“The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them.” — Albert Einstein
Leftist crybabies are afraid of a free and open dialogue. When they go to college, they demand safe spaces that are free from any challenging or offensive ideas. No one told them that life is one long series of challenges and potential offenses. College was originally a place for people to go who wanted to learn to think for themselves in a world of free and open ideas where anything goes.
It is a documentary by black political activist Candace Owens. It is meant to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant Black Lives Matter/Antifa story that has been force-fed to the general public and college students everywhere. The summer US riots of 2020 followed naturally from the orthodox narrative that dominated corporate media and university classrooms.
The dominant woke-left narrative does not tolerate contrarian points of view. We might be tempted to assume that this woke-left intolerance and hyper-fragility is something new that has come along in the past ten years or so. But actually, the violent intolerance of leftists ejaculating out of universities is a direct outgrowth of leftist intolerance that emerged immediately after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia that began in 1917.
IQ researcher Volkmar Weiss has written a remarkably revealing and informative book entitled “IQ Means Inequality.” The book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand much of the early philosophical origins of the contemporary woke-left movement. The portion of the book dealing first hand with the communist East German government’s struggle over the genetics of IQ vs. “the forced equality of everyone” opens a sunny window on the thought processes that underlie today’s prophets of woke. Needless to say, any government that goes down that road will either reverse course strongly, or will collapse into ruins.
Chairman Mao’s 1966 Cultural Revolution was another famous “woke revolution” in the attempt to destroy innate meritocracy and to initiate a top-down ordering of society on the basis of ideological purity. Once again, Mao’s grand attempt ended in ruinous failure and the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese when governmental incompetence was converted into famine.
Another aspect of woke insanity: The trans revolution that dominates school systems from K thru U. A lot of heads are going to roll when society wakes from this malignant trance.
The trans revolution is merely an extension of the leftist post-modern idea that everything is a social construct — including race, gender, science, math, economics, and anything else. According to these woke-left overlords, nothing is real until they tell you it is real.
Things are getting interesting, not least because of the grand alliance of government, media, academia, corporations, and most other social institutions, to overturn the established order in every possible way.
Much of this woke-left insanity has been underwritten by Russian and Chinese agencies. Much of the rest is underwritten by Soros-aligned European and Anglospheric foundations, non-profits, and leftist political parties in North America, UK, Europe, and Oceania.
As I said, things are getting interesting. Unfortunately it does not look as if we can sit this one out.
Along with the catastrophic demographic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, comes the possibility that Russia may be due for a USSR style disintegration — a la 1991.
With all of Russia’s men and weapons trapped inside Ukraine, Russia is helpless against any outside attack. The entire nation is seeing widespread degradation, and the looming death of Putin may be the trigger that sets everything off.
The spirit of doom is highly contagious. Society is being inundated with the sense of doom by screaming loonies who are based in governments, schools, news and entertainment media, the workplace, and by social institutions in general. Combined with the general dumbing down of the human substrate, this sense of doom is enervating. Problems are becoming more difficult to solve both due to a growing complexity and due to the idiocracy that is sprouting all around us.
Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.” — from an Associated Press report published in The Washington Post on Nov. 2, 1922
On July 5, 1989, Noel Brown, then the director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, warned of a “10‐year window of opportunity to solve” global warming “entire nations could be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels if the global‐warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco‐refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”
It’s too late to get that stupid bugger from 1922 since he’s long gone from the world and met his own private doom. But there’s a screaming loony born every minute, and if the time comes for open season on these degenerates we should at least be prepared with a long list and a good set of reliable anti-zombie tools at our disposal.
Predicting near-term apocalypse has been the occupation of fools and deadbeats for millenia now. The current crop of climate apocalyptics is nothing new and certainly nothing exceptional. Except… at the rate that populations are getting dumber, it has become much easier to whip up self righteous mobs to a frenzy. And that can get us all in a lot of trouble, as in the contagious fear of doomsday becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Viceclaimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.”
Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.”
Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, said one earlier this year. “The potential for multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” said another. If sea levels rise as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts, another scientist said, “It will be an unmanageable problem.”
Actually, everything they believe about everything is wrong, but it would take too long for me to explain why that is true. That alone is no reason to hunt them down and terminate with extreme prejudice. It is what they are doing to the rest of us on the basis of their half-cooked beliefs that puts these crazy mad malingerers in danger of serious consequences.
How the IPCC Consciously Facilitated a Shift to Alarmist Climate Apocalypse
The UN IPCC began as a relatively sober coordinating body looking at short term climate trends from decades to a few centuries in the attempt to better understand what might be happening. At first their published reports reflected the sobriety of a responsible scientist. But over the years, IPCC reports have shifted toward the sensational, helping to facilitate an alarmist reaction in the science media and the public. This reaction easily tends toward panic in the highly impressionable and scientifically illiterate, which seems to be converted into ill-advised public policy at almost lightning speed.
From the IPCC’s fourth to fifth assessment report our collective future, as envisioned by the IPCC, changed dramatically. The world was no longer heading for a wide range of possible futures, conditioned on enormous uncertainties, but instead was heading with some certainty toward a future characterized by an extreme level of carbon dioxide emissions. Quantitatively, futures with less than 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100 simply disappeared from the IPCC reference scenarios and the focus was placed on a “business as usual” scenario of more than 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100.
Irresponsible alarmists infest the media, they infest governments, they infest universities, corporations, and inter-governmental bodies and NGOs. They particularly infest foundations.
The very rich are using their wealth to feed this panic frenzy, as are powerful politicians and influential celebrities. Here are some of them:
The annual clown show at Davos epitomises how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.
Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple largely not only control the biggest platforms, but have also taken direct ownership of movie studios, newspapers and magazines. All these outlets, along with the AI models these firms produce, tend to reflect the worldview of the tech oligopoly.
Monopoly power leads naturally to ever-greater politicisation of corporations. No longer concerned primarily with potential entrepreneurial competitors, these firms have tended to embrace progressive causes as well, most notably in the adoption of ESG (environmental, social and governance) rules that often promote progressivism ahead of profit. Like the feudalism of old, with its concentration of power and knowledge in few hands, these oligarchical firms have become America’s ‘new corporate tyranny’, as author Michael Lind notes.
This marriage of big money and the left may yet have far to run. Alongside the grandees themselves, their ex-wives and offspring are also increasingly influential. Jeff Bezos’ former spouse, MacKenzie Scott, was worth an estimated $60 billion in 2019, and has since pledged a reported $14 billion in donations to progressive non-profits. Melinda Gates, ex-wife of the Microsoft founder, is worth at least $6.4 billion and is backing liberal organisations like the Clinton Foundation. The next generation of tech and finance heirs, such as the left-leaning offspring of the founders of Qualcomm, could prove even more radical. As the New York Times notes, these are ‘rich kids who want to tear down capitalism’, founding non-profits aimed explicitly at ‘challenging the system’. Born into the oligarchy rather than working their way to the top, these young trust-funders are not worried if their activities bother customers or even undermine the businesses that created their fortunes.
Nowhere is the power of the left-wing rich more evident than in their advocacy for draconian climate-change policies, such as the banning of gas stoves in homes. Tech moguls like Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg and Richard Branson regularly make donations to environmental groups like the Sierra Club, often in amounts as high as $100million. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced $10 billion in gifts aimed mostly for green non-profits. The current generation of Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, now seek to punish corporations that follow the road to riches of their founders, while also funding sympathetic ‘climate reporters’ at the Associated Press and National Public Radio.
American government climate change policies will not change the global climate at all. The emissions from China and India are so massive that they overwhelm any reductions by the US. In fact, US emissions are down strikingly (53%) in the US since 1990. But emissions in the third world (India, China, etc) are exploding. US actions are irrelevant to any miniscule climate effect that US CO2 emissions may actually have.
So my recommendation is this: Fantasize all you want about killing these worthless spongers. But for now just keep your ammunition stocked and well rotated. Learn to reload your own brass. Sharpen your knives and your battle axes. Practice on mannequins, dummies, scarecrows, and effigies. Learn stealth and small unit tactics.
If the time ever comes to move on these reprobates, think through all the repercussions before making a move. My advice is to let the professionals do the dirty work. But if at some point the creeps drive you so far around the bend that you cannot help yourself, make sure you have a very good lawyer and have set your affairs in order for the sake of your loved ones.
Human Brain vs. Other Primate Brains Neurologia 2018
What Genetic Mechanisms Made Human Brains so Large?
It is not a specific gene that makes the human brain so large. It is instead a segment [Olduvai protein domains]] of a specific gene family [NBPF] that is repeated many times in humans when compared to other primates, which seems to have provided a big part of the “trigger” to make human brains larger than other primate brains.
SEQUENCES encoding Olduvai protein domains (formerly DUF1220) (Sikela and van Roy 2017) have undergone a human-specific hyperamplification that represents the largest human-specific increase in copy number of any coding region in the genome (Popesco et al. 2006; O’Bleness et al. 2012). The current human reference genome (hg38) is reported to contain 302 haploid copies (Zimmer and Montgomery 2015), ∼165 of which have been added to the human genome since the Homo/Pan split (O’Bleness et al. 2012). Olduvai sequences are found almost entirely within the NBPF gene family (Vandepoele et al. 2005) and have undergone exceptional amplification exclusively within the primate order, with copy numbers generally decreasing with increasing phylogenetic distance from humans: humans have ∼300 copies, great apes 97–138, monkeys 48–75, and nonprimate mammals 1–8 (Popesco et al. 2006; O’Bleness et al. 2012; Zimmer and Montgomery 2015).
Olduvai copy number increase has been implicated in the evolutionary expansion of the human brain, showing a linear association with brain size, neuron number, and several other brain size-related phenotypes among primate species (Dumas and Sikela 2009; Dumas et al. 2012; Keeney et al. 2014, 2015; Zimmer and Montgomery 2015). Among humans, Olduvai copy number (total or subtype specific) has been linked, in a dosage-dependent manner, to brain size, gray matter volume, and cognitive aptitude in healthy populations (Dumas et al. 2012; Davis et al. 2015b), as well as with brain size pathologies (microcephaly/macrocephaly) (Dumas et al. 2012).
These results suggest that the same driver of genomic instability that allowed the evolutionarily recent, rapid, and extreme human-specific Olduvai expansion remains highly active in the human genome.
When a gene segment is repeated many times (copy number variant) it requires special techniques to detect and quantify the differences. While those who do not know better may believe that the human genome has “been sequenced” and its secrets revealed, those who do know better understand that the game has just gotten started.
The mechanisms that led to the anomalous human brain size described in the research study linked above, are still in play. This means that the human brain is still evolving in terms of brain size and cognitive ability, among many other traits. For better or for worse.
The process of human brain evolution is complex and multifactorial. But step by step scientists are unraveling the mystery.
The process of evolution and humanisation of the Homo sapiens brain resulted in a unique and distinct organ with the largest relative volume of any animal species. It also permitted structural reorganisation of tissues and circuits in specific segments and regions. These steps explain the remarkable cognitive abilities of modern humans compared not only with other species in our genus, but also with older members of our own species.
Brain evolution required the coexistence of two adaptation mechanisms. The first involves genetic changes that occur at the species level, and the second occurs at the individual level and involves changes in chromatin organisation or epigenetic changes. The genetic mechanisms include: (a) genetic changes in coding regions that lead to changes in the sequence and activity of existing proteins; (b) duplication and deletion of previously existing genes; (c) changes in gene expression through changes in the regulatory sequences of different genes; and (d) synthesis of non-coding RNAs.
With such a complex process as human brain evolution and development, many things can go wrong. Here are a few of the many ways that genetic development can take a wrong turn:
Inter-individual differences in brain structure are highly heritable1, but identifying the genes that contribute to brain development is challenging. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of brain anatomical structures indicate the influence of many single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with small effect sizes2,3, but the links to brain function remain weak. Evidence is emerging that some rare copy number variants (CNVs)—that is, regions of the genome that are either deleted or duplicated—are associated with both substantial brain size and shape differences; for example, the 7q11.234,5, 22q11.26,7, 15q11.28,9,10,11 and 16p11.2 proximal12,13,14 and distal CNVs15. Many of these CNVs also have a wide-ranging phenotypic impact, including poorer cognitive abilities8,16,17,18 and increased risk of neurological or neurodevelopmental disorders. The strong impact of these CNVs on brain structure and behaviour make them valuable for studies of the molecular mechanisms contributing to aberrant human neurodevelopment.
The 1q21.1 distal CNV has a known large effect on head circumference, as evident from a high prevalence of micro- and macrocephaly in deletion and duplication carriers, respectively19,20,21. This, along with its position in a region that is rich in genes unique to the human lineage (i.e. absent in primates)22,23, makes the 1q21.1 distal CNV particularly interesting for the study of aberrations in human brain structure. However, its relatively low frequency, 1 in ~3400, (deletions) and 1 in 2100 (duplications)8,16, has hampered the study of its effects on brain structure.
The authors in the Nature study above emphasize the neurological and neurodevelopmental disorders that can come about due to “abnormal” copy number variants (CNVs). That is permissible, even in today’s “woke and politically correct” environment in science publishing. What they do not talk about, however, is the potential of these research methods to discover why some breeding populations have exceptionally high cognitive capacities when compared to other breeding populations. That would not be politically correct.
More on the Olduvai domain in the NBPF gene family:
Evolution and comparative genomics
The initial name ‘Neuroblastoma Breakpoint gene Family’ (NBPF) was given because the first identified member of the family was found to be deleted in an individual with neuroblastoma [19]. NBPF gene family members include variable numbers of tandemly repeated DUF1220 domains within their coding sequences. Since the name DUF1220 was initially a working designation assigned by the Pfam database curators, Sikela and van Roy [20] have proposed to rename the domain Olduvai. The different NBPF core duplicon genes are distributed along chromosome 1 in 16 copies, of which 6 are in tandem and 10 are dispersed [21]. The macaque genome has three copies of NBPF genes, while mice and other mammals have no clear orthologs. A possible ancestral gene is PDE4DIP, which includes a single Olduvai domain [22]. The Olduvai domain copy number has particularly expanded in humans. It increased from a single domain in mouse to 30–35 copies in new and old world monkeys and up to 300 domains in humans [22]. Based on sequence similarity, the domain structure of Olduvai can be divided into six primary subtypes including CON 1, 2 and 3 and HLS 1, 2 and 3 [16, 22, 23]. The comparative analysis of Olduvai-domain-containing NBPF genes in primates has shown that NBPF genes evolve under strong positive selection [13, 16].
Several genes have been found to affect the cognitive capacity of humans. Most of the effects of these genes are thought to be quite small. But some genes have been inserted into non-human species with a possible cognition-enhancing result . I am not saying that you should be worried about a “Planet of the Apes” scenario, but you should always keep your bugout bag ready.
Here is more on the mechanism of CNVs in human brain evolution in ordinary language. Note that what they refer to as DUF 1220, is now referred to as “Olduvai.”
Because they can change so fast, CNVs are a very powerful engine of evolution. They allow a species to adapt to an environment very quickly (in evolutionary terms). Knowing this, scientists have looked into human CNVs to see what’s been changing in us, thinking it might give us clues as to what we’ve had to adapt to and maybe even help us understand how we work. What they found was a library of CNV changes — and one mysterious and enigmatic CNV in particular that may finally explain how the human brain got to be so big….
…The most obvious thing to check first is brain size. And sure enough, this rapid increase in DUF1220 copy number has a very strong correlation with both the overall brain size and cortical neuron count in primates, but not with body size. This became even more interesting when researchers sequenced the Neanderthal. Neanderthals are thought to have had larger brains than modern humans, based on skull size. Coincidentally, they also appear to have had ~300 DUF1220 domains.
So researchers began to look for correlations within the human species, and found some. The number of DUF1220s correlates strongly with “cognitive function” (based on total IQ and mathematical aptitude tests), but also with the severity of autism (though it doesn’t seem to actually cause autism). And now, DUF1220 copy number has been linked to schizophrenia, fueling the idea that autism and schizophrenia are diametrically opposed diseases.
It should be noted, though, that it’s really hard to find the differences in DUF1220 between any two humans, unless the difference is really big. You might not think that, in the age of augmented reality and sex education robots that counting would be cutting-edge technology, but it turns out it is. This is because estimating genetic copy number needs some sort of standard to compare it to, which creates a ratio. So if we’re looking at low copy number genes, we can easily find differences of, say, three vs. six. But the difference between 240 and 250 is much more difficult to see.
There is a lot going on in these genetic interactions, which can make the difference between normal cognition, augmented cognition, schizophrenia, autism, mental retardation, etc. Simple juxtaposition of genetic elements can make a huge difference:
Interestingly, most of the Olduvai triplets are adjacent to, and transcriptionally coregulated with, three human-specific NOTCH2NL genes that have been shown to promote cortical neurogenesis.
IQ researcher Volkmar Weiss, author of “IQ Means Inequality,” is a proponent of the view that differences in cognitive abilities between breeding populations of humans comes from a few large-impact genetic and/or epigenetic parts of the genome, rather than deriving from thousands of “microgene” differences. Weiss mentions the Olduvai (DUF 1220) CNV as one possible source of inherited differences in cognitive abilities. Time will tell, although researchers will have to take care to look specifically at abnormal conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and mental retardation.
Once again, the phenomenon discussed above does not arise from a special gene, but rather comes from the distribution and location of specific gene fragments that occur in variable copy numbers with significant differences in number between different species and perhaps between different human breeding populations — besides occurring differently in certain abnormal brain conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, mental retardation, etc.
In the 12 months since Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, the war has turned into an accelerating disaster for Russia. Although Ukrainians are the primary victims of the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression, the war has already left hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dead or wounded. Unprecedented Western sanctions have squeezed the Russian economy, and Moscow’s large-scale mobilization and wartime crackdown on civil society have caused hundreds of thousands of the country’s high-skilled workers to flee abroad. Yet the greatest long-term cost of the war to Russia may be in permanently foreclosing the promise of Russia occupying a peaceful and prosperous place in the twenty-first-century world order.
In the near term, Russia has an uphill struggle. It is losing 1 million people per year, and that decline will accelerate due to the rapid loss of women of child-bearing years. Deaths are up, births are way down.
If you add pandemic mortality to the casualties of war and the flight from mobilisation, Russia lost between 1.9m and 2.8m people in 2020-23 on top of its normal demographic deterioration. That would be even worse than during the disastrous early 2000s, when the population was falling by roughly half a million a year.
What might that mean for Russia’s future? Demography is not always destiny; and Russia did for a while begin to reverse its decline in the mid-2010s. The impact of population change is often complex, as Russia’s military mobilisation shows. The decline in the number of ethnic Russians of call-up age (which is being raised from 18-27 to 21-30) will make it harder for the armed forces to carry out the regular spring draft, which begins in April.
Such complications notwithstanding, the overall effect of demographic decline will be to change Russia profoundly—and for the worse. Most countries which have suffered population falls have managed to avoid big social upheavals. Russia may be different. Its population is falling unusually fast and may drop to 130m by mid-century. The decline is associated with increased misery: the life expectancy at birth of Russian males plummeted from 68.8 in 2019 to 64.2 in 2021, partly because of covid, partly from alcohol-related disease. Russian men now die six years earlier than men in Bangladesh and 18 years earlier than men in Japan.
If the looming Russian Civil War occurs as expected, Russia’s population loss will accelerate even faster, as besides the deaths due to war, any Russians with skills will immediately leave the country. China may see an opportunity to fill the vacuum, of course, to say nothing of an opportunity to purchase large numbers of nuclear warheads on the cheap.
Russia without Russians would represent a lot of land and a lot of resources without anyone to exploit them, except perhaps the Chinese. Of course, most of Russia has never been occupied by actual Russians.
Russian empire has always been a combination of various territories and peoples kept together by force, being distinguished by its strict limitation on the development of “horizontal ties” in establishing overall rule from the center. As the Russian commentator points out, “In seeking to subordinate everything to a ‘vertical’ administration, its imperial ruling class interfered directly in the natural rise of horizontal ties among the various parts of the empire” (Kasparov.ru, March 6). However, the Russian empire did something more: it deformed the Russian nation by compensating for its subordination by encouraging it to feel superior to all others. __ Source
Moscow is the real country. Everything else is a collection of buffer colonies meant to feed and protect Moscow from invasion. The people of Moscow have a feeling of outward superiority, while secretly fearing that Russia is inferior, and uncultured.
Moscow invaded Ukraine a year ago in the effort to add more colonial buffer and more colonial people. But now Russia has lost 200,000 dead in that war, and roughly another 100,000 wounded, captured, and deserted. These young Russians are lost to the empire, as are any progeny they may have had.
Which nation will collapse soonest: Russia or China? China has a lot more people, a larger and more modern military, and a stronger manufacturing base. With no Russians in the way, China will expand into Siberia in the effort to absorb Russian resources — in a last gasp effort to extend the life of the communist state.
All of the neighbors of China and Russia want those countries to fail, and will not hesitate to strip them of their wealth once they are no longer capable of bullying the sovereign nations of their respective regions.
How Russia Rebuilds to Be Better Than Before
Note: Russia = Moscow = Organized Crime
The crime mob in Russia occupies three main levels: top, middle, bottom. The top level is dominated by former officials of the USSR and close associates. The middle layer is associated with local and regional governments and oligarchs. The bottom layer is the thugs and enforcers, who are the ones you usually think of when contemplating the Russian Mafia.
The following policy suggestions are given with the above in mind (along with the purge mentality existing inside Russia since long before the Bolsheviks), containing just a touch of the satirical element:
First, depose all former officials of the USSR and execute them. These are the corrupt people that seized Russian resource wealth and forced ordinary Russians to live on crumbs without reliable health care or civil rights.
Next, depose all government officials at all levels and execute them. These are the corrupt people that kowtowed to the corrupt former officials of the USSR, and who held the populations down as third world colonies for so long.
Next, strip the non-governmental oligarchs of all their wealth and execute them and their associates. These are the mafia dons of Russia who bled Russia and the colonies dry for so many years.
Next take the state propagandists of Russian media and execute them. These are traitors to the people, who did the dirty work of fooling and misleading the people away from the truth.
Next, give the wealth and power of Russia to ordinary Russians who will finally be able to see reality, without the smokescreen of propaganda blinding them. With clear vision they will be able to take Russia in the direction that it needs to go.
Keep in mind that Moscow is Russia and Russia is Moscow. Everything else is colonies, and in the brave new world the colonies will also have the right to go their own way apart from Moscow.
In the new world, the distorted proportions of the empire will be normalized and rectified. China will be another issue, for another day.
The risk of territorial secession would add to that of political secession. There is no real Russian nation, according to political scientist Sergueï Medvedev: “there is just a population governed by a State.” The country now comprises 89 federal subjects, including 21 non-Slavic autonomous republics. Russian citizens (Rossiiskii) are not all ethnic Russians (Russkii), and the proportion of ethnic Russians (approximately 80 percent today) is on the decline. The other main nationalities – notably the Tatars, the Bashkirs, the Chuvash, and the Chechens – are experiencing population growth. As is well known, the poorest populations, often from remote areas, contribute disproportionately to the country’s military; to the point that, as in past empires, they have a sense of serving as cannon fodder for the central government.
The average IQ of the US population is in decline. I am not just talking about the inhabitants of the White House in Washington, D.C. or the members of the press. Unfortunately, the US is losing its “smart fraction” of people who solve the most difficult problems.
Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning.
Dysgenic mating accounts for a growing portion of new births, and dysgenic immigration provides further momentum to the decline in average population IQ. How long has this decline been going on? For at least 100 years, although the “phantom Flynn effect” caused the decline to be obscured for a time in the late 20th century and early 21st.
The US Has a Higher Order Advantage Providing Momentum
Despite the ongoing decline in average population IQ, the US has a natural advantage which draws high-IQ persons from other nations and which allows for higher productivity despite marginal drops in average IQ.
This US advantage is on a higher logical level than mere natural resource deposits — such as you find in Saudi Arabia, Russia, or Congo. Natural resource wealth is subject to the “natural resource curse,” The US has abundant natural resources, but it has much more. The added advantages discussed in the video above, reveal why the US can leverage its natural resources into greater wealth and power.
In addition, the US had a highly intelligent and resourceful “founder population,” which was not averse to large scale procreation. During the 1800s, the US went from a poor, weak colonial conglomerate to being the world’s wealthiest nation — despite a ruinous civil war in the middle of the century.
But now the US is experiencing a decline in average population IQ, due to low birth rates in its most intelligent and resourceful people. All of the advantages of US geography, climate, and founder population cannot overcome the disadvantages of declining IQ, declining executive function, declining resourcefulness and curiosity, and destructive governmental and societal trends that grow directly out of a less intelligent population.
But all of that is in the manner of discussing some of the handicaps in the upcoming global game of thrones. It in no way determines the outcome of the game. The game must be played out. America’s enduring strengths are many, and in some ways America is still the only game in town [in the world].
The 20th century saw a huge wave of urbanisation in the US and many other parts of the world. Cities are locations of wealth, production, innovation, and commerce. When an enemy wants to attack a nation, it often focuses on the cities. But urban conflicts are “long, bloody, and destructive affairs of attrition.” This is what we have to look forward to, at least most of the people who are living in or near cities.
Russia is a nation experiencing rapid dysgenics — probably much faster and larger in scope than the US. Perhaps leaders in the Kremlin could not imagine a better way to solve their problems than a war of mutual cataclysm, and that might reflect a loss of Russia’s smart fraction as well as any other measure.
China has many similar problems as Russia — particularly a top-down personality cult leadership that attempts to exert too much control over sectors of society that perform best when left alone by ham handed bureaucrats and dictators. And a demographic crisis, of course. In addition, China’s air-water-soil-food resources are so badly poisoned and contaminated that future generations of mainland Chinese will be badly damaged by the greed for power of contemporary Chinese leaders. If China goes to war over Taiwan, its home-grown problems will manifest in hundreds of destructive ways.
The US and the west have dysgenics, climate apocalypse, and green energy transition delusions to deal with. These “problems” will handicap the productivity and real-problem solving capacities of the US and the west for decades to come. But China and Russia have genuinely real and crippling problems caused largely by dysfunctional governments, problems such as those that led ultimately to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. With Putin’s war in Ukraine, and possibly Xi’s war in Taiwan, those two superpowers in waiting will meet their worst enemies: themselves.
“…At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about 3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.”…
The US has several centuries worth of coal underground, but as the graph above shows, coal use in the US has dropped remarkably over the past century. Fortunately, US natural gas reserves have been more than adequate to allow that cleaner fuel to make up the difference. If you squint your eyes, you may be able to see the “contribution” of wind & solar in green above.
Intelligent energy and natural resource analysts understand that wind & solar cannot generate enough reliable electric power to supply a modern, intensely electrified society. And yet many politicians persist in trying to require their constituencies to adopt a total dependency on those unreliable energy sources. Large numbers of corporate journalists, politically connected opportunists, and academic shills support those politicians in their drive to hamstring their own societies.
Governments can spend huge quantities of money in the attempt to force a particular type of energy onto the public. Here are some of the devious ways that governments try to create an uneven playing field:
Direct subsidies. This subsidy could be a direct cash grant from a government department or agency
Tax incentives. These are special tax breaks (credits) or deductions targeted at specific types of electrical generation facilities
Loan guarantees. A loan guarantee removes risk from the lender, when a government department or agency guarantees fulfilment of loan terms, making it easier for lenders to fund projects that are targeted by such legislation or regulation
“First-use” mandates. Typically, regulators will require grid managers to accept electricity sold by beneficiaries of these mandates before any other generation facility. First-use mandates ensure that an IVRE can sell its power whenever it can produce it.
“Floor-price”/minimum price mandates. Sometimes called “mandated feed-in tariffs,” these mandates can either be written directly into law (legislative) or required by regulatory bodies. Either way, such mandates require that beneficiaries are paid a minimum price for the electricity they produce, regardless of whether the price is aligned with market demand or not.
In summary:
Subsidies: often a combination of cash, favorable loans, and tax breaks
Guaranteed Demand: mandates require EMMs to buy electrons from EP-IVRs in front of all other EPs, ensuring that EP-IVRs sell every electron they can produce
Guaranteed minimum pricing: EP-IVRs are guaranteed a minimum price for every electron they can sell, affecting how much ECLs or ERs must pay to EP-IVRs over other EPs
The jagged graph above is typical for wind generation across most relatively windy locations. Anyone who understands the power grid will instantly see the danger for brownouts, blackouts, and grid collapse if utilities do not maintain exorbitantly expensive backup systems that are constantly ready to step in and make up for the instantaneous shortcomings of wind, as well as to be able to shut off instantly to allow wind power to take precedence when the wind is blowing adequately.
Besides the absurd expense involved in maintaining backup reliability to make the unreliable wind systems workable, all constituencies who try such schemes eventually see their reliable suppliers of power (gas, coal, diesel, sometimes nuclear) go out of business and quit, due to the immense wear and tear and other hidden costs with being forced to act as “backup systems” to unreliable wind.
There are two useful videos that demonstrate the impossibility of relying on wind & solar over the ong term:
Wind & Solar devices last about 20 years, compared to fossil fuels generators that last about 60 years and nuclear facilities that last from 80 to 100 years. This means that wind & solar devices must be replaced frequently. But since their manufacture requires hugely expensive materials and large amounts of energy, it is not clear that an all-wind & solar power grid could survive longer than 20 years!
The above linked video explains why wind and solar schemes cannot produce enough electric power to produce duplicate replacements for themselves — much less produce enough electric power to run a society besides. As long as there is plentiful electric power from nuclear, hydro, and fossil fuels generators, society can adopt small portions of wind & solar as “virtuous hobbies,” without suffering too much as a result. But once societies try surviving on mostly wind & solar, they will discover the pain that is felt by anyone who falls on his own sword.
The above linked video explains in excruciating detail why the much-ballyhooed energy transition will be impossible to achieve. The problem in this case is in the exponential growth in natural resource demands and in the impossibly complex supply chains within unstable political regimes. Watch it and see all the problems that are being glossed over by the rah! rah! boys of the green cheerleader brigade.
Another likely difficulty in the grand green energy transition is likely to be an unmanageable increase in complexity on several scales. The article describes some of the problems with newer higher levels of complexity that will be involved when trying to force societies to rely exclusively on EVs for transportation and on wind & solar for electric power.
Viewed from Mt. Olympus, the entire drive to push nations to a significant reliance on EVs and wind & solar energy, is more than just an attempt to channel many $trillions to politically connected investors and entrepreneurs — although it is certainly that. No, given the rather obvious potentially catastrophic impacts on societies that this transition would cause, it seems likely from up here that the foul ideology of “radical population downsizing” has reached the topmost levels of government across the western world. Many of the organizations that have been pushing radical human population downsizing have long received funding from Russia, China, and other enemies of western freedoms and western prosperity. It does not seem coincidental that at this time Russia and China see these suicidal thought trends in the west as being something of a lifeline for the survival of their own corrupt and demographically challenged societies. An investment that is finally paying off, so to speak.
Try to learn all you can about the twisting and intersecting pathways of global green transitions, climate apocalypticism, and western woke-ism. The corporate media is certainly all-in, as are western universities, many western corporations, and most western governments.
Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you!
The future survival of modern societies is balanced on a razor’s edge. Those societies that learn to distinguish between competence and expertise are most likely to survive and prosper. It is not clear that most modern societies will make the cut.
Competence is Demonstrated in Real World Outcomes
Objective, Outcome based
Does the bridge collapse, or does it hold its rated weight over its rated lifetime?
Do most patients survive the surgery with a favorable outcome?
Does the airplane fly safely at rated speeds/loads and over the specified range?
Is the performance of the device, procedure, object, or engineered ensemble up to specifications?
Expertise is Usually Claimed on the Basis of Credentials
Subjective, Consensual, Not Based on Outcomes
In the modern world, claims of expertise are usually based upon credentials, including university degrees, positions in government, authorship of books or articles, or other relatively subjective foundations of merit.
In government, media, academia, and other fudge factories of society, credential-based expertise is sacrosanct — because it can be fudged and spun till the cows come home. The same is true in law, another fudge factory of modern societies. This is one reason crime rates are rising and quality of life is falling in so many large urban areas with woke prosecutors.
In business, we find examples of expertise-without-competence in the Enron debacle, the subprime collapse of 2008-2009, FTX and several other cryptocurrencies, and in the handling of the Wuhan originated Covid pandemic over most countries of the western world. Whenever expertise is valued over competence, disasters will repeat.
Expertise is largely subjective, as currently used. Competence is objectively visible in the real world.
Ideally Competence and Expertise are Combined
It is best if competence and expertise can be combined in the same person. If not in the same person, then in the same team or the same organization. In mainstream academia, corporate media, and government, expertise is often faked or overstated, and in the absence of demonstrable competence can usually be seen as the pretense that it is. But in persons such as Elon Musk, competence can be demonstrated in his breakaway space launch systems and in some of his improved EV subsystems. This combined with his “wealth on paper” allows him to do things such as take over Twitter and roll back much of the political-social censorship that had plagued the US for over a decade. Musk gained a lot of credibility (expertise valuation) due to his competence in specific areas along with his paper wealth.
Most of Musk’s vocal opponents from inside and outside of Twitter, lacked any demonstrable competence in any field, making any claims of authority or expertise on their part to ring hollow.
Much of Ukraine’s defense capacity has relocated to places that Russia will not bomb without risking all out war with NATO. Ukraine was always the place where the cleverest technologies were devised and produced, out of all the USSR. Without Ukraine, Russia is lacking the best of what made the USSR intimidating and feared.
Russia’s Existential Dilemma:
Russia is facing a demographic time bomb that will make it harder to wage war and, in the long run, keep its ailing economy going.
Sending waves of young men onto the battlefield, compounded by emigration, will result in tens of thousands of fewer births and hasten an already long-term decline in birth rates.
Alexey Raksha, an independent Russian demographer, says the Russian battlefield casualty numbers may not sound a lot for a country of 145 million people, but he believes the war will leave deep scars on an already fragile economy.
“If there are no soldiers, it means there are no men. No men, no sex. No sex, no children. It’s very simple,” he says. “But we also don’t know what the psychological impact is going to be on these people, which will also cause the number of births to decline.”
In the first few months of 2022, about 4 million Russians left the country. In the last 6 months of the year roughly another million left in response to mobilisation. Prior to 2022, we thought that most of those who could leave, had already left. But clearly, each person in Russia has his own tolerance point that determines whether he finally makes the decision to go.
Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Russia has been ruled by organized criminal forces descended largely from the security forces of the former USSR. The rise of Putin — first in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow — was entirely consistent with this criminal ascent to power of former KGB and other security officials.
Urban Decline in US Parallels National Decline in Russia
The decline of American cities under quasi criminal corrupt and incompetent local governments runs in parallel with the ongoing decline and collapse of the country of Russia. Americans are willing to air the dirty laundry for the world to see. In Russia one must wait for the entire nation to collapse before one can sift through the ruins. In Russia, political connections count above competence. The same is true in many large US cities in rapid decline due to ideological wokeness.
Thanks to Putin’s erratic decision making, that time of reckoning for Russia is drawing closer.
An eye-opening look inside the psychology of Russia and its leadership:
A Hunger to Dominate Like a Vampire
Nominally, the country of Russia occupies over 17 million square kilometers of land, a massive area. But if you understand that the real country is Moscow, and the rest of the country is colonial possessions, you will know that the real land area of Russia is only about 2,500 square kilometers — a much smaller area.
The colonies surrounding Moscow are simply buffer zones which provide a world-class defensive perimeter for most of the year. This perimeter has exhausted the armies of Napoleon and Hitler, and would probably inhibit the plans of more contemporary invaders — if there were any to be found.
A year ago, Vladimir Putin raised the banner of Peter the Great in order to expand Russia’s colonial territories to encompass all of Ukraine, through violent conquest. But the going has been a little slow for Russian armies, and Russian propaganda seems the most potent weapon that Moscow can wield, at the moment.
Most of the Russian colonies are wastelands, either too dry, too cold, too remote, or too thinly inhabited to provide much of a living. But they serve as a buffer zone to keep most of the greediest outsiders outside of Moscow and its immediate surroundings.
From the 18th century onward, Moscow added most of its colonies to its east, Siberia and the Far East. In the 20th century Moscow added some western colonies and tributaries, but then lost most of them when the Warsaw Pact dissolved, and then later when the USSR collapsed.
Last year, Putin imagined himself as Peter the Great, and set out to retake some of the old colonies. But there is such a thing as “a colony too far.” Moscow can only support and defend so much territory in its depleted state. Putin’s calculations before invading Ukraine were badly done.
Empires have limited lifespans. Many different events can trigger the final cataclysm of decline, but imperial overreach in the face of decline is probably one of the most common. Russia was never that great, but for a long time it was able to convince the world that it was very large. Now that we know that Russia is only 2500 square kilometers rather than 17 million kilometers, the true dimensions of the country can be better apprehended.
Yes, judging by its political class and by its elites in media, academia, and corporate culture, the US is in serious trouble. It doesn’t take a space alien to see that. A number of the global cities with highest homicide rates are in the US. And with political leaders like Biden and the mayors of most large US cities, expect some of those murder rates to get worse as intellectual and moral decay sweeps across the “woke lands”.
But what about the main US global rivals, China and Russia? According to reliable sources, they are not doing so well themselves.
The only shocking thing about the above report is how deeply corrupt the IMF and World Bank have become in supporting the national propaganda of the mafia state in Moscow. You know Putin is lying because his mouth is open and is making noises. Or, at least someone who looks a lot like Putin.
What about China? Demographically, China has a lot more people, and the average IQ of the Chinese people is about 5 IQ points higher than the average IQ of the Russian population. You might think that China would last a lot longer than Russia — at least long enough to grab a big piece of Siberia!
Peter Zeihan recently told Joe Rogan that China has about 10 more years before it must either disintegrate — as has often happened throughout history — or it must come under new management.
Predicting anything is very tricky, but especially predicting the future. Talk to those who have been predicting peak oil, the second coming, environmental collapse, climate apocalypse, etc. for the past 150 years!
We Almost Lost Texas
Texas has a power grid that is largely separated from the power grids of the rest of North America. If the entire Texas power grid went dark — as it almost did in a recent winter — it might take several weeks to get it back up. And all the wind & solar installations in the world would not help raise Texas from the dead. Low grade energy from wind & solar farms cannot black start a total grid collapse.
He gets beaten to within an inch of his life, goes to jail.
When she cried for help, she recalled, neighbors came. “They all came out to help me,” she said. The suspect ran across the street but was caught by the neighbors, who pummeled him.
“They caught him and I said, ‘oh, you going to jail today. You definitely going to jail, yes you are,’” the grandmother said.
“And they said it’s a wonder he wasn’t dead,” she declared. “On 22nd Street? He must didn’t know where he was. Nobody has seen this boy before.”DW
The attempted carjack happened in the Southeast neighborhood of Washington, DC, a neighborhood that is almost 80% black. If Washington DC were a state, it would have the second highest rate of carjackings of all US states. Colorado has the most. California is third.
Why Do Black Teens Carjack, Sometimes Killing Victim?
Many of these young criminals will tell you that it’s all a game to them. It’s the thrill and the power over other people.
The part that has researchers worried isn’t just the increase in violent carjackings but the age of the alleged criminals. Kids as young as 11-years-old have been arrested.
“They are children,” Robert J. Contee III, chief of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, said at a news conference in early February about a carjacking task force formed with the police in a neighboring county.Source
The video game Grand Theft Auto is popular among poorly supervised kids as young as four or five. Playing the game can make kids feel invincible, the more people they kill. This sense of invincibility can accompany immature kids when they graduate to real world crimes, which happens much sooner for some than others.
Bad behavior by children is not just seen on the streets, of course. It is seen everyday in the classrooms and hallways of government schools.
Harry Tupuola quit his job as a security guard at Marina in September. He and other current and former staffers say students are allowed to roam the halls without attending class.
“They pretty much control the school and can do whatever they want,” he said. “They don’t want to expel the kids because it looks bad for the admins. They try to transfer them or get them in special ed — you know, brush them under the rug and just try to deal with them til the rest of the year when they graduate, so they (the administrators) don’t have blemishes on their school record.”
“Many students in my class work hard and want to get an education,” said a teacher, who insisted on anonymity. “They want me to stop the kids who are constantly disrupting class, but I can’t. . . . We aren’t preventing those kids from going to prison; we’re just repeating the cycle of poverty and violence in a different way.”San Francisco Schools Worse than Ukraine
When these violent “students” graduate, the ones that don’t land on the streets sometimes go on to schools of higher ed where they are offered indoctrination into grievance, often into violent forms of grievance for which they will get paid. Think of it as a dark career choice subsidized by your tax dollars and incorporated into a system of training by university faculty and staff.
There are very good reasons why blacks commit violent crimes at higher rates and tend to underachieve in schools while misbehaving in violent ways. Blacks commit more crimes proportionately and occupy more prison and jail space, proportionately.
75% of black children are illegitimate, raised without fathers — often by grandmothers when the birth mothers are otherwise occupied. It is often not a good start in life, especially if it is taking place in the inner city. If the child is exceptional with a high IQ, and performs well in school, he will probably be persecuted by other blacks for being “too white.”
Being raised in a bad environment tends to accentuate any genetic problems that black children are born with — particularly those that lead to antisocial behaviors and that limit executive functions and IQ.
It is bad enough to have a below-average IQ, but if one’s genetics also predispose him to violent and impulsive behaviors, the long range life trajectory can begin to look very grim.
In the US, a “woke ideology” in high government places is leading to the rapid decay of once-beautiful cities.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this where federal election level money and resources are brought to bear and coordinated to effectively flip local level races where campaign finance restrictions make it almost impossible to counter,” said Anderson, adding that conservative opponents are hamstrung by local campaign finance laws that Soros doesn’t have to abide by because he is using independent expenditures and not directly coordinating with the campaigns.
Critics say the policies of Soros-funded DAs, which have included abolishing bail and, in the case of Chicago, placing hundreds of violent criminals on electronic tracking systems, have led to a spike in crime throughout the country. According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report released in September, the country saw a 30 percent increase in homicides in 2020 — the largest single-year spike since they began recording crime statistics 60 years ago. The report also saw a 24 percent decrease in arrests across the country.
This year, Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million, had more homicides than New York and Los Angeles, the country’s two largest cities. The city recorded 521 homicides — the highest since 1990 — compared to 443 in New York and 352 in Los Angeles. Chicago, the country’s third largest city, registered the highest number of homicides at 739, up three percent from the previous year. An Engineered Decline
There is not much a city or state can do about dysfunctional demographics other than mitigation. But when governmental institutions are taken over by ideologues who intentionally make conditions worse for those they are claiming to help, it is up to voters to reverse the decline as quickly as possible. If the voting population of the jurisdiction is incapable for whatever reason of understanding the problem, then the decline may be irreversible.
Urban decay (also known as urban rot, urban death or urban blight) is the sociological process by which a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. There is no single process that leads to urban decay which is why it can be hard to encapsulate its magnitude.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, urban decay has been a phenomenon associated with some Western cities, especially in North America and parts of Europe. Cities have experienced population flights to the suburbs and exurbcommuter towns; often in the form of white flight.[1] Another characteristic of urban decay is blight – the visual, psychological, and physical effects of living among empty lots, buildings, and condemned houses.
Urban decay has no single cause. It results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions, including the city’s urban planning decisions, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeways and railroad lines that bypass or run through the area,[2] depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining,[3] and immigration restrictions.[4]
What we are seeing is the wholesale destruction of quality of life based partly on dysgenic population trends, partly on corruption, and partly on ideological incompetence and sabotage in high places. It is not uncommon for the three trends to work together.
Violent carjackings by black teens is one troubling element of urban decay. But there are many others that should trouble us. It is not enough just to move away from the problem, or to blame much of the decay on political opponents — as justified as the blame may be.
An abundant and expansive human future will require more than avoidance of problems and placing much of the blame where it obviously lies. It will require ingenious and peaceful action, much of it below the radar.
Science fiction fans of Frank Herbert’s Dune will remember the renowned warriors from Salusa Secundus, the feared Sardaukar. In all the known universe only the Fremen on Arrakis possessed the skills and mindset to defeat the Sardaukar.
The abilities of the Sardaukar were largely attributed to the harsh environment and brutal discipline they were exposed to on planet Salusa Secundus, the Corrino prison planet. Only the Fremen, raised in the fanatical warrior culture and merciless desert environment of Arrakis, were capable of matching the Sardaukar. Fremen typically scorned Harkonnen soldiers as cowardly and weak, but judged that the Sardaukar fought well, and even respected them to some degree.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is turning the formerly fertile sovereign nation into a hellscape of devastation and death. Civilian dwellings and infrastructure are being pounded to dust by a fiery flood of indifferent Russian artillery, rockets, and bombs.
You might expect modern Ukrainian men — European men after all — to flee the brutal fires in a unanimous attempt to escape death and torture from the vicious hordes to the East. Instead we see Ukrainian men, women, and boys rushing to join the fight against the now-hated invader.
Mothers and the very young they care for, have largely fled the battlefield — for now. But new generations of warriors are growing up, and they are motivated every night by scenes of hellish battle, to acquire the skills they need to defeat and repel the outsider who has inexplicably chosen to ravage their sacred homeland.
Defenders Have Natural Reason to Fight
From the beginning it has been clear that the advantage of motivation has rested with the Ukrainians. This advantage can only grow, as the home defenders witness the depravity of the foreign invaders on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the invaders still have no rational explanation for why their country has sent them to this foreign land to fight, rape, torture, and kill people who look and talk a lot like themselves.
This same motivation to toughen and train for a deadly battle against Russia pervades all of the countries in the region. They believe that in order to keep the Russian marauder out of their own countries, they should help Ukraine to stop and repel Russia before its conquests can grow.
Most of Russia’s attention is currently focused on its ruthless war in Ukraine, but Putin has not lost sight of the bigger objectives. In fact, in Russia’s view, success in Ukraine serves as a major stepping stone for reaching further goals.
Russia’s long-term strategic aims remain unchanged: to dissolve the rules-based world order. Putin has written and talked about this for the past 15 years, and Russia’s actions have brutally proved it. Re-establishing spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and recreating buffer zones are the key steps in turning the current international order around for Russia. This is the most important reason why Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, and why similar scenarios have unfolded
Is Russia the unhealthiest country on Earth? No, that would be China. But fewer nations have tried so hard to pollute their air, water, soil, and countryside like the Russians have done, over the past century or more. Whether from industrial waste, from biowarfare and nuclear labs, leaky nuclear reactors, or other sources of dangerous toxins, Russia is a global center of pollution — just like China.
But there are parts of Russia well East of the Urals that are still relatively pristine. That is why China has its greedy eyes on Siberia. And the way Putin is pissing away the wealth and blood of Russia in Ukraine, it may not be long before China can make its move.
You might think that all the deadly poisons permeating the environment of Russia should turn Russian boys into Sardaukar, but unfortunately it is only weakening them and making them unfit for work, combat, or any productive endeavor beyond perhaps drug addiction and alcoholism.
It is worth noting that, for example, in Sweden and Switzerland, 90% of men live to this age. In Russia, alcoholism, smoking, and drugs are considered the main factors of such a high mortality rate. __ Source
Death rates are up, birth rates are down. Disregarding the travels to and from Russia of its citizens, in absolute terms Russia is losing about 1 million ethnic Russians to excess deaths over births, every year.
Russia has plenty of propaganda, but people cannot live on propaganda for long, nor can propaganda raise dead Russians from the grave.
Since Russian forces extended the invasion of Ukraine last February, between 5 and 10 million Russians left the country to avoid the unpleasantness of war — including conscription, repression, and lack of profitable employment. Russia has lost well over 100,000 dead in the fighting, and another 150,000 have been wounded, captured, mutinied, or deserted.
Russia is trying to recoup some of its population losses by kidnapping Ukrainians from the temporarily Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. Russia’s orphanages are famous for the appalling conditions that prevail there. Russia’s “baby-drop” method of infant abandonment is famous around the world. Russians do not tend to adopt their many abandoned children, but allow them to languish in degrading conditions in abusive orphanages.
Russia’s people are slipping away, one way or another, and when they are replaced by Muslims from central Asia, these Muslims do not see the Russian empire the same way as the old, dying ethnic Russians that they are replacing. Russia’s ongoing loss of power and prestige has just begun.
Russia’s population pyramid is distinctly inverted. Putin planned to annex a nation of 44 million people into Russia, enriching the decrepit and corrupt empire with young blood and rich natural resources. But the Kremlin has lost that hope and is reduced to crushing Ukrainian civilian infrastructure using long range missiles and suicide drones.
Russia will learn that the devastation it serves to its cousins in Ukraine can be returned to mother Russia with a vengeance. The reciprocal crushing of Russia will be regrettable, but predictable.
Most Russians — if given accurate information — would be less than enthusiastic about sending their sons to conduct a self-defeating genocidal style war against their Slavic cousins. Slavic cousins who will neither forgive nor forget.
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies details how societies grow in complexity as they solve problems that allow them to prosper. But if a society grows beyond its ability to maintain the level of complexity that sustains it, it will tend to “decomplexify” or collapse.
Collapse = A society can be said to collapse when it undergoes a rapid and substantial loss of an established level of socio-political complexity. This, according to Tainter, is always a political process. It stems from the destruction and decay of social organisations and institutions. He gives a list of the kinds of things you can expect to see less of in a society undergoing collapse. These include: less social stratification and differentiation, less economic specialisation, less centralised control, less trading and economic activity and less production of ‘cultural epiphenomena’ such as monuments, buildings, and artworks (Tainter 1988, 4)
Every Prosperous Nation Today is Caught in a Technology Trap
The complex problems of modern societies are not being solved by average individuals. They are being solved by their most intelligent residents who often operate at a far higher cognitive level than 99% of their fellow citizens and residents. This means that the scientific and technological solutions to more and more complex problems will remain incomprehensible to most citizens of advanced countries.
When the underpinnings of the complex machinery of society breaks down, if decomplexification occurs too rapidly it may not be possible for society to recover.
In advanced societies, intelligent women are choosing not to procreate. In addition, too often immigration is not restricted to people who are cognitively capable of sustaining or improving an advanced society’s current average population IQ. This means that both native births and immigration often work together to lower national average IQ. So, when collapse takes place, the new population will be even less able to exhibit resilience in the face of challenge.
The ability to master complexity varies with a person’s IQ, executive functions, and levels of curiosity and creativity. The graph of “occupation vs. IQ” below illustrates the IQ demands of various occupations. The average population IQ of some nations is too low to provide many individuals to perform the high-end occupations, and thus those nations have lower GDP and lower complexity.
This graph was adapted from Figure 12 of Hauser, Robert M. 2002. “Meritocracy, cognitive ability, and the sources of occupational success.” CDE Working Paper 98-07 (rev). Center for Demography and Ecology, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, Wisconsin. The figure is labelled “Wisconsin Men’s Henmon-Nelson IQ Distributions for 1992-94 Occupation Groups with 30 Cases or More” and is found at http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/cde/cdewp/98-07.pdf. taken from IQ Comparison Site
When a society adopts an unnecessarily complex and costly solution to a problem, it makes itself more vulnerable to collapse. An example would be the current political mandates in western countries to rely more and more exclusively on wind & solar energy for national power grids. Or consider the unbelievably (impossibly) complex supply chains that are required to fulfill government mandates to adopt an all-EV automotive fleet. Another example might be a society that bans the use of physical cash in favor of electronic forms of money — forms of money that evaporate when the electricity supply disappears. In fact, decomplexification occurs in rapid cascades when electrical power supply comes under threat.
Some solutions to problems contribute to societal fragility, and others can contribute to anti-fragility or resilience. In recent years, western governments and societies have tended to choose solutions leading to greater vulnerability to collapse.
As global and national average IQs continue to drop, the overall capacity for resilience and recovery declines. An IQ of 115 is close to the minimum for a person to thrive in a rigorous 4 year college program. As the supply of viable students drops, the innovation that comes from universities will decline.
But as global IQ drops, eventually the smart fraction of the human population will be too small to solve the problems of the world that are growing in number and complexity.
It is impossible to make a reliable prediction as to when and why the modern human edifice of complexity will collapse. It will probably not happen everywhere all at once, just as “Rome” did not collapse everywhere and at once.
Any areas that can simplify their supply chains for critical infrastructures and vital industries, will lower their exposure to complexity risk.
If North America simplifies its supply chains — as Peter Zeihan is predicting — the rate of collapse in Africa and Asia is likely to accelerate quickly, while collapse would happen less quickly in North America and allied countries (Japan, UK, Australia, Colombia, and perhaps Chile). Europe’s rate of collapse would fall somewhere between, and South American collapse would vary with the level of economic cooperation with North America.
The benefit of understanding the processes upholding our worlds, is that it becomes more difficult for our overlords to bamboozle and hornswoggle us. If we allow ourselves to be deceived over some particular issues, we may be signing our own death warrants, and those of our descendants.
Our modern existence is built upon affordable and reliable electric power and fuels. If those things are removed, the conditions allowing our existence begin to crumble. Currently, the leaders of most modern societies are attempting to cram down our throats particular energy and transportation policies that will not only bring ruin upon our societies — they will also make it difficult or impossible to recover from that ruin.
How can the forceful imposition of green energy bring ruin to a vibrant western society? By eliminating energy systems that allow societies to thrive, and replacing them with energy systems that cannot sustain modern life. To understand how green energy is a powerful force of destruction, one has to understand a few key concepts. Otherwise you run the risk of being talked into killing yourself unwittingly, along with everything and everyone you love.
EROI stands for energy return on investment. Once we understand the huge underlying investment behind green energy, we can see how relying on wind & solar for our electric power needs will trigger a cascading loss of infrastructure across societies.
Wind & solar have such a low EROI that they do not produce enough energy to replace themselves. Since wind & solar generators only last about 20 years on a generous average, they must be replaced frequently — but if all we have are wind & solar, our electric generation days are numbered once we commit to all wind & solar. Fossil fuel and nuclear plants last 60 to 90 years or more, and produce multiples of energy amounts in EROI to replace themselves.
In the next video, we are given a detailed look at the materials that are required to build enough wind and solar energy devices to bring about a green energy transition. It is a very ugly and painful lesson, for those with the fortitude and attention span to learn it:
Simply put, there will not be enough minerals to feed all of these green energy dreams, and the “unstoppable force” of green energy promotion will be hitting the “immovable object” of material reality very, very soon.
The following video looks at congressional testimony before the US Congress from the last decade. It is a simple, clear verbal explanation of some of the problems faced when trying to integrate intermittent unpredictable energy into a life-or-death critical electric power grid.
Conventional power generation from coal, gas, nuclear etc. is stable and reliable. But when political ideologues force unreliable energy sources onto the power grid, chaos will ensue. Germany and California are learning a parallel lesson in the toxicity of intermittent energy, and their societies are beginning to feel the pain. Australia and Spain have committed similar errors. Denmark is lucky to be so close to Scandinavian hydroelectric power, or it would be feeling the pain as well.
Because wind & solar cannot be counted on to provide power-on-demand, an entire parallel energy generating infrastructure must be built and maintained at considerable cost to society. This forced redundancy is one of several reasons why wind & solar drive up the costs of electric power wherever they are mandated by governments. More and more consumers in Europe and California are being faced with hard and sometimes devastating choices when it is time to pay the monthly power bill.
The Issue of Complexity Hits the Wind & Solar Industry
Actuary Gail Tverberg is a good data analyst. When the data is put in front of her, she does a good job of explaining it to the general reader. Her latest posting on her blog deals with the issue of “complexity” as it relates to the green quest to replace all fossil fuels and nuclear power with wind & solar energy.
Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.
A relatively low level of complexity, such as the complexity embodied in a new hydroelectric dam, can sometimes be used to solve energy problems, but we cannot expect ever-higher levels of complexity to always be achievable.
According to the anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his well-known book,The Collapse of Complex Societies, there are diminishing returns to added complexity. In other words, the most beneficial innovations tend to be found first. Later innovations tend to be less helpful. Eventually the energy cost of added complexity becomes too high, relative to the benefit provided.
The reason I consider electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to be much more complex than, say, electricity from hydroelectric plants, or from fossil fuel plants, is because the output from the devices is further from what is needed to fill the demands of the electricity system we currently have operating. Wind and solar generation need complexity to fix their intermittency problems.
Gail is quite correct that electric energy from wind & solar is further from what is needed to meet the demands of the operating power grid. The power grid runs optimally when synchronous rotating machines generate high voltage AC power at specific frequencies which can be transformed for transmission and distribution to users. Wind and Solar are nothing like what the grid needs, in fact the kind of intermittent low-grade energy that comes from wind & solar is toxic and damaging to the electric power system and ultimately damaging to the environment.
(Parenthetical note: Gail is an active participant in the peak oil community, and has been for decades. Peak oil, like climate change, involves predicting the future. Data used for prediction purposes is a bit trickier than data used to compare actual phenomena, and in those realms failed predictions are the frustrating norm.)
Wind & solar are more complex than conventional forms of producing electric power in the difficulty involved in integrating their output onto power grids, and in the difficulty and expense involved in mining and producing materials for building the devices, and constructing the land installations, and new grid infrastructure necessary, and in the absolute requirement for reliable parallel power generating capacity, and in whatever system of energy storage and power conditioning electronics required to keep wind & solar from crashing the grid.
Wind & solar require massive amounts of land, both for the wind farm and solar array installations themselves, but also for the mad proliferation of new power lines necessary to move the energy from the place it is generated to where it is integrated into the grid at large.
Your lives are based upon modern critical infrastructures which all rely closely on electric power and/or hydrocarbon fuels. The attempt to transition to infrastructures that are based almost entirely on wind & solar is doomed to fail. The question is how much damage will this attempt do to societies, and will they be able to recover from that damage?
Very Important: Wind & Solar Cannot “Black Start” a Dead Power Grid
If the power grid crashes and dies, it can only be restarted through a “black start.” This is difficult enough for a reliable power generation infrastructure, but for an intermittent low density non-synchronous system like wind & solar, it is impossible. Unicorn fantasy engineers sometimes claim that wind & solar + battery storage could black start a power grid, but no such high density battery storage exists which can start and stabilize an all wind & solar grid. It never will. Without the ballast of high capacity coal, gas, and nuclear power generation, black start of a large grid will be impossible.
In some locations, hydropower is a large enough resource to black start a grid. But if the grid is penetrated by a large proportion of wind & solar, it will just crash again. Especially if the grid is a “smart grid” which is easily hacked and crashed by outsiders.
Russia has lost about 20 generals and almost 140,000 dead so far. The Kremlin is gearing up its offensive in Donbas in the hope of forcing a temporary cease-fire under advantageous conditions, to re-group and re-arm for yet another evolution of the war. Russian casualties consequently skyrocket, and materiel losses accelerate rapidly. Russia needs a lot of help to convince Ukraine’s allies to reduce their military and financial aid to the besieged country, but considering all of Russia’s war crimes to date, it may be too late for that.
A lot more Russian men will die, and many more will emigrate out of the country or will sink into alcoholism and drug addiction. Russia’s demographic situation is dire, and its economic situation is beginning to look dismal as well.
Artificial Intelligence and the Military
The Netherlands government is hosting an international conference on AI in the military, next week
“We truly see this as a key shaping moment in the future of AI in the military,” Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra told a small group of journalists on Thursday.
“In a field that is really about life and death, you want to make sure that humans, regardless of all the flaws baked into our DNA, are part of the decision-making process.”
Militarily, AI is already used for reconnaissance, surveillance and situational analysis.
While one of the conference sessions on the future of war is called “Regulating Slaughterbots”, the prospect of fully independent killing machines remains far off.
But AI with the potential to autonomously pick targets could be just over the horizon.
These include so-called drone swarms and the use of AI in nuclear command and control systems.
The conference aims to take a first step towards international rules on “what is acceptable, what is not acceptable” in military uses of AI, Hoekstra said.
“You already see that AI is being used in the war that Russia is waging against Ukraine.”
The government of the Netherlands is hosting the first global Summit on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: REAIM 2023. REAIM 2023 will be a platform for all stakeholders to discuss the key opportunities, challenges and risks associated with military applications of AI. The event is co-hosted by the Republic of Korea and will be held on 15 and 16 February 2023 at the World Forum in The Hague, the international city of peace and justice.
The big 5 tech giants, Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, are worth over $5 trillion between them. They are gobbling up tech startups like turkeys.
The reason these companies are so active in acquisitions is that they recognize that disruptive innovation tends to happen at a smaller scale, typically a handful of contributors. By buying up small innovative startups that show promise, they can sort them out over time while allowing the smaller companies to go as far as they can as a relatively small scale enterprise. Some new technologies will be incorporated into pre-existing products right away. Others will be killed, or simply sat on.
ChatGPT is causing a lot of big tech companies to panic:
But pretty much all of the top tech companies are working on AI projects with military implications, even if that is not the stated intention of the company. Some of these companies have displayed strong antipathy toward the US military, while at the same time channeling funds to US government officials with military oversight powers. It is an interesting dynamic.
As it usually goes with all businesses around the free-market world, big corps have two options: grow or perish. And the way to growth is a one-way street. The name of the game: Merges and acquisitions. Since the day they were founded, the big five tech companies have acquired numerous companies and made them subsidiaries. For example, Hotmail being part of Microsoft is pretty much a given. But did you know that Minecraft, the gaming phenomenon, is also under a Microsoft division? What about IMDb or Twitch being part of Amazon?
Elon Musk has been working on a human::computer interface for several years now. Most intelligent people with tech expertise are concerned about the potential of machine intelligence to disrupt the human world irrevocably. Elon Musk is no exception.
Musk approached competitor Synchron earlier this year about a potential investment after he expressed frustration to Neuralink employees about their slow progress, Reuters reported in August.
Synchron crossed a major milestone in July by implanting its device in a patient in the United States for the first time. It received U.S. regulatory clearance for human trials in 2021 and has completed studies in four people in Australia.
A device like Neuralink may eventually be used to treat otherwise untreatable drug dependency and other behaviors that disrupt a person’s life and puts them at total risk. Recent discoveries are starting to point out ways that such a thing might be designed.
Russia is not the only country with a critical crisis of substance abuse across its population. Chinese factories in Wuhan and elsewhere are collaborating with Mexican drug cartels to produce and distribute synthetic drugs of abuse into the US and Canada . The transport and distribution of these drugs are difficult or impossible for law enforcement agencies to stop.
If enough of a nation’s human substrate is handicapped by substance abuse, it becomes weak and subject to disabling attack from many directions.
High tech approaches to changing drug seeking behaviors may prove to be the last resort for many societies.
Many of the big tech companies fly cover for some of the most corrupt forces at work in western societies today. The Twitter Files, for example, are not just a distraction. If you do not understand how Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and several other tech companies have been distorting the information environment along with the corporate mainstream media, you are pretty much lost in the dark. If the mainstream tells you it is just a distraction, pay very close attention to what they are trying to cover up.
This method of constructing high rise buildings does not require large cranes or dangerous high altitude iron work. Once the top level is erected, each subsequent floor is completed on the ground, then raised to fit in its place, like a 500 ton elevator car. Most of the construction can be automated, like an automated factory.
These buildings can be built faster, safer, with far less labor, and on a smaller land footprint than if conventional high rise construction were used. In fact, if you wanted to build a city in the middle of nowhere from scratch, you could construct several buildings simultaneously using a small labor force — if you had the materials, electric power, and fuel required. Conversely, if you wanted to build a “city within a city,” this approach allows you to use every bit of land available.
LIFTbuild’s vertical manufacturing approach aims to transform how the world is built. Traditionally, construction has been among the most static industries, using many of the same building methods first adopted in the 19th century. LIFTbuild will catapult the construction industry forward by providing opportunities for a safer, quality-driven, and more efficient project site.
LIFTbuild works by utilizing structural, concrete spines, and steel/concrete framed decks for floorplates. Each floor of a building is assembled at the ground level and lifted up the spines, where they’re subsequently locked into place. The fit-out is accomplished in a fully enclosed and conditioned space, while the lower floors are built below. The assembly process is designed to maximize cost and schedule savings while providing a safe, efficient, and highly productive work environment.
The LIFTbuild method is less expensive than traditional high rise construction for many reasons, including saving time by making it easier to stick to schedule. This saves significantly on current and future financing.
Learning to automate construction on Earth is one step toward automating construction on Mars, the moon, and other locations in the solar system. On Mars and Luna, the building materials are plentiful, once we learn how to use them effectively.
Once the method is perfected, mining and construction robots will be dropped from orbit, where they can begin building the colonists’ habitats, workshops, and laboratories autonomously.
“The whole reason to do that is, it’s too expensive to ship materials to Mars,” Malott said to Space.com. “We want a place for the astronauts to stay in,” he added. When we are ready to send humans to live on the surface of Mars, they will need somewhere to live. But construction equipment and materials are large and heavy, and it would be both difficult and extremely expensive to send them to another planet.
Buildings on Mars have “to be made robotically in advance of the astronauts arriving using materials made from Mars,” Malott added.
Stop Wasting Terrestrial Resources on Wind, Solar, Climate Apocalypse
Advanced western governments are wasting hundreds of $billions on technologies that don’t work. The final costs will be in the $trillions, once humans finally come to terms with their grand folly. Those are scarce resources which might have gone toward building an abundant and expansive human future. Instead, the money is going to politically connected billionaires who have close ties to government, corporate media, high tech corporations, and other social institutions including universities and publishing.
Our most precious resource is the human cognitive resource, which is being rapidly depleted due to the failure of intelligent humans to procreate. This depletion is in part due to the apocalyptic panic that is actively instigated around the issue of climate apocalypse.
We need all of our precious resources to face the genuine challenges in front of us. We cannot afford to squander them on the hobgoblins of fanatical ideologues.
Civilization is Upheld by Force
Prolific science fiction author Robert Heinlein understood that an orderly civilization does not just happen, nor can it sustain itself without considerable force and resources. But our new leftist overlords either cannot understand this, or they do not care one way or another. Once beautiful cities are falling into ruin, one after another, due to the failure of the new breed of leftist government to heed the unpleasant truths of human social order.
Civilization, in the end, is upheld by force. In areas where anarchy is of an unusual degree, a higher degree of force is needed. It really is that simple. Rather than confront violence in the hood, the Left blames whites and further hamstrings already demoralized, overworked cops. The result will be more disorder and, ultimately, the need for more heavy-handed policing in the communities that need it most.
Intermittent unreliable energy sectors such as wind and solar, are disruptive and destructive to the vital electric power infrastructure of every advanced nation. Every government that mandates these exorbitantly expensive and catastrophically destructive technologies, is guilty of sabotaging the futures of its own people — for the sake of the corrupt financial gain of the politically connected.
Underlying all Critical Infrastructure is the Cognitive Infrastructure
If through our own ideological stupidity and selfishness we lose our collective cognitive ability to sustain our own advanced critical infrastructures — no matter what the “reasons” we give — we probably deserve our downfall, and the downfalls of all of the less advanced societies around the world that depend upon our cognitive output.
It may be possible for artificial intelligence to partially make up for the steady degradation of our cognitive infrastructure. We seem to be automating everything from heavy construction, manufacturing, and drug discovery, to the composition of music, art, and literature. As long as humans are around to fine tune, modify, and maintain the AI and the robotic machinery, then several nations are capable of maintaining economic output for some time while suffering from a critically dwindling human population.
The nation’s cognitive infrastructure includes the mental capacities of our citizens and the decision-making ability of people, organizations and our government. It also includes the information channels used to feed our decision-making capabilities and the education and training systems used to prepare people and organizations for critical thinking.
Our cognitive infrastructure is threatened in ways few of us ever imagined just a few years ago. Old style propaganda has been modernized and is now being aided by advanced technologies and new information dissemination methods.
One example of the risk of cognitive infrastructure is when most of a nation’s advanced technical and scientific training in universities is being devoted to foreign students, rather than domestic.
Never stop learning. Pay attention to what the information gatekeepers are trying to tell you, and what they are trying to keep you from hearing. Think for yourself.
We are passing through a stage where the overlords of government, media, academia, corporations, and other cultural institutions are trying to restrict the free flow of information at all levels of society — including among scientists and technologists. These overlords are also diverting large quantities of scarce resources to deal with artificially created phantasms — to the great economic and political benefit of well connected political donors, puppet-masters, and information gatekeepers.
It is nothing new, but it is getting worse, and the numbers of cognitively capable and potentially enlightened persons available to overthrow the suffocating oligarchy of extinction, are shrinking.
Predicting anything can be risky, but especially predicting the future. Falling census numbers and subsequent research have demographers predicting rapid drops in China’s population.
Based on that data and an overall reluctance to have more kids, the country’s population could be cut in half as soon as the year 2050, according to research published in the Journal of Xi’an University of Finance and Economics.
The United Nations has estimated that if China’s birth rate remains at its super-low level and the country fails to position itself as an attractive destination for migrants, the country will lose nearly half of its population by the end of this century, a contraction of roughly 700 million people.
It isn’t important to predict to the exact year when China’s population will be cut in half from current numbers. It is more important to understand what is happening to China’s working age population, its very old population, and its very young population. And what that means for China’s future, and the future of the world.
What will happen to China’s GDP as its working age population crashes? Much of China’s GDP has been tied up in infrastructure malinvestment over the past 15 years, and will eventually lead to huge write-offs of bad debt. No one knows what a financial crash on top of a demographic crash will do to an already unstable China.
Korea Becoming Huge Arms Supplier to NATO
Korea’s economy by GDP is the 10th largest in the world. But as demand for weapons and ammunition grows in Ukraine and elsewhere, Korea is set to hop-scotch over a few other countries.
The war in Ukraine created increased demand for NATO standard weapons that could be delivered quickly. South Korea, already a growing exporter of weapons, was the major beneficiary of this demand. NATO nations seeking to replace weapons sent to Ukraine, or expand their own arsenals, found South Korea was the only major arms exporter able to meet this demand. Orders for South Korea weapons more than doubled in 2022 and this will push South Korea from one of the top ten arms exporters to one of the top five.
And here lies the crux of the issue: South Korea’s demographic picture is almost as dire as those of Russia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, and Canada. How long can South Korea continue to be the free world’s arms supplier? The answer may surprise you. Due to South Korea’s facile way with automation, there may be no demographic limitation whatsoever on South Korea’s ability to produce and supply modern weapons into the indefinite future.
Japan is likely to begin using its prolific robotics industry to start producing a lot more weapons as well. Advanced robotics when combined with improved machine intelligence, will make weapons and ammunition production much easier, safer, and more economical for even the most demographically challenged nation — as long as it has the intellectual resources to back up its advanced technology and to make sure its advanced technology industries are well supplied along all critical supply lines.
Weapons Producers and Funeral Homes: Boom Industries of the Future
I am not going too far out on the limb to predict two of the largest boom industries into the future, for countries that are likely to be left hanging as deglobalization proceeds to its somber climax.
As deglobalization stretches into the future and the demographic collapse continues, we will see that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was but a preview of coming attractions. The youth bulges will occur in the more primitive parts of the world, providing cannon fodder for those dictators and generals willing to pay to feed, clothe, and transport the surplus young men to the places of conflict.
The Biden-instigated hordes crossing US southern borders are something else. Disorganized, and a mixed bag in terms of ability to contribute to the economies of the US and Canada, expect several kinds of instability as these masses are moved across the geography of North America.
No doubt a number of foreign state-sponsored instigators of discord and disruption will make their way along with economic and political migrants. But that is also true for the immigrants making their way into Europe and Oceania. It can’t be helped, given the mindless immigration policies of most of the governments of Europe, North America, and Oceania.
Russia and China are shrinking. Any wars that they instigate will contribute to this ongoing collapse. Ultimately, China will take advantage of its growing “big brother” status with Russia to rapidly infringe on Russian sovereignty in the Far East and in the best agricultural regions of Siberia. China must have the clean water and the relatively untainted fertile soil — it has polluted its own water and soil beyond repair.
New York Times: When Will China Reclaim Siberia?
Russia will be unable to resist this slow-motion incursion, since China holds the economic strings that allow Russia to exist — and this leverage is only increasing with every passing day. China’s own demographic collapse will become more complex, as the agricultural workers in “New Chinese Siberia” are likely to procreate at a rapid rate in order to produce young farm workers to help with ag production.
By this means, Chinese populations will steadily displace Russian populations across the livable regions of Siberia, over time.
In the video above, natural resource investor Adam Rozencwajg discusses the many reasons why renewable energy is a flat out loser and always will be. Rozencwajg has made a long study of energy resources and energy economics. He favors nuclear energy as the most environmentally friendly large scale power source. He also speaks widely on the need for a greater investment in the oil & gas sector in order to meet the looming energy demands he sees on the horizon.
Meanwhile, high energy prices in Germany are helping to accelerate the exodus of German manufacturers to offshore locations. Corporations with intensive energy use, such as BASF, were already relocating to natural gas-rich regions. Others will leave as well, as Germany’s untenable energy situation grows ever clearer. Germany’s unicorn renewable energy fantasy can only kill the country’s long term prospects.
The above podcast comes from macrovoices.com, a website recommended in comments by a reader. The podcast is aimed at the general listener. It discusses some of the dangers from current generations of nuclear power, and reveals some of the promise of future generations of nuclear reactors. It is good entertainment, but each listener must make his own judgment as to the overall value of the presentation. My assessment of this particular macrovoices.com production is mixed.
The podcast initially rejects and condemns all reactors that are currently approved by the US NRC, and all those that are currently in use (pressurized water reactors). It goes on to praise and extol several other reactors that are not approved and are not in use. That approach is fine for those who are providing generally accurate information and entertainment. But for those who want to get something done today, rather than 20 or 30 years from now, it is worse than useless.
The blanket condemnation of pressurized water reactors is not helpful for easing the current regulatory blockage against nuclear power — in fact, by rejecting all current reactor designs and praising future unapproved reactors no matter how good they may eventually turn out to be , the attitude of the podcast makes it more likely that none of the future alternatives will ever be approved or developed.
Opponents to nuclear power tend to paint the entire industry with a broad brush. They will use any ammunition given them, and will use any excuse to reject all nuclear power permanently. None of the newer designs extolled by the podcast are approved or likely will be for decades.
By the time the podcast comes back around to explain that even conventional nuclear reactors in the west are safer than any other large energy source, the damage has been done. Most listeners will not stick around that long, once the speaker voices his initial condemnation of pressurized water reactors.
The energy density of lithium ion batteries does not even signify, even among the lowest of the above energy densities. That is why electric planes cannot do useful work, and why electric cars are such a nightmare to drive cross country for any significant distance — particularly in bad weather. It also explains why the idea of using lithium ion batteries to back up a large power grid that is heavily dependent on wind & solar, is a horrifically nonsensical proposal.
Every optimistic prediction about the growth of the EV market is a lie. It takes almost 10 years for a lithium mining project to be fully developed, and even if all current projects are completed on time there will be a serious shortfall of lithium before 2030.
“Unfortunately, battery capacity can be built much faster than lithium projects,” said Joe Lowry, president of consulting firm Global Lithium. “The lack of investment in lithium capacity over the past five years will extend the supply shortage.”
The situation is so critical that Lowry didn’t want to make demand forecasts beyond 2027 —the supply-demand imbalance could be so serious that supply might end up capping demand, so forecasting beyond that could be misleading, he said.
“Even well-capitalized major lithium companies have struggled to meet their expansion targets,” Lowry said. “New producers have seen their project timelines extended in many cases due to Covid and related supply chain issues along with their ‘learning curves’ OEMs and battery producers that assumed ‘market forces’ would ensure adequate battery raw materials are finally taking note of the supply-demand issue but much too late to solve the problem in the near to mid-term.”
The outlook described by Lowry is confirmed by Platts’ comparison between the expected supply and the expected demand until 2030 (see infographic below), which shows that supply should not reach the projected 2 million mt demand by the end of the decade.
Alternative battery technologies will also take at least 10 years to develop, probably longer. That means that other kinds of batteries will not be relieving the lithium shortage any time soon.
It is time for governments to back off of their EV mandates and their internal combustion engine prohibitions. Either they let the markets and the consumers make these choices for themselves, or governments will create major instabilities and hardships with their heavy-handed — but empty-headed — overreach.
This is not a declaration of “peak lithium” by any means. The lithium is there. But it takes time and a lot of water and dirty work to make it ready to turn into batteries for EVs and electronics products.
First of all, about 80 percent of all lithium in the world is sourced and processed in China. Strained international relations or unforseen events in this region could cut off the U.S.’s lithium supply. To prevent this, the U.S. has declared lithium an essential resource and has been exploring domestic alternatives which are concentrated in California and Nevada. As setting up lithium extraction sites is a slow process, the U.S. is relying heavily on metal from Australia and South America at the moment…
Environmental issues
Some current lithium extraction mechanisms are detrimental to the environment: the process typically requires massive resources, which contribute to water, land, and air pollution. The two main forms of lithium mining today are open pit/hard rock mines and brine extraction sites. Open-pit mines are essentially large holes in the ground – aka, the image that typically comes to mind when you think ‘mine.’ These excavation sites release dangerous chemicals including arsenic into the surrounding groundwater and are incredibly resource-intensive, releasing 15,000 kilograms (kg) of carbon dioxide emissions per one ton of lithium extracted – not quite as environmentally friendly as we’d like to see!
On the other hand, brine extraction operates by pumping lithium-rich water out from under hypersaline lakes and filtering the metal out. This method is even more water-intensive than the hard rock mine, and drains water out of already drought-plagued regions while polluting the local aquifers. Check out our article on why lithium mining is so controversial to learn more about the problems with current extraction processes.
If you believe in “peak oil” now, you probably also believed in “peak oil” 20 years ago, in 2003. The early 2000s were a golden age for peak oil, with lots of books being written on the topic, and many speakers roaming the world giving talks and seminars as experts on why the world as we knew it was soon coming to an end.
But there have not been a lot of new converts to “peak oil” since the onset of the 2010s and the coming of American shale oil & gas. For one thing, the US reversed its decline in oil production in dramatic fashion, becoming for a time the world’s largest oil producer once again. For another thing, the predicted collapse of Saudi Arabian oil fields never happened, destroying one of the main themes of the “peak oil” orthodoxy.
Anyone who was paying attention knew what was going to happen, even 15 or 20 years ago. But human beliefs have very little to do with paying attention or thinking carefully. Back then, “peak oil” was a hot topic that fit the dominant narrative, and so it was easy for drifting minds to latch on to the idea, and to feel important for believing in it.
These days climate apocalypse is the “end of the world du jour.” True believers and alarmist promoters of climate apocalypse only wish that “peak oil” were a problem. But most cannot bring themselves to reach out to another apocalyptic belief, when the one they are riding on seems quite sufficient for now. It gives their lives a sense of meaning.
Links Between Viral Illness and Neurodegenerative Disorders
New research looking at health records from nearly half a million people has identified 22 different associations between viral infections and neurodegenerative diseases. Influenza, encephalitis and other viral infections all were linked to increased rates of brain diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and MS.
The idea that viral infections can play a role in the development of neurodegenerative disease isn’t particularly new. Back in the 1950s microbial infections were suggested to be the source of many neurodegenerative diseases, with herpes in particular hypothesized to be deeply associated with the development of Alzheimer’s.
Although the idea sat on the fringes of neuroscience for decades, it has recently been drifting into the mainstream after a handful of key studies uncovered strong, novel evidence. In particular, a study published early in 2022 presented robust causal evidence linking the development of multiple sclerosis (MS) to infection with the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
The above “research” is actually a study in data mining, or statistical fishing for associations in a database ocean. Such studies can be useful for planning epidemiological and eventually clinical research which can help to establish “causal” proof. Genuine research on people is very expensive, so computer association studies can help to winnow out avenues of study which might be more fruitful.
If You Made a Perfect World, Would You Put Black People In It?
In a virginal perfect world, it pays to be very selective when populating it with people. Rough statistical stratification on the basis of crude racial categories could easily lead you astray, if you want the best and most promising young population for your new world. You would have to look at new immigrants on a case by case basis, and select carefully on a broad range of categories.
As the human populations of Earth diverged and evolved separately over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, different ensembles of gene alleles served to embody fitness and to facilitate survival. The mean IQ of a group of Igbo tribesmen from Nigeria may be roughly the same as the mean IQ of a group of German townsmen, but the specific gene ensembles used by the different groups to get the same mean IQ is apt to be different. The same is true for comparisons of high IQ groups from Northern Europe with other selected groups from East Asia or South Asia with equivalent mean IQs. The IQ may be the same, but the gene assemblies utilized to achieve those IQs will be different.
We will learn a great deal more about the different high IQ ensembles of genes used by different divergent breeding populations as we grow beyond current radical left censorship and groupthink in “science.” Much of the research in the meantime may have to be done under the radar.
Russia After Putin: What Are the Possibilities?
Now that Russia has been so greatly damaged and diminished by President Vladimir Putin’s reckless war of choice in Ukraine, what might the country’s future hold? Plausible scenarios range from a power grab by a hard-line security adviser like Nikolai Patrushev to an election victory by a dissident like Alexei Navalny. But one thing is almost certain: Putin’s regime will not survive the war he started.
Hitler’s regime did not survive the war in Europe that Hitler started. The same is true for the militaristic government of Japan that started the war in Asia and the Pacific. Napoleon did not survive his wars for long after exile on St. Helena. Wars of conquest trigger unpredictable instabilities and counter-alliances which often lead to the collapse of the invading entity.
In Putin’s mind, Ukraine was already conquered before his army had even crossed international borders. He had already worked it out in his mind, and he could see no problems whatsoever in taking and raping the country and its inhabitants. Almost a year after his fateful decision, and it is not clear whether Putin is even alive. But as long as the Kremlin has serviceable doubles to stand in for the little guy, Russia’s leaders will not have to face the decision considered in the article linked above.
As long as the western world is dominated by a billionaire-financed top-down suffocating stagnation of ideological left censorship and “social action” driven suicidal policies, the globe will suffer from a chaotic absence of wisdom and direction. Regional conflicts such as the Putin invasion, a possible invasion of Taiwan by China, and a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, will interfere with critical supply lines of energy, fertilizer, highest quality semiconductors, and minerals including lithium, among other things.
Education, media, entertainment, and high tech corporations have joined governments in the ideological twist to left radical groupthink as a pretense for policies of ultimate self destruction. All financed by billionaire opportunists who own the media/corps and control governments and academia and believe they will benefit from whatever is left on the other side of the crossing.
Disruption — the kind that comes from the creative destruction arising from innovation in a free society with property rights and rule of law — is the friend of an expansive and abundant future. But it is the enemy of those status quo overlords who are riding the froth of their own making. From disruption can arise something newer and more clever. And perhaps less corrupt than our current overlords.
Using estimates for current battery densities and plane weight restrictions, the analysts estimated that 19-seat battery-powered aircraft would have a maximum cruise range of about 260 km (160 miles), significantly less than the company’s claim of 250 miles.
… Reserve requirements could severely limit the true range of electric planes. A plane needs extra capacity to circle the airport for 30 minutes in case it can’t land right away, and it must also be able to reach an alternative airport 100 km (60 miles) away in an emergency.
When you take all that into account, the usable range of a 19-seat plane goes from about 160 miles to about 30 miles. For a larger aircraft like the 100-seat planes that Wright is building, it’s less than six miles.
Australia is the largest mining producer of lithium, but China buys 90% of Australia’s production. China turns most of its bulk lithium imports into lithium batteries for EVs and other uses such as electronics. Lithium mining and refining is a very dirty business, which is probably why US lithium production declined from 37% down to only 1% since 1995.
For what it’s worth, production of lithium batteries creates a massive carbon footprint. So if you buy one of those flashy EVs, you are already well down the carbon hole — and that may not have been your intention. It is likely you will continue dropping down that hole as you drive and recharge your EV, since most of the world’s electricity comes from burning fossil fuels and will continue to do so into the indefinite future — regardless of “green” claims to the contrary.
Elon Musk Building Lithium Battery Superfactories But is Running Behind
Elon Musk said that Tesla plans to produce at least 100 GWH/year 4680 batteries from the new Nevada factory and this could reach 500 GWH/year. This will be part of Tesla expanding 4680 battery production to 1000-3000 GWH/year. This will be in addition to batteries from other suppliers like CATL.
Giant Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has grown to its huge size within China by bringing all vertical component manufacturing in-house.
In-house manufacturing of key components has become one of the biggest trends in China’s EV industry over the past year, as many automakers look for ways to reduce supply chain vulnerability amid persistent chip shortages and the surging cost of battery materials. Among them, BYD is widely seen as a role model for this vertical integration strategy: the automaker builds its own supply chain and performs most of the activities required to bring its vehicles to market.
Already the world’s second-biggest battery maker and a major domestic supplier of power semiconductors for automobiles, BYD is now looking to expand production capacity significantly and accelerate the development of new products. Founder Securities expects BYD’s capacity to increase to 445 GWh-worth of batteries to close the gap with dominant player CATL by the end of 2023.
Korean giant LG is currently either #1 or #2 in global lithium battery production. China’s CATL is also either #1 or #2 lithium battery maker globally, depending on who counts the batteries. Samsung, Panasonic, Tesla, and a few additional manufacturers from Japan, Korea, India, and the US, are the primary competitors to the Chinese giants. But since China controls most of the world’s lithium (and cobalt via Congo), Chinese manufacturers currently have the inside track to most of the world’s refined lithium production.
The cost of refined lithium has been skyrocketing over the past several years, while the cost of the lithium batteries themselves has been falling — and is expected to fall another 40% in the next few years, unless China commits suicide by invading Taiwan.
Tesla Scaling to Produce Up to 3,000 GWh of Lithium Batteries per Year
Russia’s senseless invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 has led to a very expensive war in terms of economic and manpower costs for all the countries involved. The war has also impinged on multiple important global markets, including hydrocarbons, fertilizers, and minerals like cobalt, used for lithium battery manufacture. The loss of Russian cobalt further centralizes control of cobalt in China’s hands, since China controls most of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt production.
As the US signals a global reduction in international policing, we can expect more regional wars which will impinge on minerals production, and affect global markets in many other ways. But it is China’s upcoming decision whether to invade Taiwan, which will have the largest impact on the minerals utilised in lithium battery production, as well as the sheer numbers of batteries that will be manufactured and sold on global markets.
Several alternative approaches to EV battery production — including among many others sodium-ion, fluoride-ion, solid state batteries, non-cobalt batteries, and lithium phosphate batteries — will complicate the picture, and possibly create new niches for startup battery and EV makers.
Government regulations can either help dynamic markets or — more often — hamper markets considerably. In the US, the suffocating effect of tight labor and environmental laws, combined with mandates for manufacturers to utilise domestic mineral resources, will make it almost impossible for domestic manufacturers to compete with Chinese and Indian competitors — unless, of course, China goes to war.
Somewhere, a Disruptive Technology May Pop Up Anytime
Suppose tomorrow, someone in Ireland or Switzerland announced the invention and development of a new battery technology for EVs with 10 times the energy density of lithium, and 20 times the number of charge-discharge cycles, and at least 10 times the projected lifetime compared to lithium — at half the cost. If the newcomers could scale up economical production within a few years, soon all the mighty plans and investments of Tesla, CATL, BYD, and the others in the old technology, would be wasted.
That is the wonder and the tragedy of capitalism. The old must be displaced by the new, if the new is better, more affordable, safer, cleaner, and more durable.
But a flood of disruptive innovation requires an underlying society with basic freedoms, property rights, and the rule of law. Our new left radical overlords in charge of most western governments, media, academia, corporations, and other large social institutions, do not like to allow common people to have the freedoms that have brought us the sci-tech innovations of the past 200 years.
As a hobby, Elon Musk bought Twitter and made the company into a free-speech zone for the first time. That is a step in the right direction. There is still a long ways to go.
As for electric cars, there are many built-in limitations to the ability of EVs to overtake internal combustion driven vehicles. Without government mandates forcing the issue, it would take at least 20 years for EVs to become a majority mobility type. And that would require significant improvements to vehicle range, battery lifetime, charging infrastructure, and battery cost/safety.
In extreme weather, an EVs range can be cut by 50%, which is unacceptable in an already short-range vehicle. The time it takes to go any distance cross country is hell on travelers.
As for those who keep talking about battery powered aircraft for freight and passengers, you are simply ignorant of the concept of energy density and the limitations it puts on working aircraft.
The most important thing needed for a rational adoption of EVs on a larger scale, is new generation nuclear fission and nuclear fusion on a large scale to provide abundant electric power that is reliable. Those who believe that more wind & solar energy will help the situation have not done their homework, but are likely paying for their sloppy mode of information acquisition in many other aspects of their lives already.
The video below is quite optimistic about renewables, while admitting that they are pretty much crap.
In the video above, Peter Zeihan is interviewed by a Vancouver-based investor who is especially curious about the future of Canada. Peter takes 15 minutes to lay the demographic groundwork for his free-ranging geopolitical discussion — which just happens to contain some pessimistic predictions for Canada.
Canada has been under disintegrative stress for decades, and when the central government is controlled by a left radical child man incompetent, the stresses only get worse.
Alberta wants to leave federation. Western Canadians have a desire to separate from the East. Quebec separatism is now revitalized. Under this incompetent pseudo-dictator, Canadian society is more fragmented than at any other time in modern history.
Canada has a large number of Ukrainian emigrants and their descendants, up to 2 million. Canada has been supplying Ukraine with a wide range of aid to resist the Russian invasion. Over 30,000 foreign nationals are fighting for Ukraine, one of the biggest cohorts is from Canada.
Meanwhile, in Russia it is still not clear whether Putin is still alive — or whether his large cadre of body doubles is subbing for him while his body is decomposing. In fact, if you read the article linked here with the assumption that Putin is dead and others are now making the decisions he would have made, it makes a lot more sense.
Putin’s ill-conceived invasion is eating up young Russian men at a rate up to 1,000 per day at worst, and 500 a day at best. Russia needs to find about 5 million healthy young men to complete its invasion of Ukraine, while also defending the massive land borders of Russia from those — including China — who are beginning to see an opportunity to pounce while Russia is occupied in Ukraine.
The last time Russia called up 300,000 men for mobilization, a million young Russian men — its best and brightest — flocked out of the country like migrating geese. As Russia moves to raise the age limit for mobilization, expect another million to fly the coop.
Several months ago, Putin said the the death of 500,000 Russian military men was an acceptable loss, as long as it gained him the country of Ukraine and its 140 million people to add to the Russian population. The calculation has likely risen to allow for at least a million dead Russian fighting men. Perhaps more, depending upon how long Russia thinks it can keep it up.
For those countries that are aiding Ukraine, the awareness is dawning that the only alternative to supporting Ukraine is to let Russia steamroll over the country, then continue to mop up Finland, the Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, and Moldova. Belarus, of course, would cease to exist as a nation outside of Russia.
Realistically, given Russia’s poor performance in Ukraine, it is likely that the ultimate end result of western capitulation to Russia, is a global nuclear war. Because Putin — or whoever takes his place — would never be satisfied with Ukraine and Moldova. They want the whole ball of wax, and the ball of wax does not want to be absorbed into the criminal republic of Russia.
Ironic that those who want to bend over and drop their pants to Russia in the name of preventing a nuclear war, are the people who would most assuredly bring such a devastation about.
China’s Decline and Reglobalization
Things are shaking up in China now, as its population has begun the great decline, and the drop in China’s working age population really takes off. Global companies are starting to “reglobalize” out of China this time as labor costs in the middle kingdom are no longer competitive.
We now see almost daily headlines reporting on large enterprises having big shakeups in production lines. Just last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple AAPL+3.1% has directed it’s long-time contract manufacturing partner, Foxconn, to shift production out of China and to other regions of the world for certain product and component lines. This is decentralization in the world of bits, this is re-globalization.
It’s not just the world’s largest enterprises that are reeling from these waves and ripples. Direct to consumer startups like Vela Bikes – an e-bike maker – recently made news in moving production for one of it’s product lines out of China and to Detroit (the news is replete with examples like this), and home goods brand Simple Modern has proven that high grade consumer plastics can be manufactured in mass, domestically.
… The next 20 years may present the best opportunity that the United States and its allies have to re-capture production capacity. The embers of a great industrial base are still burning, the US has an opportunity to stoke the flames and revive the vim and vigor of American industriousness.
If China makes the fateful decision to invade Taiwan, it will sound the starting gun for an outright race of international manufacturers to get the heck out of China. Given that global markets are likely to collapse with a Taiwan invasion, it is not clear whether those companies that wait until then to exit China, will be able to get the capital to re-build elsewhere.
We are supposed to be undergoing a genuine climate apocalypse, according to the corporate media mainstream information gatekeepers. According to these highly placed persons of limited intellect and even more limited knowledge, we have been on the verge of — or experiencing — a genuine climate apocalypse for over 50 years. And the hits just keep on coming….
Predictions of disaster get a lot of attention — especially from the bored and easily diverted. Unfortunately, devious huxters in government, media, and academia are gaining a lot of mileage out of hoodwinking the easily fooled. These huxters are ginning up a fake climate apocalypse that has taken on all the trappings of a mass movement religion and lynch mob. Religious zealots and lynch mobs are not in any mood to think things through.
50 Years of the Climate Apocalypse on Our Doorstep
1. 1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975 2. 1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969) 3. 1970: Ice Age By 2000 4. 1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980 5. 1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030 6. 1972: New Ice Age By 2070 7. 1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast 8. 1974: Another Ice Age? 9. 1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life (data and graph) 10. 1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent 11. 1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link) 12. 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link) 13. 1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s 14. 1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs 15. 1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not) 16. 1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000 17. 1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not) 18. 2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is 19. 2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy 20. 2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024 21. 2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018 22. 2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013 23. 2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World 24. 2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to ‘Save The Planet From Catastrophe’ 25. 2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014 26. 2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link) 27. 2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’ 28. 1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide 29. 1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources 30. 1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years 31. 1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years 32. 1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s 33. 1980: Peak Oil In 2000 34. 1996: Peak Oil in 2020 35. 2002: Peak Oil in 2010 36. 2006: Super Hurricanes! 37. 2005 : Manhattan Underwater by 2015 38. 1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985 39. 1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable 40. 1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish 41. 1970s: Killer Bees!
Update: I’ve added 9 additional failed predictions (via Real Climate Science) below to make it an even 50 for the number of failed eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions over the last 50 years.
42. 1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production 43. 1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century 44. 1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum 45. 1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980 46. 1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018 47. 2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020 48. 2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past 49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming 50. 2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster? Not.
California is the worst place to try to survive the fake climate apocalypse. That is because California — of all the 50 states — has gone deepest into the dark side.
The sale of new internal-combustion cars and light trucks will be banned beginning in 2035; the ban on the sale of large diesel trucks starts in 2045. (On January 1 of this year, the ban on operating diesel trucks with engines manufactured before 2010 took effect.) And, though the recent imbroglio over a nationwide ban on the sale of gas stoves has settled down, California has enacted just such a ban, which takes effect in 2030. In that same year, the state will prohibit new gas furnaces and water heaters, and a ban on both the sale and use of gas-powered small engines (for example, lawnmowers, chainsaws, and portable generators) begins next year. __ California’s Green Debacle
These opportunists in government, academia, and media — and the fanatics among the bored and impressionable elites — have just gotten started. They intend to take this fake climate apocalypse to the very limit, no matter who has to suffer and die. These elites and opportunists think of you in the same way that Putin thinks about Ukrainians — you are in their way.
There is a reason why electric power production in advanced nations has been built upon coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydropower, if available. Those forms of power production are reliable — they can be turned on and off — and when used together they can match virtually any pattern of energy use at any scale. They work very well at regulating frequency and voltage, at reasonable costs for developed nations. They are robust, unlike the intermittent and unreliable low quality, low density sources of energy such as wind or solar. You can build an industrial superpower on top of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydropower.
What makes a system strong or robust? In additions to high-capacity transmission lines, the anchoring source is large rotating machines that operate in synchronism with the grid. They provide inertia, they can respond quickly through ramping, they can inject vars, they increase short circuit MVA (mega volt amperes). All good things necessary for a reliable power system. Asynchronous generation, sources which don’t spin with the system, such as wind and solar, do not as readily add strength to a system; rather they tend lean on other resources.
Synchronous generators provide essential reliability services which are needed for the operation of the grid. The primary services are voltage control, frequency control and balancing services. Conventional generators (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro) readily provide these ser vices because they rotate in synchronism with the grid. Not all resources do. To quote from the US Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy”:
Modern Leftism and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
It is going to be difficult surviving the fake climate apocalypse, because you are not really supposed to survive. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) is an integral part of the modern leftist juggernaut, and they are not kidding around.
The modern left is in control of most universities and most media outlets, and is busy creating leftist clone-thinkers in classrooms and over the internet using every tool at its command. Governments in the western world are likewise largely controlled by leftist drones, who have been university educated by other well-positioned leftist drones. The “human extinction” element of modern leftism is kept largely in the background, for fear that the masses might wake up and rebel against their drone-like overlords in media, government, and academia. But you should understand that while the loudmouths are warning you about “climate change” and “environmental disaster,” what they are not saying out loud is that they would prefer to just get you the hell out of their way.
And so they are doing just that through their policies.
By making electric power production unreliable and exorbitantly expensive, they are increasing the costs of business for both consumers and for the enterprises that employ consumers and produce the goods and services that consumers need, at previously affordable prices.
By making internal combustion engine automobiles illegal, and allowing only the use of short range electric vehicles for individuals, they limit the mobility of individuals and groups of individuals. Rather like a full time “lockdown,” except without the pandemic.
By promoting LGBQT ideology and by teaching children that growing up and procreating will destroy the planet, they are contributing to ever-lower birthrates among educated persons, leading to a loss of the human capital that will be needed to build an expansive and abundant human future.
The list could go on, but all you need to do to see the broad array of battlefronts lined up to do you in is to read between the lines of what the corporate media mainstream information gatekeepers are telling you. Visit libraries, bookstores, and internet lists of published books, and see what kind of mental fodder is being fed to the human livestock. Read lists and descriptions of classes at your local colleges and universities. If you have children of school age, demand the right to observe the teachers in the classroom, filling their little minds with the doctrines du jour.
It is a vile flood of dominance policies from government, media, academia, and other social institutions — meant to overwhelm you and your cohorts at every level of existence. They are hoping that they will be successful at rapidly trimming populations while continuously building influence over all levels of information and other forms of behavior control.
Compared to what they have been setting up over the past 50 + years, surviving a genuine climate apocalypse would be a breeze.
Resilience, robustness, toughness, and anti-fragility. It is coming to the point that surviving the fake crises foisted on us by our overlords, will be a full time job.
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) biology. This has been driven in part by the discoveries that two intermediates of NAD+ biosynthesis, nicotinamide riboside (NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN), effectively increase NAD+ concentration in a variety of tissues, in many cases with beneficial or therapeutic effects.
The scientific timeline of discovery for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is pictured below. The mystery dates back to the 1730s when the deadly disease pellagra was first described and studied. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the nature of the disease as a nutritional deficiency was discovered, and the nutritional cures were discovered — members of the niacin family.
It was only in the late 1990s and early 2000s that a decline in NAD was found to be associated with the processes of degenerative aging. Multiple body systems appear to suffer and age when the levels of NAD decline in the tissues of various organs.
For many of us, we are primarily concerned with the brain and the heart, since those two organs represent a significant part of the decline in function as well as mortality, as a person ages.
So, what is NAD+ and what is it needed for? The pioneering work by Otto Warburg and co-workers in the 1930s discovered a key role for NAD+, and its phosphorylated counterpart NADP+, in hydrogen transfer biochemical reactions. The following decades unveiled how NAD+ and NADP+ are vital cofactors for most cellular oxidation/reduction reactions, where they can be reduced to NADH and NADPH, respectively, or vice versa.
The NAD+/NADH couple primarily drives oxidation reactions, while the NADP+/NADPH couple drives reductive reactions (for extensive reviews on the topic, see [10, 11]). The redox potential and relative amount of the phosphorylated and non-phosphorylated nicotinamide adenine dinucleotides is very different. For instance, NAD(H) levels in liver are twofold those of NADP(H), while in muscle they are 12-fold [11]. In addition to differences between tissues, NAD(H) and NADP(H) content is highly compartmentalized in the cell, with the mitochondria harboring the higher amounts [11]. Therefore, tissues with high mitochondrial content, such as heart or kidney, display the higher NAD(H) and NADP(H) contents. Even if cellular membranes are generally impermeable to NAM-based (di)nucleotides, the mitochondrial and cytosolic pools of NAD+ related nucleotides and their redox states are not fully independent. Instead, they are interconnected by an intricate net of molecular redox shuttles and the recently identified mitochondrial NAD+ transporter [10, 12–15].
As redox cofactors, NAD(H) and NADP(H) participate in the most critical paths in cellular metabolism and mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. Most notably, during glycolysis, glucose can generate two molecules of glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate (G3P). This is followed by the reduction of NAD+ to NADH in the glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) reaction. Thus, glycolysis will finally render two NADH and two pyruvate molecules that can either be transformed into to NAD+ and lactate by the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) reaction or transferred into the mitochondria. In the second case, the reducing equivalent of NADH is transported into the mitochondria via either the malate-aspartate shuttle or the glycerol-3-phosphate shuttle, while pyruvate has a dedicated transporter [10]. Once in the mitochondria, the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex will reoxidize NADH into NAD+. The mitochondrial tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA) is a major location for the reduction of NAD+ into NADH molecules. Mitochondrial NADH can be re-oxidized to NAD+ by Complex I of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. The subsequent two electrons gained by Complex I will then be an initial step to generate a proton gradient that provides the chemiosmotic force to drive the oxidative phosphorylation of ADP to ATP, catalyzed by the F0F1-ATP synthase enzyme [10]. These processes highlight the intimate link between NAD+ and cellular ATP synthesis.
The puzzle of NAD goes to the heart of how our bodies work. We cannot simply say “the heart does this,” “the liver does this,” “the kidneys do this,” “the brain does this,” etc. Beneath such glib layers of explanation lie the deeper biochemical and physiological functions and processes which enable these organs to fulfill their roles. Everything requires energy. If our body tissues lose their grasp on the energy they need, they begin to deteriorate — to age. That is not the only cause of aging, but it sits at the center of the cascade of causes.
An aging person (anyone over the age of 30) can mitigate part of this “tissue energy crisis” by supplying the body with precursors of NAD. Some of the precursors of NAD are pictured below:
NMN (nicotinamide mononucleotide) and NR (nicotinamide riboside) are two of the most common precursors of NAD used by the public in the form of nutritional supplements. There is a bit of a controversy over which of the two supplements are more effective. There has even been a suggestion by one scientist that NR may inadvertently contribute to some forms of cancer metastasis. Time and more research will help to sort out these questions.
These NAD precursors are not a magic bullet. But careful research is helping us to discover some details about how they may be of benefit to us.
Human patients with stage D heart failure orally supplemented with NR for 5–9 days (0.5–1 g/day) displayed increased whole blood NAD+ levels, mitochondrial function in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and a large reduction in pro-inflammatory cytokine (IL-1b, IL-6 and IL-18) gene expression [221]. This suggests that NR could help reducing the pro-inflammatory systemic state in in cardiovascular complications. Along the same lines, when healthy elderly individuals where supplemented with NR (1 g/day) for 21 days no major changes were observed in body composition or cardiovascular parameters, yet a decrease in circulating levels of inflammatory cytokines (IL-2, IL-5, IL-6) was also observed [222]. Therefore, two independent studies point towards the concept that NR supplementation could reduce systemic inflammatory signals.
It can be difficult to discover the subtleties at work when we try to untangle the complex interactions of genes and the natural components of our bodies, with the environment. Part of that is due to the clumsiness of the tools that we are using in our research. It takes time to build the tools that we need. But as we stumble awkwardly ahead using our clumsy tools, we discover clues, little by little.
Recently, NR showed some promising outcomes in treating patients suffering from ataxia–telangiectasia (AT), a rare neurodegenerative disease, causing severe disability. AT is caused by mutation of the Ataxia-Telangiectasia Mutated (ATM) gene, encoding the ATM kinase, a master regulator of DNA damage resolution [247]. Initial work in mice suggested that dietary NR supplementation (12 mM in the drinking water) increased the lifespan of the short-lived Atm−/− mice, correlating with the normalization of mitochondrial architecture due to improved mitophagy and a better resolution of DNA repair [225]. In an open-label, proof-of-concept clinical study, 24 patients with AT were treated with NR (25 mg/kg/day) during four consecutive months. NR supplementation led to improvements in diverse kinetic and speech parameters [227]. Interestingly, these benefits disappeared 2 months after NR withdrawal [227], further strengthening that the benefits could be genuinely due to NR treatment.
A newer precursor to NAD has recently been discovered which may prove significantly better in many respects than either NMN or NR. It is a reduced form of NR called dihydronicotinamide riboside (NRH). More on this discovery:
Parallel work by the Sauve lab and our group identified a reduced version of NR, dihydronicotinamide riboside (NRH), as a new NAD+ precursor in mammalian cells and tissues [128, 263] (Fig. 2). Despite the structural similarity with NR, the biological properties of NRH turned out to be particularly surprising. NRH can sharply increase NAD+ levels in cultured cells, being far more potent than any other NAD+ precursor described to date [128, 263]. After entering the cells, predominantly through ENTs [128], NRH uses a unique path to drive NAD+ synthesis. Surprisingly, the ability of NRH to act as a NAD+ precursor does not rely on NRK activity. Using chemical inhibitors, Giroud-Gerbetant et al. identified adenosine kinase (AK) as the enzyme that initiated the conversion of NRH to NAD+ [128]. This finding was later confirmed by the Sauve lab using cellular fractionation methods [264]. The phosphorylation of NRH by AK renders dihydronicotinamide mononucleotide (NMNH), which is then adenylated by NMNAT enzymes to generate NADH, which is then oxidized to NAD+ [128, 264]. Thus, NRH defines a new path towards NAD+ synthesis relying on the activity of AK. The use of AK for the initial catalysis step and that it acts by increasing NADH might be critical in understanding why NRH action in cultured cells is so vastly superior to all other precursors. Interestingly, as with NMN, NMNH can be used as an effective extracellular NAD+ precursor, but also require dephosphorylation to NRH prior to cellular uptake [265].
Another interesting aspect of NRH is that, unlike NR, it is not degraded in mouse plasma [128]. Accordingly, the intraperitoneal injection of NRH led to larger increases in NAD+ than those observed with NR [128]. Unlike NR, NRH could be detected in circulation after oral administration. More precisely, it was detected in the low micromolar range when gavaged at 250 mg/kg, which is consistent with promoting significant effects on NAD+ levels in cultured cells [128]. To date, two studies in mice support the case that NRH could have therapeutic applications.
As outlined above, it is clear that both NMN and NR have beneficial effects in multiple conditions in rodents. Indeed, there are a number of pathophysiological conditions that show significant decreases in tissue NAD+ levels (Table 3). Although both compounds have been tested in some models, no side-by-side comparisons have been conducted between NMN and NR. Therefore, even though both compounds are capable of enhancing NAD+ biosynthesis, there might be certain interesting differences in their effects on these pathophysiological conditions. Additionally, in the vast majority of cases in which NMN and NR are effective, it still remains unclear what downstream mechanisms mediate their beneficial effects. NAD+ is required as a cosubstrate for PARPs, sirtuins, ADP-ribosyl cyclases, and mono-ADP ribosyltransferases, but also serves as a redox cofactor for countless enzymes (Figure 1B). In several cases, deletion of sirtuins has been shown to block key benefits of NAD+ supplementation, supporting a role for these enzymes (Brown et al., 2014; Gomes et al., 2013; Guan et al., 2017; Martin et al., 2017).
Most of the studies on these NAD precursors have been done on animal models, specifically mice of various derivations. Human studies have had mixed results. Since our ignorance is far greater than our knowledge when it comes to this complex topic — as with most complex topics — there is only a small basis for recommending the use of any of the above supplements.
Nevertheless, given the current state of knowledge and ignorance, the potential benefits of supplementation with NAD+ precursors (combined with SIRT boosters such as resveratrol) seem to outweigh the risks — at least in healthy persons past the age of 50.
The least expensive approach to supplementation with NAD+ precursors, to my knowledge, is to take nicotinamide and ribose as separate supplements, but at the same time. The two supplements are absorbed separately and recombined as NR, and then converted to NMN (see picture above). On the other hand, genetic differences between people — and between their microbiomes in the gut — probably cause differences in individual abilities to boost NAD+ levels using the above approach. Everything the gut absorbs goes to the liver, where it is subject to “first pass” metabolic modification and dismantling into component parts.
Keep in mind that some new cancer treatments in development are based upon blocking NAD+ in cancer cells. Too much NAD+ boosting in patients with certain cancers may interfere with the effect of their chemotherapy. In other words, keep up to date with your cancer screening. If you are being treated for cancer with chemotherapy, ask your doctor whether NAD+ boosters could interfere with the treatment. This caution is important for a relative few persons considering supplementation with NAD+ boosters.
As I always say, supplementation with most of the things in vitamin stores will accomplish little more than creating some very expensive urine. Certain supplements, however, may make a big difference in the quality of life for persons with particular morbidities — including the decline in function associated with aging.
Bonus video: One man’s opinion on which is the better precursor of NAD+
Often the court jester is the wisest man in the kingdom. Dressing as a clown does not negate the truth in what a man says. In a recent interview with cognitive scientist John Vervaeke, Jordan Peterson delves into deep issues of psychology, neuroscience, and cognition.
Many of us have been worried that Jordan Peterson might not be able to fully recover from his deep personal crisis of a few years back. But if his YouTube channel is any judge, he is pushing even deeper into the mysteries of life than he had done prior to the crisis. The world certainly needs his voice, and it needs the insights of all the deep thinkers that Peterson can introduce to us.
Russia Gives Tiny Soledar the Mariupol Treatment
The tiny salt and gypsum mining town of Soledar, in east Ukraine, has been reduced to rubble by Russian artillery. If conquering a pile of rubble constitutes a victory, then Russian forces have achieved a Pyrrhic and temporary victory in the occupation of the immediate territory of what was once a thriving little town called Soledar.
Soledar, known for salt mining and processing, has little intrinsic value apart from the salt and gypsum mines, but it lies at a strategic point 10 kilometres north of the city of Bakhmut, which Russian forces want to surround.
Taking Bakhmut would disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines and open a route for the Russians to press toward Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk province.
Soledar’s fall would make “holding Bakhmut much more precarious for Ukraine,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russia Studies at the CAN nonprofit research group, noted.
The war of attrition, with heavy casualties, may make a Russian victory as deadly as a defeat.
“I don’t think the outcome at Bakhmut is that significant compared to what it costs Russia to achieve it,” Kofman said in a tweet.
College and University Do Not Prepare Students for Real World
Students go to university with the intention of learning to live skillfully in the real world, to become competent thinkers and doers, to learn to make their way and to live well. But in the real world, universities have slipped from the role of teaching students to think and do for themselves. Instead, universities have become centers of one-sided propaganda and deep groupthink indoctrination. Too many of those who graduate from such schools lack the skills and know-how to do meaningful work.
To remedy that situation, private enterprises have begun devoting themselves to helping college students, graduates, and dropouts, to acquire the needed skills for success in the real world of enterprise, trade, and work.
One employment mentor and entrepreneur concurred. Michael Gibson founded the 1517 Fund to guide and invest in college drop-outs or those who chose not to attend.
“By giving rookies a chance to learn from the pros on the job, apprenticeships give young people starting their careers a much better opportunity to learn the foundational skills they need directly, instead of relying on failing schools and colleges to teach them outdated lessons or poisonous ideology at a luxury price,” Gibson told The College Fix via email Jan. 6.
According to the Multiverse study, “72% of young adults with degrees believe college didn’t fully equip them to start their career.” Additionally, nearly half of students surveyed said that they felt expected to go to college after high school; however “three-fourths would skip college if their dream job was available without a degree.”
Flow batteries do not depend upon lithium or scarce rare earth minerals. If they can be made affordable, efficient, and scaled for different uses including EVs, they could represent a significant breakthrough in the quest for electrification of our infrastructures — including transportation. Flow cells do not suffer from many of the supply constraints which limit a rapid scale up of other types of battery technologies. Combined with advanced nuclear power generation, the way to an expansive, abundant future would be eased.
Will flow batteries become the leading solution for energy storage in the future? These batteries’ numerous advantages can make the flow batteries even more popular in energy management in the coming years. Essential benefits of flow batteries include:
Long service life: this is one of the most significant advantages of flow battery systems. Flow battery allow for a large number of complete cycles of both charging and discharging. Importantly, electrons do not undergo any physical changes to be freely upgraded for catalytic and electrical properties. Besides, convective cooling of the electrodes supported by the pumped electrolyte helps in managing and distributing heat.
No standby losses: flow batteries are the ideal solution for devices with long periods of disuse. The flow-through battery will not discharge because the charge-carrying electrolyte is stored in separate reservoirs.
Low maintenance costs: the flow batteries are incredibly ergonomic. One electrolyte is used for all cells, ensuring that the battery is charged uniformly.
Environmentally friendly: flow battery waste can be reused. Additionally, electrolytes are not very toxic.
Charging method: fluctuating power demand, charging, and discharging rates do not affect the operation of redox flow batteries. Therefore, flow battery systems are the right solution for complex energy management systems.
In all the apocalyptic panic and fury over the various environmental apocalypses that threaten the weak-minded, it rarely enters the minds of information gatekeepers that there are solutions to almost every problem. We are told that it can take hundreds and thousands of years for plastic items such as water bottles to be broken down by nature. But is that true? Not likely, just as it is not likely that incremental changes in atmospheric CO2 levels will lead to a global apocalypse. But scientists want their grants, and journalists want their story. If it bleeds it leads, and may even lead to a prize or two.
Nature has learned how to deal with oil spills, for example, without human assistance. Since most oil spills are natural oil seeps from the ocean floor which have been occurring for hundreds of millions of years or more, that is a fortunate thing. Natural microbes in the ocean evolve and promote specific enzymes to utilize the rich food source as it becomes available. What is true for oil is also true for plastics. Sunshine is an important element in the breakdown of plastics, perhaps more than with oil. If a plastic bottle sinks to the deep ocean floor beyond the sun’s power to reach, it may indeed survive for hundreds or thousands of years. But it may take a long time for us to prove that, either way. Stick around for a thousand years, and you can perhaps say “I told you so!”
In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of “OpenAI Gym”, its platform for reinforcement learning research.[7] In December 2016, OpenAI released “Universe”, a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications.[8][9][10][11]
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to “capped” for-profit, with profit cap set to 100X on any investment.[13] The company distributed equity to its employees and partnered with Microsoft, who announced an investment package of US$1 billion into the company. OpenAI then announced its intention to commercially license its technologies.[14]
In 2020, OpenAI announced GPT-3, a language model trained on trillions of words from the Internet. It also announced that an associated API, named simply “the API”, would form the heart of its first commercial product. GPT-3 is aimed at natural language answering of questions, but it can also translate between languages and coherently generate improvised text.[15]
In 2021, OpenAI introduced DALL-E, a deep learning model that can generate digital images from natural language descriptions.[16]
Around December 2022, OpenAI received widespread media coverage after launching a free preview of ChatGPT, its new AI chatbot based on GPT-3.5. According to OpenAI, the preview received over a million signups within the first five days.[17] According to anonymous sources cited by Reuters in December 2022, OpenAI was projecting a US$200 million revenue for 2023 and US$1 billion revenue for 2024.[18] As of January 2023, it was in talks for funding that would value the company at $29 billion.[19]
ChatGPT has become controversial with schools, because students can get the app to write all kinds of assignment papers for them, then claim that they wrote the papers themselves. It is a big step up from the “cut and paste from Wikipedia” approach that the last generation of students used.
There are emerging technologies out there which are capable of pulling the rug from under your feet. Keep your eyes open and your brains clear.
Bonus video: 3 hour interview of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke by Lex Fridman
al fin next level 