass). Humans depend on this transformation for their survival, and on many more energy flows for their civilized existence. As Richard Adams (1982, 27) put it,

We can think thoughts wildly, but if we do not have the wherewithal to convert them into action, they will remain thoughts. … History acts in unpredictable ways. Events in history, however, necessarily take on a structure or organization that must accord with their energetic components.

The evolution of human societies has resulted in larger populations, a growing complexity of social and productive arrangements, and a higher quality of life for a growing number of people. From a fundamental biophysical perspective, both prehistoric human evolution and the course of history can be seen as the quest for controlling greater stores and flows of more concentrated and more versatile forms of energy and converting them, in more affordable ways at lower costs and with higher efficiencies, into heat, light, and motion.”

In this energy-transforming quest, fossil fuels have become the most critical and fundamental energy source to our modern, industrialised and exceedingly complex global society. As can be seen in the graph below, it is estimated that fossil fuel-based energy (i.e., coal, oil, and natural gas) is responsible for 80+% of our current energy needs that support our many varied complexities from transportation and food production to industrial production and communications.

Evidence suggests there is no current substitute — at density or scale — for the energy provided by fossil fuels[6]. We continue to be exposed to countless promises and potential technological ‘breakthroughs’ to replace them (especially when it comes to ‘clean/green’ energy sources, or should I say non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies), but the cold hard fact is that our dependence upon fossil fuels continues and is actually increasing, even when one zooms in on the past twenty years when ‘renewables’ have been pursued with ‘gusto’ as shown in the following graph (although not as much fervor as some would like and argue for — ignoring/rationalising away the ecological systems destruction that would accompany such a ‘war effort-like’ push).

All of the ‘renewables’ we have adopted have been additive to our fossil fuel dependency. They have not supplanted any — or at least minimally — fossil fuel extraction or use[7]. In fact, it could be argued that they have increased it due to their dependency upon fossil fuel-based industrial processes[8].

Add to this that there is convincing evidence that we have encountered significant diminishing returns in our extraction of fossil fuels[9]. This can be seen in our need to increase continually the energy and resource inputs towards accessing and extracting these fuels (e.g., deep sea drilling, hydraulic fracturing, bitumen refinement).

This necessity necessarily has an impact on the net energy that we have for supporting our complexities. We are increasingly having to put more and more energy/resources into fossil fuel extraction and refinement resulting in less and less energy/resources leftover to maintain our complex systems, let alone have any leftover to pursue growth as we have the past century or more[10].

So, we have a finite resource that is requiring greater energy/resource inputs to access and retrieve but that we depend significantly upon with no comparable replacement — to say little about the ecological systems destruction accompanying all of this (‘renewables’ and fossil fuels alike).

This is an obvious conundrum. Where do we go from here is what a number of people want to know…and I will explore this further in Part 2.


[1] Please note that I am not an ‘expert/academic/researcher/etc.’ in the topics discussed but an avid ‘student’ of them as I try to make sense of how and why events are unfolding the way they are. This is why I have included quite a number of references (to those who may be considered ‘experts) to my thoughts. Declaring this, I am also wary of the term ‘expert’ in light of criticisms such as those expressed by Philip Tetlock, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and others: see this, this, this, this, and/or this. The views expressed, therefore, are part of my personal journey of understanding; they could be accurate but they might not be…in the end, I believe we all believe what we want to believe.

[2] See this.

[3] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[4] See this and this.

[5] See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[6] See this, this, this, and/or this.

[7] See this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[8] See this, this, and/or this.

[9] See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

[10] See this, this, this, this, this, this, and/or this.

Rule by Criminals: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.”— Martin Luther King Jr.

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

The government’s list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing by the day.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely one of the most visible victims of the police state’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers.

Five years ago, on April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Financial Flim-Flam Backs Imran Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate

Financial Flim-Flam Backs Imran Ahmed’s Center for Countering Digital Hate

Intelligence asset Imran Ahmed’s seedy money comes to light, although his lawyers won’t explain his false filings with the IRS.

The dark money that apparently birthed the censorship industry’s most critical “anti-disinformation” group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), recently came to light in an investigation by The Telegraph, which uncovered £700,000 in undeclared donations to British Labour Party politico Morgan McSweeney. And who’s McSweeney? He helped found CCDH in the UK in 2018—the same timespan when millionaire venture capitalists and businessmen were sending McSweeney secret money, triggering an investigation by Britain’s Electoral Commission.

As I first reported last October, Imran Ahmed is a Labour Party political operative who maintains close ties to intelligence agencies and began running CCDH from D.C. in 2021, when he started working closely with the Biden administration. That first year in D.C., Ahmed took in 75% of his donations from a dark money pass through, although new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents show Ahmed provided false information to the U.S. federal government to receive tax-exempt, nonprofit status.

“A finding that there is a materially incorrect statement on an application for tax exempt status should hopefully encourage the IRS to take a hard look,” said Dean Zerbe, a tax attorney with consulting firm Alliant, and a former Senate staffer who investigated corruption in the nonprofit industry.

While he was based in the U.K., Imran Ahmed ran both the CCDH and another Labour Party front group, Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN), to attack British leftists, to defund the Canary news site, and to remove Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party’s leftist leader. Both CCDH and SFFN wielded wide influence in British politics and posed as grassroots movements, until reporters at the Canary exposed the groups’ ties to Labour Party conservatives Imran Ahmed and Morgan McSweeney.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXIV–Chasing Perpetual Growth On a Finite Planet

Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh LXXXIV

December 16, 2022 (original posting date)

Chitcen Itza, Mexico. (1986) Photo by author.

Chasing Perpetual Growth On a Finite Planet

A very brief contemplation (as I work on some longer ones) that shares my response to the following billboard that was shared on the Degrowth Facebook group I am a member of:

The insanity of such a message on a finite planet should be self-evident to all but sadly this is simply not so. I have found that the overwhelming majority of people actually don’t pause whatsoever to consider how absolutely ridiculous such messages are.

Most (all?) are so caught up in relatively meaningless distractions or real-life personal crises that the ruling caste’s misleading narratives surrounding perpetual growth and our technological ingenuity to bypass hard biogeochemical limits are accepted as gospel truth. And it doesn’t help that humans have a tendency to defer/obey ‘experts/authority’ and participate heartily in groupthink.

Combine these cognitive ‘distortions’ with the fact that the products of growth (e.g., new infrastructure, additional services, etc.) are visibly and quickly perceived yet the negative impacts of our attempts to sustain our exponential growth can be readily externalised and/or take many years to materialise, and it is near impossible to make accurate attributions regarding causal relationships.

But as Meadows et al. argue in The Limits to Growth: when response delays occur in an exponential growth environment, overshooting a system’s capacity to sustain itself is common as well as the collapse that inevitably follows. It’s simply a matter of time and pursuing business-as-usual behaviours…

Infinite growth. Finite planet. What could possibly go wrong?

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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