The Cure for Climate Anguish. Rintrah, by Radagast. Sept. 7, 2024.
So I’ll try not to waste too many words on this, but the Dutch Extinction Rebellion protesters are blocking the entrance to the state museum in Amsterdam.
Ted Kaczynski famously warned that protesters should not create a rift between themselves and the general public. Rather, they should seek to find adherents, by attacking the excesses of the system they oppose. For his anti-tech revolution, he recommended focusing on genetic manipulation, rather than, let’s say, the electricity grid.
So if you block the entrance to the state museum, preventing people who have very little spare time from going to the museum, you’re inevitably just marginalizing yourself. You’re also marginalizing yourself of course if you start piling other leftists causes on top of your cause, like the Palestinians.
But I don’t think these people are seriously trying to save the world. I think they want to be able to say to themselves that they were “on the right side of history” and “tried everything”. Above all else, they’re trying to treat their own existential anguish.
They kind of ran out of ideas, so now they’re settling on a kind of “fifteen degrees to Hitler” leftist social shaming strategy. The fossil fuel industry is Hitler. ING, the Dutch bank, funds Hitler, so they’re nazi’s. The nazi bank also funds the museum, so the museum are nazi sympathizers.
But this is a bit of a dead-end social strategy. At this point, my honest recommendation is to just accept that the attempt to stop global warming has failed and we’re going to die.
“It was all looking pretty bleak. But then people blocked the entrance to a museum funded by a bank that also funds the fossil fuel industry and things began to get better!”
The Africans are fucked, the elephants are fucked, the orangutans are fucked.
But let’s be honest to ourselves. The African population is projected to swell to 3.5 billion by 2100. Global warming or no global warming, they were fucked to begin with. Their fertile soils are flushing down into the ocean.
Congo had 12 million people in 1950. They had 101 million in 2020. They will have 379 million by 2100. What did you think was going to happen? “Oh no, global warming caused millions of people in Congo to die of starvation in 2050 who would have otherwise died in a Malthusian catastrophe in 2080!”
Most people don’t zoom out, they live in the here and now. If you zoom out you’ll get anxious, because you will see your own ugly old mug and your death on the horizon. But if you’re going to zoom out, it would be better if you would recognize the inevitability of collapse too.
Nobody really knows exactly what’s going to happen, but you don’t have to be a genius, to recognize collapse is baked into the system by now. Forget about global warming for a moment. We don’t have the natural resources we need to keep the system going. The aquifers are depleting, our soils are flushing into the ocean, the pollinating insects are dying from our pesticides, our sperm counts are crashing and most of the population is obese.
The Koreans and Japanese are dying out, the Afghans and the Congolese are undergoing a population explosion. Call me racist if you want, but I don’t think the Amish-Afghan-Congolese coalition is going to build the same sort of society as the Japanese and the Koreans did.
If you think the temperatures we’ll get by 2050 are terrifying, wait until you see the resource depletion problem that kicks in much earlier. We don’t have the natural resources we need for the whole sustainable energy transition, there’s very little copper left in the world.
And if you think the resource depletion is scary, wait until you see the real problem, the pandemic problem. Congo has always had monkeypox. But in the old days people lived in isolated villages, so the virus would die out for lack of hosts, before finding its way into the next village.
But now people are living in giant refugee camps, in cities where children with bullet holes in their body lay in the same hospital bed as children with monkeypox. People now live in refugee camps where a hundred people have to share the same toilet. The women are forced to prostitute themselves, to feed their children. Just as nature tries to be merciful to the chickens we put in cages, nature tries to be merciful to the poor people stuck living in these refugee camps.
When you go from 12 million people to 101 million people, you make it much easier for a virus to spread to the next host, before dying out. Add some airplanes and truck drivers to that and a virus can spread to multiple other countries. That’s what happened to monkeypox. I said it before, I’ll say it again: Orthopox viruses killed 300-500 million people in the 20th century, even though smallpox was extinct by 1980. When this goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
“We’re going to save the Africans from global warming!”
Bro, you can’t save the Africans from monkeypox. The vaccines have finally arrived, but they won’t start vaccinating until they’ve trained the personnel, so the first vaccines will be administered in October at earliest. After that it’s a week or two before the vaccine is actually effective.
They will have 380,000 vaccines, on a population of 90 million in Congo alone. The capital city Kinshasa has already had its first 11 detected cases. There are 17 million people living there.
Good luck. This is going to turn into the same thing as SARS2, you’re just going to accelerate its evolution by vaccinating against it.
“I wonder what’s going to happen…”
Well, I have often released animals in Sim Life that showed this growth pattern and ate all the plants before the plants could produce seeds, so allow me to spoil the ending for you: They’re going to die. You can stabilize the ecosystem a bit, by releasing a plague virus before the animal population peaks, but otherwise they will probably just make all your plants extinct too.
But that’s just Congo. Nigeria will have 477 million by 2100, Ethiopia will be at 366 million. The EU will have 420 million by 2100, so yes, Nigeria alone would have more people than the EU. What do you think is going to happen?
By 2100 Nigeria would have the population density of the Netherlands! Forget about improving yields for a moment. In the Netherlands, we’re using 7% of our land, just for housing. Your food production is going to decline, simply because you’ll need to use your most fertile farmland to build houses and roads for your population. After all, your first cities like Lagos emerged in fertile river deltas, not in the middle of the desert up north.
We obviously won’t make it that far, collapse is baked into the system by now. But people don’t want to hear this, they want to think they can still dig their way out of this hole.
The crown of trees looks like this:
(see his post for pic)
This is how they stop pathogens from spreading. For generations, people living in the jungle did the same thing, they were highly xenophobic, they avoided other tribes.
But now countries like Congo are becoming an actual unified whole. And the number of flights worldwide exploded:
(again, see his site for pic)
So take a guess what’s going to happen.
The writing is on the wall by now.
Like the era of antibiotics, the era of controlling viruses through vaccination is of limited duration.
We’re now entering the pandemic era. Global warming will be of secondary concern.
Radagast: A fata morgana in the desert of the real
The nice thing about 9/11 is that it taught a lot of people never to trust anything their government is involved in ever again. The reward for that lifelong distrust you were immunized with came in 2021. Am I saying it’s an inside job? Before psychedelics I would say yes. Now I would say: 9/11 happened in your head. There’s no objective reality, it’s all in the eye of the beholder and you’re (un)lucky enough to have ended up in synch with mine.
And you might say I should watch some 2 hour documentary that proves who did it. But here’s the thing: They caught FSB agents in Russia with explosives in an apartment complex, yet you can’t PROVE that the FSB caused the Russian apartment complex bombings. And in a world where you can’t prove the FSB committed a terrorist attack, after the FSB agents were caught planting explosives in an apartment complex, what chance do you have to prove that Cheney and the PNAC gang had those planes fly into those buildings?? It’s a fool’s errand.
The point is: Physical matter doesn’t determine what happened. Rather, these are the constraints within which we, the conscious observers, have to maneuver. And from your angle it’s obvious what happened, but that can only ever tell us something about you. It’s a Rorschach test: It’s not designed to have a single correct answer.
It’s like the wave-particle duality. Is it a wave, is it a particle? It’s both as long as we don’t force the function to collapse through sufficiently careful observation. And events like 9/11 or the Russian apartment bombings are forever in that grey zone, where it looks like a particle, but it might just be a wave.
The sufficiently paranoid conspiracy theorist will point out that the attacks were FORESHADOWED! Look at Neo’s passport in the Matrix! It expires on 9/11!
Or look at that Lone Gunman episode, where the government flies a plane into the WTC to increase defense spending!
Or look at how the Simpsons predicted 9/11!
So what happens is you find yourself expanding your conspiratorial vision of the world. Apparently these people insist on giving you hints. As part of their Satanic religion, they must foreshadow what they’re going to do. And they are dedicated enough that a Lone gunman Episode is insufficient, the SImpsons have to be made complicit too.
But what I would argue, rather than calling you crazy, is that you haven’t expanded your paranoid view of the world enough yet. You’re looking for an agent here within this world. That’s the mistake. It’s something that designs this reality you experience, that’s toying with you. It’s pulling your legs, never quite giving you concrete proof of what’s going on, forever keeping you guessing, forever keeping you deeply suspicious, but unable to prove that something is not adding up. And when it decides to troll you through the Matrix out of all possible movies, it’s just laughing in your face.
You’re stuck with a society that expects you to believe a completely ridiculous story, about the mightiest nation in the world that has two of its skycrapers brought down by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan who decides a bunch of dudes have to hijack some airplanes and fly them into the buildings. Buildings that were bought by a guy a few weeks before, who then went on to sue his insurer to insist the two buildings being hit by airplanes constitute two separate terrorist attacks and thus entitle him to double the money. What actually happened on 9/11 appears more like a parody of a conspiracy, than as an actual conspiracy.
The Pentagon somehow announces the day before a couple of trillion dollars are unaccounted for. The people involved in the accounting are blown up the next day by an airplane strike into a section of the building that was recently reinforced.
The top dogs in government write a creepy document where they explain how they wish to build an American empire, for which they will need a “new pearl harbor” to pull the whole thing off. And they even go around, giving speeches where they warn about such a surprise event:
And simultaneously, at the end of the day you’re just unable to poke a sufficiently strong hole in this whole thing to deflate it, the kind of big hole that allows you to move on with your life. Your choice is: Either ignore it like all the normies do, or turn yourself into a social pariah by digging and digging and digging in an attempt to find that one silver bullet that allows you to finally put the whole thing to rest. But you won’t find it. It’s a rabbit hole, filled with quicksand at the bottom.
And the mistake you make, is that you play along in the game. You signed up to go on the fool’s journey. Like a young farmhand who has his colleagues ask him to get the strawberry ladder, they’re going to keep the game going as long as you’ll play along with it: “Where’s the strawberry ladder?” “Oh haha it was out there somewhere in the attic, see if you can get Joe to get it for you, ask him about it.”
Because the real game here, is metaphysical. You’re looking for something concrete, here in this world. Something you can grab and hold and show to someone else: “Look, this type of metal doesn’t create this kind of crystalic structures until 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, which JET FUEL CAN’T REACH!” And so you’re like the young farmhand looking for the strawberry ladder. As long as you play the game, your coworkers will help you out in search of the strawberry ladder.
The joke is that you won’t find it here in this world. I’ll never find that video again that proves Timothy McVeigh was still in the army months after he had supposedly quit, it was on Youtube, it was deleted and nobody bothered to back it up. You’ll never find that video that proves the controlled demolition beyond a doubt. And http://archive.org won’t have that news article you seek. But if you’re naive enough to play along, this world will happily keep you forever searching, searching for your very own strawberry ladder.
It’s a supernatural event. 9/11 happened in your brain and what really happened is in the sight of the beholder. There is no objective answer, because there is no objective reality. It’s all subjective. From time to time events happen, events where us mere mortals can’t agree on what took place.
What 9/11 is, is the desert of the real. When Slavoj Zizek wrote Welcome to the Desert of the Real, he was quoting Morpheus in the Matrix. And Morpheus, was referencing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. A Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
To Baudrillard, we live in a world of symbols, symbols which serve to obscure the fact that reality, insofar as it may even exist, is irrelevant to our lived day to day experience. So it is with 9/11. What actually happened on 9/11 is irrelevant, what matters for our lived experience is what it became as a symbol. And when you try to find out what really happened, when you try to replace their symbol with that of your own, first you will encounter a conspiracy, but as you dig deeper, you will merely encounter a void.
These events are like forks on the road. And as our boats split off into different directions on the river, we try to hold hands, we try to pull each other back towards our direction: “Look at this obscure Youtube video I found! This proves it beyond a doubt! Your fact-checkers have nothing to say about it!”
But again, it’s a fool’s errand: The boats will be pulled apart. The forks on the road exist for a reason. Maybe a consensus reality with 8 billion people is just hard to run, maybe it takes a lot of processing power.
You’re stuck in a ride in an amusement park. And what runs this amusement park is entirely indifferent to your suffering and confusion. It seems to find it hilarious that you continue to believe any of this is even real.
You could call this a metaphor if you want, about the nature of reality. But I would say: Just smoke it. Smoke the Salvia plant. The metaphor will manifest itself before your very own eyes. The clowns will appear and they will joke with you, they will mock you, you will see their whole circus, along with the device within which they put you through all of this insanity.
And when you do, when you return from the circus, you can forget for a moment about trying to prove what happened on 9/11. Two skyscrapers where 3000 people were immolated by their own government becomes among the least of your worries. You felt as if there is a joke that’s being played on you, but it’s much bigger than you held possible.
