Minor point of information. The scapegoat (originally literally one animal of a pair) was indeed loaded with the sins of the people and driven out, but the blood sacrifice was of the pure or purified member of the pair - compare Judas and Jesus.
As the saying goes, I'm ahead of you Ugo. In the latest 'newsletter' that was circulated to members of the Mensa Atheism and Secularism special interest group that I edit, I wrote - An historian suggests that escalation and prolongation of violence is driven by fear of the alternative. While those who can, gather to debate why the people of the world cannot renounce war and live together in peace, they seem to spend less time debating, at least in public, why this never comes to pass, or at best creeps glacially towards any resolution. I suggest it may be because killing people is what actually works. (Religion just makes it easier.)
Ah, well, no problem. I am sure that many people are ahead of me. Religion may make it easier to kill people, but it can be done even without religion.
if you kill in the name of god you did not believe in god in the first place like god bless america why would god bless america if they kill people god would never bless them if they did that !!!!
Some have really demanded a lot of blood sacrifice.
It is hard to keep them straight for a lot of people, and they excuse it as above-their-pay-grade to figure out how a God of Love also commands complete genocide sometimes, mostly a long time ago, but maybe it's ok now, too...
well for me i believe in the christian god as the only one but it does not mean i have no respect for other believes or people who do not believe i pretty sure no god wants war but humans also have a bad and a good side meaning like a little devil inside us who wants to make war etc jesus died for ours sins but jesus never said humanity would never sin again
My Grandfather, a covered-wagon child to Texas, raised near Abilene by his minister father, and who served in both world wars, told me his belief that the "God" of the old testament was not the same God-the Loving Father, which Jesus taught and lived as an example of.
He did not elaborate much, but he said it with gravity, and I can still picture where we stood.
dear john md I can not speak about the new testamony I am an evangelical christian I follow the old testamony that the apostels like paulus did write the new testamony is more used by catholics they have statues of Jesus and Maria in there church we also believe in jesus but statues are forbidden in my church god spoke he said you will not pray on statues in my image or other gods it is one of the 10 ammendments
As most of us have become grazers/farmers, about 3% have become sociopathic apex-predators upon the rest of us, "nobles", "royals", "bankers", "priests", "Scientists"...
We have to consider Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom as well. When under stress, a society turns to strongmen who promise quick solutions. Principles are abandoned to propaganda. Corruption and cruelty are confused with strength. Bigotry is welcomed back out into the open, and the ends justify the means.
He has recently stopped communicating, around 90, and has some health issues. We and our wives had dinner in Sydney around 8-9 years ago on our only trip down under. He’s a delightful gentleman. Note that Lynn Margulis (microbiologist and co-developer of Gaia Theory) wrote the fwd to _The Spirit in the Gene_, his book from ‘98. I reviewed it for The Innovation Journal. His profession was photojournalist, not scientist.
That's a big "if." Science demonstrates that the filters/evaluators that humans and other organisms utilize are *all* physical and embodied. Heredity (not just genes- viruses, microbiome, prions, epigenetic RNA effects on gene activation, and?), plus the cumulative effects of experiences since conception -including conscious and unconscious learning are inescapable. Meaning derives from them; no other known source! When the present externality is encountered (often complex and unpredictable), the resulting perceptions, actions, feelings… are the result of the combination. Cannibalism still exist, BTW. Not pleasant to think about.
All of reality existing within "mind" or a simulation, is a paper bag that one can't think one's way out of. It can't really be proven or disproven. Elon Musk is fond of thinking that we all exist in such a simulation.
You called my bluff, Professor! Actually I cannot find or did not note down a source for the 'historian', and I haven't read Girard. The point about scapegoat just refers to the derivation of the word. According to the Web it was William Tyndale's translation of the Hebrew equivalent.
What's quite comical, if this story was not so tragic, is that the very people who for 3 years have been saying that there was no question of negotiating anything, invoking the spirit of Munich and thus comparing Putin to Hitler to the point of nausea, are now demanding “negotiations” on his part.
The Europeans would now like to force Putin to accept an unconditional ceasefire as a precondition to some vague future negotiations, whereas he, logically from his point of view, can only agree to negotiate the conditions of a ceasefire.
And it's always been the same problem for the last 3 years: European politicians, having neither the political means to impose their will on Putin nor, and this is even more problematic, to respond to the increasingly pressing demands of their own populations, are just blowing smoke to continue justifying their existence.
Indeed, they need their favorite scapegoat to keep their own fantasy alive...
It has occurred to me off and on that current trends are on track to seriously disrupt the financial plans certain people have involving the looting of whatever manages to survive this war. But not to worry--as their consolation prize, they still have that fat $300B of Russia's sitting captive in Euroclear, waiting for them to summon up the "courage" to steal it.
I may sometimes disagree with you on fine points Prof. Bardi, but your work on Limits To Growth has been with me, in the back of my mind, through most of the last 45 years or so. I've used it for decisions about where to live and how. It is really the lens through which I view the world. Now that we are reaping what we have sown in our "Business As Usual" world, human irrationality, I believe, will make hate and war our final overshoot.
I learned about it 51 years ago, in 10th grade Sociology class. I have lived similarly, holding it in mind. I did not know if I would live this long...
>There are still people in Italy who think the Austrians are evil because of a propaganda campaign of more than one century ago
Frankly, I think that it is very much the opposite. Italians have forgotten all about Austria and think that it is nothing more than a small country in the Alps with nice scenery, Struedel and Sissi memorabilia.
Austrians on the other hand still see Italians very much as their Erbfeinden. They haven't forgotten.
It was not just a propaganda campaign. A million people died on either side of the front in WWI. Thousands more over the 70 years previous.
Eventually, we are bound to have new troubles, for example about South Tyrol or influence in Croatia or Slovenia, or access to Trieste. But Italians will be caught by surprise.
You my be right. My comment was mostly a personal impression, probably influenced by what my grandfather was telling me about having fought in a trench with the Austrians on the other side. Or having read about the evil Austrians as a child in my schoolbooks. Hard to say, but in my opinion the ghost of the Erbfeinden is still alive on both sides. And ghosts are easy to summon.
I have been to Monte Piana in Tirol where there are remains of trenches and barbed wire and a rusty bell. People who were essentially the same people on both sides, happening to live under different governments, killed each other there. Insanity. But short of 'deserting' and being shot by their own side, what could individuals do? A young German Willy Wenger in the Volkssturm in 1945 recalled that he met a Russian soldier in fog. Each shot at the other and missed. It was probably a lucky accident, but he said it was the only time he tried to kill another human being. Most of us have tried even fewer times than that. Maybe to shoot and miss is an option, but it doesn't seem a very satisfactory solution.
My own thought after reading Ugo's piece was to comment that although propaganda certainly leans into this human tendency, propaganda itself is not the sole source for it. It is incredible how some historical hatreds, based in some ancient conflict or oppression, hang on literally for centuries after they have come and gone.
Wars are fought for resources, and Russian Federation has most, both per capita and absolute. For the Germans the issue was called "Lebensraum" and the carnage the Nazis wrought in the USSR was such that no family existed without having lost one or more relatives due to the war. Contrary to popular opinion, Hitlers army even included Jews. The Nazi ideology was popular in parts of the Ukraine as well, and chief Nazi Bandera still is popular in the Western part of the country.
After WW2 top Nazi scientists like Werner von Braun were transferred to the US via Operation Paperclip, got good jobs and with "free speech" could transfer "the Führer's ideology".
This contrary to the USSR where Nazi scientists could work but had to be silent on Nazi ideology.
From that perspective the present situation shouldn't be a surprise. It's even easier when understanding Henry Kissinger's famous saying "having the US as an enemy is dangerous but having the US as a friend is lethal".
In a world with declining resources, the above suggests that the EU has become a competitor for resources that has to be eliminated and the terrorist attack on Nord stream showed that without doubt. The only question is if EU politicians have been bribed / corrupted enough to execute the US war plans to maintain hegemony.
While "Limits to growth" still is worthwhile reading, the relevant issue is "Living within the limits of terrestrial resources" which includes environment.
If that would have been serious, much advertising would have been banned long ago, limiting compulsive buying. Unfortunately, even environmental degradation and war are seen as profitable.
The elite owners do plan to live within planetary resources, I think, but don't speak openly to us, their herds, about it, because we are being culled, and it would upset us to know that. We would not conform as well to their plans.
Now there is a schism (or more) in the elites, but they are keeping the secret so far.
Bad habits are hard to change and more so for emotional animals. The two factions are geo-engineering (aimed at atmosphere) and surface (afforestation, reforestation, speed up rock weathering). So I asked Chat GPT for some calculations and the 22 Gt CO2 produced would need 0.4 TW (400 GW) of energy for the rock crunching machines to just counter that. The largest thermal solar power plant provides ~2.2 GW.
In theory rock crunching to reduce CO2 to say 350 ppm is possible within 2 generations but not in an ambiance of resource wars.
I think we're just going to deal with whatever the weather is. Oil declining will be the main driving factor, I think, since crude production is 90% correlated with economic output. there is no higher correlation.
I wonder if some of the kinds of chemtrails have microplastics. they used to all be the same, but now there are big fluffy ones that spread, not just the wispy ones that become fine veils across the sky.
I see chemtrails a lot over Austin, and have since around 1995.
I grew up on military bases, so I saw contrails from military jets all along, and they fade away a few plane lengths behind the jet, so I always noticed the difference.
The weather will be smokey, refining tar sands and Venezuelan heavy crude. That to hide the chemtrails (just joking).
Spot on, the dispersion signature of chemtrails visually differs from the usual condensation stripes.
I wouldn't be surprised if even plastic would be used in the chemtrail technology. But you would need a lab to prove that. A DIY shortcut could be to place a piece of metal with insect-repellent glue at a place where the wind has access but rain, birds etc. don't. Over time there would be enough plastic on the metal to view with a microscope.
We learned yesterday that a further 400 people have been killed in Gaza, one presumes mostly women and children, adding to the previous count around 45,000. Without getting into the complicated reasons for 75 years of deadlock there, what stops the civilians in Gaza overthrowing the minority of Hamas extremists who are immediately responsible for the war, or the majority in Afghanistan - women and children presumably constitute a majority there too - overcome the minority of extremist male Taliban? Basically it's that the extremists can kill anyone opposing them instantly and without compunction (in democratic societies it takes ideally a certain process). Everywhere one sees this conundrum at various levels: how do diverse random uncommitted individuals organise successfully to resist a coordinated weaponised political movement? Looking at history: Peasants' Revolt, French/Russian Revolution, Arab Spring, it seems hit-and-miss, as well as prone to be taken over by another extreme movement.
If we consider the actual power-struggle in our world to be between old-money, seeking to maintain ownership of usurous loans and pledged assets, which grow exponentially, as stagnant real economy looks at terminal decline in post-peak oil, and populist nationalist interests, seeking to rebuild constructively, then many things make more apparent sense.
The paradox for well-established global finance, now that it has the mechanisms in place for the "Great Taking", is that enforcement of this legal-construct will destroy society, because it is so grossly unjust, and therefore destroy actual wealth.
Elites are divided into groups that would carry out the "Great Taking", and pay to enforce it, maintaining their ownership positions, opposed by other elites who would seek to rebuild productive economies to support their societies, and enlist citizens in this rebuilding with revised social contracts, reminiscent of Roosevelt's "New Deal".
When I look at European and UK political elites using the specter of a Russian threat to build up their militaries, I see that it is hopeless to get in a war with Russia, but that they are likely to be able to use the war funding to build up forces to suppress their own citizens in the financial collapse.
There is palpable fear and anger in liberal-minded Americans about a "neo-Nazi" movement of Trump/MAGA supporters. This was discussed at length in my Buddhist group today after our practice and meditation.
I did not point out that the actual structural economic problems are vastly worse than acknowledged, even by Team Trump (for which I did not vote, myself). I noticed some people externalized projections of the "problem" onto the "others" a literal fear of Nazis.
No personal worry about becoming a Nazi was openly voiced. The assumption seemed to be that "we are not that kind of people", but I personally recall being squelched during COVID in the fall of 2021 when I gave advice on early treatment with repurposed antivirals. My earlier advice on taking Vitamin D-3 to support one's immune system had been well received in early 2020, but in the fall of 2021 my mic was muted and was I harshly told that I was completely wrong, end of discussion.
There was some schadenfreude expressed that winter about a man who had died of COVID after refusing vaccination, leaving a wife and large family behind. I looked up the Go-fund-me, donated, and emailed the group how to do that, since they had expressed concern...
If you notice me externalizing my demons onto somebody else, do feel free to point it out. It's not what I want to do.
We all have to look at ourselves. I am inviting your observations openly here. I'm not offering such uninvited observations to anybody, myself.
Interesting that no one openly voiced any worry about "becoming a Nazi." Is it your impression (?) that they assume "they are not that kind of people" or did some of them voice that? The other possibility is that deep in their hearts, the more introspective ones might silently admit to themselves that under the right circumstances it might be possible.
There is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's often-quoted line: “The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” I've also read a good bit of writing from people who were in gruesome circumstances like the Gulag or the Death Camps, and have wondered how well my own humanity would hold up to such challenges if things became truly bad enough.
In our extended travel with our four teenagers, bicycling and backpacking, we visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Dachau in Bavaria, and Tuol Sleng in Cambodia. In each place the lesson was the same, that this is what ordinary people do to other ordinary people when history takes this certain ugly turn.
How would one know when to flee?
I was not yet sure, but said to keep history in mind.
When I saw "the unvaccinated" pushed into subhuman status in 2021, I recognized it, but realized that few others did, and that my role was to stand openly with "the unvaccinated" and be fired from the clinic where I had worked 18 years, stating my principles clearly.
Here is the story of the firing-ambush, 2 weeks early, as I planted fall-winter vegetables in the garden I kept for my coworkers, at my expense:
Thanks, Ugo, for you passionate words of warning. And thank you for you book Exterminations which I found very insightful however difficult it was to stay reading such a topic.
Ugo, you ask in the subtitle "Is War Unavoidable"? I would say that if you live in a place where "warlords" are employed to keep the peace then the answer would definitely be a no.
I think C. Wright Mills does a great job explaining how that story unfolds in one of my favorite books THE POWER ELITE. In the "Warlords" chapter he points out "All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence." Later he clarifies "peace in modern, or even in world history, […] has been due to the centralization and monopoly of violence by the national state". So it seems that near constant violent wars to keep the peace are the inevitable condition of at that time having eighty-one nation states that were organized behind that logic of the use of violence for keeping the peace.
Note this explanation for the level of violence in the world may need some updating since Mills wrote his take on the affairs of the world in the mid-1950's, but I don't think the logic base of the power elites of today has changed much from their predecessors in the past 70 years or so. I do, however, worry what influence the exponential increase in their relative power base in that period has had on their fundamental belief in the power of violence for keeping the peace.
This mostly non-violent fools conclusions is that peace does not equal violence, for whatever that is worth.
Minor point of information. The scapegoat (originally literally one animal of a pair) was indeed loaded with the sins of the people and driven out, but the blood sacrifice was of the pure or purified member of the pair - compare Judas and Jesus.
Good point. I hadn't thought about that -- did you read that in Girard's work?
Actually, I can't find this concept in Girard's book. Do you have a source?
As the saying goes, I'm ahead of you Ugo. In the latest 'newsletter' that was circulated to members of the Mensa Atheism and Secularism special interest group that I edit, I wrote - An historian suggests that escalation and prolongation of violence is driven by fear of the alternative. While those who can, gather to debate why the people of the world cannot renounce war and live together in peace, they seem to spend less time debating, at least in public, why this never comes to pass, or at best creeps glacially towards any resolution. I suggest it may be because killing people is what actually works. (Religion just makes it easier.)
Ah, well, no problem. I am sure that many people are ahead of me. Religion may make it easier to kill people, but it can be done even without religion.
if you kill in the name of god you did not believe in god in the first place like god bless america why would god bless america if they kill people god would never bless them if they did that !!!!
There are many "gods", are there not?
Some have really demanded a lot of blood sacrifice.
It is hard to keep them straight for a lot of people, and they excuse it as above-their-pay-grade to figure out how a God of Love also commands complete genocide sometimes, mostly a long time ago, but maybe it's ok now, too...
well for me i believe in the christian god as the only one but it does not mean i have no respect for other believes or people who do not believe i pretty sure no god wants war but humans also have a bad and a good side meaning like a little devil inside us who wants to make war etc jesus died for ours sins but jesus never said humanity would never sin again
My Grandfather, a covered-wagon child to Texas, raised near Abilene by his minister father, and who served in both world wars, told me his belief that the "God" of the old testament was not the same God-the Loving Father, which Jesus taught and lived as an example of.
He did not elaborate much, but he said it with gravity, and I can still picture where we stood.
dear john md I can not speak about the new testamony I am an evangelical christian I follow the old testamony that the apostels like paulus did write the new testamony is more used by catholics they have statues of Jesus and Maria in there church we also believe in jesus but statues are forbidden in my church god spoke he said you will not pray on statues in my image or other gods it is one of the 10 ammendments
but god can forgive even the biggest murderer if they stop murdering and believing in god and accept them there heart
A change of heart leaves a person with a lifetime of work to do in that regard, doesn't it?
It won't ever be complete, will it?
It is Apex-Predator ecosystem management.
As most of us have become grazers/farmers, about 3% have become sociopathic apex-predators upon the rest of us, "nobles", "royals", "bankers", "priests", "Scientists"...
;-(
We have to consider Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom as well. When under stress, a society turns to strongmen who promise quick solutions. Principles are abandoned to propaganda. Corruption and cruelty are confused with strength. Bigotry is welcomed back out into the open, and the ends justify the means.
Indeed...
There is a violent crowd-mind, which people enjoy at large sporting events, but which I have never liked, myself.
This ties in with Reg Morrison’s take on the negative feedback from overshoot which he links to Hans Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome.
short course for those interested: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/gambler.pdf (~ 80% in see short section-Evolution’s Automatic Plague Limiter)
Interesting, but a little obsolete. Is Reg Morrison still active?
He has recently stopped communicating, around 90, and has some health issues. We and our wives had dinner in Sydney around 8-9 years ago on our only trip down under. He’s a delightful gentleman. Note that Lynn Margulis (microbiologist and co-developer of Gaia Theory) wrote the fwd to _The Spirit in the Gene_, his book from ‘98. I reviewed it for The Innovation Journal. His profession was photojournalist, not scientist.
What if all of "reality" exists within consciousness, like a dream? Are not all characters aspects of the dreamer?
The simpler logical flaw is that humans are different from other sentient animals, who also love and share feelings.
People don't usually eat their pets... but they eat other critters that they don't know.
There's more reality if you have to kill your own animals to dine upon meat.
I've gone both ways on this.
That's a big "if." Science demonstrates that the filters/evaluators that humans and other organisms utilize are *all* physical and embodied. Heredity (not just genes- viruses, microbiome, prions, epigenetic RNA effects on gene activation, and?), plus the cumulative effects of experiences since conception -including conscious and unconscious learning are inescapable. Meaning derives from them; no other known source! When the present externality is encountered (often complex and unpredictable), the resulting perceptions, actions, feelings… are the result of the combination. Cannibalism still exist, BTW. Not pleasant to think about.
All of reality existing within "mind" or a simulation, is a paper bag that one can't think one's way out of. It can't really be proven or disproven. Elon Musk is fond of thinking that we all exist in such a simulation.
It is the core of Chittamatra, "mind only", Buddhism https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Chittamatra
You called my bluff, Professor! Actually I cannot find or did not note down a source for the 'historian', and I haven't read Girard. The point about scapegoat just refers to the derivation of the word. According to the Web it was William Tyndale's translation of the Hebrew equivalent.
Not a bluff. It was an interesting comment! Thanks a lot for it.
What's quite comical, if this story was not so tragic, is that the very people who for 3 years have been saying that there was no question of negotiating anything, invoking the spirit of Munich and thus comparing Putin to Hitler to the point of nausea, are now demanding “negotiations” on his part.
The Europeans would now like to force Putin to accept an unconditional ceasefire as a precondition to some vague future negotiations, whereas he, logically from his point of view, can only agree to negotiate the conditions of a ceasefire.
And it's always been the same problem for the last 3 years: European politicians, having neither the political means to impose their will on Putin nor, and this is even more problematic, to respond to the increasingly pressing demands of their own populations, are just blowing smoke to continue justifying their existence.
Indeed, they need their favorite scapegoat to keep their own fantasy alive...
European politicians are likely serving banking interests, which bet big on asset-stripping Russia again, and now need War-Emergency-Powers.
;-(
It has occurred to me off and on that current trends are on track to seriously disrupt the financial plans certain people have involving the looting of whatever manages to survive this war. But not to worry--as their consolation prize, they still have that fat $300B of Russia's sitting captive in Euroclear, waiting for them to summon up the "courage" to steal it.
I suspect that they already need the $300 billion to fill some collateral gaps...
I may sometimes disagree with you on fine points Prof. Bardi, but your work on Limits To Growth has been with me, in the back of my mind, through most of the last 45 years or so. I've used it for decisions about where to live and how. It is really the lens through which I view the world. Now that we are reaping what we have sown in our "Business As Usual" world, human irrationality, I believe, will make hate and war our final overshoot.
I learned about it 51 years ago, in 10th grade Sociology class. I have lived similarly, holding it in mind. I did not know if I would live this long...
>There are still people in Italy who think the Austrians are evil because of a propaganda campaign of more than one century ago
Frankly, I think that it is very much the opposite. Italians have forgotten all about Austria and think that it is nothing more than a small country in the Alps with nice scenery, Struedel and Sissi memorabilia.
Austrians on the other hand still see Italians very much as their Erbfeinden. They haven't forgotten.
It was not just a propaganda campaign. A million people died on either side of the front in WWI. Thousands more over the 70 years previous.
Eventually, we are bound to have new troubles, for example about South Tyrol or influence in Croatia or Slovenia, or access to Trieste. But Italians will be caught by surprise.
You my be right. My comment was mostly a personal impression, probably influenced by what my grandfather was telling me about having fought in a trench with the Austrians on the other side. Or having read about the evil Austrians as a child in my schoolbooks. Hard to say, but in my opinion the ghost of the Erbfeinden is still alive on both sides. And ghosts are easy to summon.
I have been to Monte Piana in Tirol where there are remains of trenches and barbed wire and a rusty bell. People who were essentially the same people on both sides, happening to live under different governments, killed each other there. Insanity. But short of 'deserting' and being shot by their own side, what could individuals do? A young German Willy Wenger in the Volkssturm in 1945 recalled that he met a Russian soldier in fog. Each shot at the other and missed. It was probably a lucky accident, but he said it was the only time he tried to kill another human being. Most of us have tried even fewer times than that. Maybe to shoot and miss is an option, but it doesn't seem a very satisfactory solution.
My own thought after reading Ugo's piece was to comment that although propaganda certainly leans into this human tendency, propaganda itself is not the sole source for it. It is incredible how some historical hatreds, based in some ancient conflict or oppression, hang on literally for centuries after they have come and gone.
Wars are fought for resources, and Russian Federation has most, both per capita and absolute. For the Germans the issue was called "Lebensraum" and the carnage the Nazis wrought in the USSR was such that no family existed without having lost one or more relatives due to the war. Contrary to popular opinion, Hitlers army even included Jews. The Nazi ideology was popular in parts of the Ukraine as well, and chief Nazi Bandera still is popular in the Western part of the country.
After WW2 top Nazi scientists like Werner von Braun were transferred to the US via Operation Paperclip, got good jobs and with "free speech" could transfer "the Führer's ideology".
This contrary to the USSR where Nazi scientists could work but had to be silent on Nazi ideology.
From that perspective the present situation shouldn't be a surprise. It's even easier when understanding Henry Kissinger's famous saying "having the US as an enemy is dangerous but having the US as a friend is lethal".
In a world with declining resources, the above suggests that the EU has become a competitor for resources that has to be eliminated and the terrorist attack on Nord stream showed that without doubt. The only question is if EU politicians have been bribed / corrupted enough to execute the US war plans to maintain hegemony.
While "Limits to growth" still is worthwhile reading, the relevant issue is "Living within the limits of terrestrial resources" which includes environment.
If that would have been serious, much advertising would have been banned long ago, limiting compulsive buying. Unfortunately, even environmental degradation and war are seen as profitable.
The elite owners do plan to live within planetary resources, I think, but don't speak openly to us, their herds, about it, because we are being culled, and it would upset us to know that. We would not conform as well to their plans.
Now there is a schism (or more) in the elites, but they are keeping the secret so far.
Bad habits are hard to change and more so for emotional animals. The two factions are geo-engineering (aimed at atmosphere) and surface (afforestation, reforestation, speed up rock weathering). So I asked Chat GPT for some calculations and the 22 Gt CO2 produced would need 0.4 TW (400 GW) of energy for the rock crunching machines to just counter that. The largest thermal solar power plant provides ~2.2 GW.
In theory rock crunching to reduce CO2 to say 350 ppm is possible within 2 generations but not in an ambiance of resource wars.
I think we're just going to deal with whatever the weather is. Oil declining will be the main driving factor, I think, since crude production is 90% correlated with economic output. there is no higher correlation.
I wonder if some of the kinds of chemtrails have microplastics. they used to all be the same, but now there are big fluffy ones that spread, not just the wispy ones that become fine veils across the sky.
I see chemtrails a lot over Austin, and have since around 1995.
I grew up on military bases, so I saw contrails from military jets all along, and they fade away a few plane lengths behind the jet, so I always noticed the difference.
The weather will be smokey, refining tar sands and Venezuelan heavy crude. That to hide the chemtrails (just joking).
Spot on, the dispersion signature of chemtrails visually differs from the usual condensation stripes.
I wouldn't be surprised if even plastic would be used in the chemtrail technology. But you would need a lab to prove that. A DIY shortcut could be to place a piece of metal with insect-repellent glue at a place where the wind has access but rain, birds etc. don't. Over time there would be enough plastic on the metal to view with a microscope.
Aluminum and barium oxides have long been reported, but something is big and fluffy sometimes over the past couple of years.
Above my pay grade, of course...
I remember reports on using fly ash as long as a decade ago, and as time goes by and the climate worsens, one can only wonder "what's up next?".
And the Jews! My God, they have, since 7 October 2023, become the world's favorite scapegoats.
That's for a reason, you scum fucks are literally behind all the wars for the last 200 years if not more.
We learned yesterday that a further 400 people have been killed in Gaza, one presumes mostly women and children, adding to the previous count around 45,000. Without getting into the complicated reasons for 75 years of deadlock there, what stops the civilians in Gaza overthrowing the minority of Hamas extremists who are immediately responsible for the war, or the majority in Afghanistan - women and children presumably constitute a majority there too - overcome the minority of extremist male Taliban? Basically it's that the extremists can kill anyone opposing them instantly and without compunction (in democratic societies it takes ideally a certain process). Everywhere one sees this conundrum at various levels: how do diverse random uncommitted individuals organise successfully to resist a coordinated weaponised political movement? Looking at history: Peasants' Revolt, French/Russian Revolution, Arab Spring, it seems hit-and-miss, as well as prone to be taken over by another extreme movement.
"Anti-vaxxer", and "Vaxxine Hesitents" - two recent inventions by State propagandists
as targets of the masses angers...
Yesterday's post: "Uninvited Observations" https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/uninvited-observations
If we consider the actual power-struggle in our world to be between old-money, seeking to maintain ownership of usurous loans and pledged assets, which grow exponentially, as stagnant real economy looks at terminal decline in post-peak oil, and populist nationalist interests, seeking to rebuild constructively, then many things make more apparent sense.
The paradox for well-established global finance, now that it has the mechanisms in place for the "Great Taking", is that enforcement of this legal-construct will destroy society, because it is so grossly unjust, and therefore destroy actual wealth.
Elites are divided into groups that would carry out the "Great Taking", and pay to enforce it, maintaining their ownership positions, opposed by other elites who would seek to rebuild productive economies to support their societies, and enlist citizens in this rebuilding with revised social contracts, reminiscent of Roosevelt's "New Deal".
When I look at European and UK political elites using the specter of a Russian threat to build up their militaries, I see that it is hopeless to get in a war with Russia, but that they are likely to be able to use the war funding to build up forces to suppress their own citizens in the financial collapse.
There is palpable fear and anger in liberal-minded Americans about a "neo-Nazi" movement of Trump/MAGA supporters. This was discussed at length in my Buddhist group today after our practice and meditation.
I did not point out that the actual structural economic problems are vastly worse than acknowledged, even by Team Trump (for which I did not vote, myself). I noticed some people externalized projections of the "problem" onto the "others" a literal fear of Nazis.
No personal worry about becoming a Nazi was openly voiced. The assumption seemed to be that "we are not that kind of people", but I personally recall being squelched during COVID in the fall of 2021 when I gave advice on early treatment with repurposed antivirals. My earlier advice on taking Vitamin D-3 to support one's immune system had been well received in early 2020, but in the fall of 2021 my mic was muted and was I harshly told that I was completely wrong, end of discussion.
There was some schadenfreude expressed that winter about a man who had died of COVID after refusing vaccination, leaving a wife and large family behind. I looked up the Go-fund-me, donated, and emailed the group how to do that, since they had expressed concern...
If you notice me externalizing my demons onto somebody else, do feel free to point it out. It's not what I want to do.
We all have to look at ourselves. I am inviting your observations openly here. I'm not offering such uninvited observations to anybody, myself.
Interesting that no one openly voiced any worry about "becoming a Nazi." Is it your impression (?) that they assume "they are not that kind of people" or did some of them voice that? The other possibility is that deep in their hearts, the more introspective ones might silently admit to themselves that under the right circumstances it might be possible.
There is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's often-quoted line: “The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” I've also read a good bit of writing from people who were in gruesome circumstances like the Gulag or the Death Camps, and have wondered how well my own humanity would hold up to such challenges if things became truly bad enough.
In our extended travel with our four teenagers, bicycling and backpacking, we visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Dachau in Bavaria, and Tuol Sleng in Cambodia. In each place the lesson was the same, that this is what ordinary people do to other ordinary people when history takes this certain ugly turn.
How would one know when to flee?
I was not yet sure, but said to keep history in mind.
When I saw "the unvaccinated" pushed into subhuman status in 2021, I recognized it, but realized that few others did, and that my role was to stand openly with "the unvaccinated" and be fired from the clinic where I had worked 18 years, stating my principles clearly.
Here is the story of the firing-ambush, 2 weeks early, as I planted fall-winter vegetables in the garden I kept for my coworkers, at my expense:
https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/10/go-down-gardening.html
Thanks, Ugo, for you passionate words of warning. And thank you for you book Exterminations which I found very insightful however difficult it was to stay reading such a topic.
Ugo, you ask in the subtitle "Is War Unavoidable"? I would say that if you live in a place where "warlords" are employed to keep the peace then the answer would definitely be a no.
I think C. Wright Mills does a great job explaining how that story unfolds in one of my favorite books THE POWER ELITE. In the "Warlords" chapter he points out "All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence." Later he clarifies "peace in modern, or even in world history, […] has been due to the centralization and monopoly of violence by the national state". So it seems that near constant violent wars to keep the peace are the inevitable condition of at that time having eighty-one nation states that were organized behind that logic of the use of violence for keeping the peace.
Note this explanation for the level of violence in the world may need some updating since Mills wrote his take on the affairs of the world in the mid-1950's, but I don't think the logic base of the power elites of today has changed much from their predecessors in the past 70 years or so. I do, however, worry what influence the exponential increase in their relative power base in that period has had on their fundamental belief in the power of violence for keeping the peace.
This mostly non-violent fools conclusions is that peace does not equal violence, for whatever that is worth.
Tom Jablonski
Frederic, WI, USA
Or maybe the anti-war movement needs to get real about the Jews behind the wars and recruit as much on the right, as the left?