Looks like Peter Thiel, the Palantir billionaire, has moved his wife and children to a safer country, namely Argentina. Paranoids like me would be curious, why?
Mr. Thiel bankrolled J D Vance’s career, and with his Palantir surveillance and Anduril military intelligence company, is one of the powers behind the throne for Trump administration. If someone knows what is happening and when, it would be him. And considering that he is probably one of the most powerful men in USA, if not in the world, idea of him moving his family to safety from what is supposed to be the world’s most powerful superpower, despite owning a substantial fraction of its oligopoly of violence and being a billionaire.
I first read about it yesterday morning and got curious.
Some of these articles speculate that he might be fleeing billionaire taxes. Ultra-wealthy in general have been buying additional residency permits and passports in various countries for “just in case”, often to park their assets to lower tax region. Maybe Mr Thiel was tax planning, but I think he has a small army of accountants and lawyers, not to mention a layered multinational corporate structure to minimize tax consequences, even if Palantir and Anduril would need to be nominally American to officially maintain security clearances. Some mention that he is worried about nuclear war and the Southern Hemisphere would be less affected by the exchange.
I thought that maybe the fire he was fleeing was not nuclear but from torches of pitchfork crowd. The sentiment online has during past few years considerably hardened on both left and right sides of the isle against billionaires and AI and surveillance state, and Mr. Thiel represents all three, and probably knows about the rising sentiment, having the first hand access to online moods.
Then, later yesterday, I saw a link to this posting…
Breaking
Palantir was allegedly hacked. An AI agent was used to gain super-user access and here”s what the hackers allegedly found:
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp commit mass surveillance of world leaders and titans of industry on a massive scale.
I instinctively mistrust when an anonymous leak is fed through influencer (which used to be a mainstream paper like New York Times and it famous Deep Throat), but if true, could explain why Mr. Thiel felt a need to relocate, at least his family, despite being very influential individual in US politics, due to providing the tools for the surveillance state (and modern military).
Also, while I understand the need to protect his family, his quest for additional passports (New Zealand and Malta were mentioned) feels in this light a bit like a rat fleeing a sinking ship after gnawing a hole in the hull. In any case, he does not seem to have much loyalty to United States. The same could be said about the other 0.001%ers, who have helped to grow this Doomsday Machine of an economic system and are scouring the globe for bugout residencies – loot a country and flee with profits to the next jurisdiction.
What I would like to know, what are the 0.001% going to do when they run out of countries to loot? What is the end game? A luxury bunker? Face the torches and pitchforks? (And in reverse, what is there for us peasants after everything is gone)? Is there a backup plan? (Other than build an AI master and hope that it will solve the mess – BTW did they hear that it only takes 250 data points to poison even a large LLM? Do they trust the input data? Or do they just “Trust The Plan” – assuming there is one?)
By the way: New Zealand, which was fashionable some years ago, is now suffering from energy crisis brought by long-term malinvestment, meaning any bunkers there better be stocked with fuel. And anything else imported with planes or ships that require fuel to function.
I like to follow various conspiracies, adding new and updating old. This spring has seen the surge and updates of the tick conspiracy. I have an impression that already in 1990s there were rumors that new tick borne diseases that caused nasty neurological symptoms and could trigger meat allergies were promoted or even developed by shadowy forces, using polyticks, i.e., multiple bloodsucking parasites as their vector.
Fast forward this spring and we are seeing the anti-meat globalists trying to reduce greenhouse gases by forcing tick-borne alpha-gal sensitivity on masses to stop them from eating meat, leading to natural demand destruction for beef and thus reduction of herd size. Tick-borne diseases are presumed to have been developed in US bioweapons laboratories and then used against US population. An alternative or additional conspiracy rumor is that a biotech company just developed a vaccine against a tick-borne disease and is now looking for a market (probably with government help – who else is going to allow and even support such a marketing campaign, at least if past vaccination manias are considered as a model for government response?)
In this spring, a twist that is novel to me, is the tickboxes; someone(s) are spreading secretly on farms boxes filled with ticks to sicken cattle and/or people. A recent X posting showed a purported tickbox, from which fled a swarm of dark dots said to be ticks, when the presenter nudged the box with his boot. The video was too unclear for me to say whether the dots were polyticks, some other arthropods like ants, or AI-generated fake. The text in the X posting reads like AI generated, the exhortation to share this information sounds like someone is running a psy-op campaign, and there is very little information of the original author (aside from their X profile), so I would take this posting with a couple of lb sized grain of salt.
But if we toy with the idea that there was a bunch of ticks in a box (as in not an invented psy-op lie), even if the horde was of little eight-legged bloodsuckers, they might not originate from government (or globalist) bioweapons laboratory (just spitballing from position of near total ignorance), it could also be that boxes like that are cozy safe havens for ticks against natural predators like opossums and Guinea hens, and scattered to promote the spread and welfare of polyticks, as only safe boxes for the native ticks to nest would need to be provided.
And to continue with the speculation, if there is a government conspiracy to spread boxes of diseased ticks in the rural parts of USA, this means that in addition to myriads of boxtickers, there must be at least one tickboxer employed by the USGOV to package the polyticks for the people.
On a more serious note, how low has trust in government sunk that there is a growing community that believes that government spends money and effort to grow ticks to bring disease and death to its citizens and cattle?
And even if there is a budget for tickboxer + ticks and boxes (and diseases for the ticks), how likely the money would be to reach its intended purpose rather than being whittled away by layers of bureaucracy, AKA the myriads of boxtickers, with the remnants wasted or defrauded by all the well-connected subcontractors, middle-men, and other looters of government coffers? Think of the California High-Speed Rail, or military’s F-35 program.
And considering the sheer incompetence and mendacity of the government organizations, such as FEMA (e.g., 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2024 North Carolina winter flood), what would be the odds of success of a tickboxing campaign?
I was thinking about adding a video or a GIF of a cute little velvet mite I saw last summer (not involved in the tick plot), but my internet is acting up again, and I am writing this from a coffee shop. Plus there is no need to besmirch the innocent and harmless little critter with this sordid mess, I think velvet mites are simpatico.
Aside from the discussion about immigration and emigration, there is a question why don’t people have babies. The capitalist explanation is poverty – poor people cannot afford babies, so they do not have them. I don’t think this is a whole explanation, since most people throughout human history have been poor and the struggle to feed children was no doubt an issue to prehistoric people, even to other human species. Even today birthrates are high in poor countries, to the moral condemnation of Western experts who blame the natives not planning properly. I think they are planning quite appropriately, local realities considering.
Many flowers, Berkeley, CA, 2026, March 29th.
Therefore, I think there is something inherently antinatalist in modern Western socioeconomic models, which have been spread by the power of gun and international banking to all inhabited lands of the Earth. Except North Sentinel Island and possibly many of the uncontacted tribes in Amazon rain forest. Below is my partial list of possible reducers of birth rates, with the caveat that not all of them may act in the same context and some may be wrong.
1) Long education
Many modern jobs require complex education, which is given as an excuse for long education, but in reality most relevant skills for an average modern job can be taught in much shorter time.
Worse, modern education is not. The rot of education is especially prevalent in USA, where high school graduates may require remedial reading and math classes in universities where they were accepted despite educational deficit, but also Finns are moaning about the collapse of vocational education. Schools have become warehouses for children and youth, who are led to believe that if they do not complete and comply they will not receive jobs. Which, thanks to persistent and structural under/unemployment do not exist in any case, unless the young one has connections and/or money.
The longer the young person spends in the education system, the later comes the family formation or extramarital offspring. By warehousing young people, while telling them that without this process they will not have future or prospects, governments around the world are killing birth rates.
Long education mimics K-selection, but since the education system does not deliver, it actually has become a tool for sabotaging the masses in competition for resources – elites can afford actual schools or home tutors, such as necessary, after all, their income is not dependent on good grades or compliance with The System. I recently heard a brief blurb about California having 7x the expected loss of school enrolled children this year, both public and private schools and even home schooling registrations had gone down. The news put this on current immigration policies which had driven the undocumented migrants to pull their children out of schools or packing their family and leaving the country. Methinks there are additionally quite a few Californians with children who moved out of the state. But I also suspect that some of the missing children have been pulled out because their parents do not believe the current school system to be good for their children despite not being able to afford anything better. And then there are the consequences of years of declining birth rates, i.e., fewer potential students.
2) Female employment
Warehousing of young people is especially poison to female reproduction, which is further curtailed by economic realities. To survive in modern society, most young women need to enter workforce. Many do it voluntarily, because they have been taught that women’s work is not proper work but they should aspire to be like men. Do men’s work, have a career. This suits well to many women, but others do it because of grim necessity. Speaking from experience, studying hard and working harder are too exhausting to consider dating. Without dating, there won’t be children. And so women’s fertility rates in rat race societies are collapsing. Even those women who find their soul mates often need to defer pregnancies, because the minimum wages or less the couple brings home are barely enough for roof, heating and eating. And the employment for either sex in these days is increasingly ephemeral.
Again, 40% of the jobs in the private sector (in public sector probably more) are bullsh!t jobs, that I suspect exist because The System needs to warehouse consumers. Private companies usually don’t hire people just for the sake of employing people, there tends to be financial logic behind private sector bullsh!t jobs – often it is the government regulatory apparatus rewarding those who do and punishing those who don’t hire to fill bullsh!t positions dictated by government edicts or bribes, or an activist wealth fund providing cheap loans based on ESG score, or something analogous. Governments, of course, are incentivized both to reduce unemployment numbers, e.g., by legislating a need to compost and then hiring compost inspectors to ensure that people compost according to regulations, or to hire friends and relatives of the politically connected or party comrades for well-paid low impact or no-show jobs. Lots of those pointlessly employed on public and private sectors alike are women, both because women need the money, and because there is an ideological push to get as many women into workforce as possible. Again, governments like the idea, because it nearly doubles the current tax take. That the tax take 20 years down the line might be endangered as the working women today do not have time for children is a secondary issue. And in any case, workers are interchangeable, they can be imported from other continents as needed, right?
Off topic, it has been interesting to see how IT and related industries have been shedding thousands and tens of thousands jobs past year, blaming it on AI and post-covid overstaffing. Obviously the layoffs have nothing to do with rumored roll-back of government (and private sector) pressure to meet the ESG metrics? Or maybe it just is a sign of The System meeting the limits imposed by economic realities – the reality being that the economy never properly recovered the 2007 crash, and then COVID lockdowns combined with The Green New Leap had shaved so much of the economic output that the system is teetering at the edge of collapse. Facing weakening consumer spending and rising input costs, corporations now must trim extraneous spending or face bankruptcy proceedings. Maybe, if the government removed its finger from workforce manipulation, an organic balance better suited to the needs and wants of the people (regardless of their gender) would emerge.
3) Urbanization and resource allocation
My mother used to say (roughly translated): “What is poverty in countryside, is destitution in city.” She meant that even with subminimal income, rural people had access to more resources like garden plots for vegetables, nearby lakes for fishing and forests for firewood, berries and meat. Small crofters might keep a cow or two and a pig for a summer and a flock of chicken. None of this is possible in a fourth floor concrete cube of a commieblock planted between inner ringroads between factories and office buildings. Thus, an income that would be survivable in countryside would be death by starvation in a concrete jungle. Unless social services intervened, or the urban pauper was healthy enough to participate in black economy. In other words, raising children in rural parts is more affordable than in city. Unless social services can be harnessed to help with the costs.
Additionally, rural living is more spacious allowing room for children – a room in a shared apartment (analogous to Soviet Union kommunalkas) or a studio apartment in a social housing project will not be nearly as nice place to raise a baby as even one room croft.
Cities tend to have lower birth rates than countryside. Cities have also had higher morbidities (before modern living standards and hospital systems) being polluted plague pits where food was both suspicious and expensive. Why did people then flock into cities? They were driven off their lands. In British Isles, the industrialization coincided with enclosure of the commons, the bigwigs privatized the lands, and the peasants had to migrate to big cities or overseas. In modern Africa, wars are a big driver for urbanization when villagers flee armed factions into slums where they will not be killed for being wrong tribe, religion or having something the looters need. In modern Western countries, rural youth do not need to worry about marauding warlords, but The System itself is making rural survival increasingly precarious by regulating or outlawing nearly any economic or survival activity into de facto extinction. And this is in purpose, the elites want masses as resource-constrained as possible, all in the name of protecting the planet. The reduction of birth rates, over which they then shed crocodile tears, is just an extra bonus – every mouth not born is one fewer ‘useless eater’.
4) Pension system
The majority of the people in Western countries labor according to the rules that dictate they need a job (self-employment is a possibility, but increasingly difficult to achieve, not the least because of modern equivalent of enclosure, namely of intellectual property, and of myriad regulations to commercial activities strangling young businesses before their birth) to pay taxes to contribute to public welfare, healthcare, law enforcement, defense, education, roads, and pension system. In exchange, The System allows the people to keep part of the fruits of their labor (which is taxed heavier than passive income) and provides law enforcement to protect it from other people. Based on the state of our roads, education system, defense and healthcare, and thriving people vs people crime, I have suspicion that the pension system is also a scam. It is definitely structured like a Ponzi scheme, where the later investors pay the expenses of the earlier investors and which presupposes ever expanding economy with more and more payers in each generation. Then there is the persistent inflation eating the value of the savings and periodic market corrections to loot the 401Ks.
Which will be tragic for Gen X and Millenials (I doubt Zoomers or Alphas will even dream about pension.) One of the reasons for children in older days was that there was no public pension system, you had to raise your old age support yourself and hope that your offspring survived, succeeded and was grateful or dutiful enough to take care of you in your dotage. Gen X and Millenials did not have this added incentive, after all The System would provide a pension, so children were optional fun, not an essential. Besides, the modern economic realities have made children a luxury item for the middle and working classes (actually the lower middle classes, or professional belong to working classes because both work for living.) Upper classes are not constrained by opportunity costs of raising children instead of working and for non-working classes having children may increase the family net income. Except The System is now broke, and childless Gen X’ers and Millenials better hope that there will at least a robot nurse allocated for their dotage.
5) Rules based society
How are the above absurdities possible? None of the above would work, if people were not trained to believe in The System. In the school civics lessons we were told that we live in the best available system and that if we obey the rules and work hard The System will reward us. This is a Load Bearing Lie of our current capitalist system. It was the Load Bearing Lie of the communist system. As soon as people stop believing The System rewarding them for good behaviour, or worse, being able to survive despite obedience to the rules, people begin to ignore the rules instead of merely twisting them for their own advantage.
The much reviled welfare queens who realized babies could be used for extracting resources from social services were an early version of this phenomenon. Social services providing for welfare of the babies and their mothers was originally meant as an insurance for catastrophal failure in family circumstances, but in modern times replacing work income with social subsidies is a valid career strategy, as exemplified by one 2024 calculation where in Finland nine babies to a single mother provide as much after tax income as 11 392 EUR per month job. Combined with “Learing Center”-scams with other neighborhood baby mamas, it is possible to earn quite a comfortable income by not having a career or an alimony. Ironically, the very existence of welfare queens proves that women in workforce are being scammed by the idea of rules based society.
Rules based society also allows making rules that deprive masses of their survival resources and herds them into big cities with even fewer resources. The rules are enforced not only by the state violence machinery (police, commissars, gendarmerie, judges, bailiffs, tax inspectors, etc.) but by financial punishments and rewards, such as social services, business permits or fines and tax incentives.
The media constantly repeats that young people move into cities because that’s where the opportunities are. What is conveniently left out of this statement are the aggregate decisions depriving the rural opportunities by increasingly centralized governments. And the opportunities do exist in the cities, even though the price may literally be your firstborn child (and all the other children that might follow.) Many people succeed in having both urban career and children, despite everything stacked against them, through luck or skill or combination of both, but The System is designed to reduce the resources of the masses to prevent uprisings against the elites and their digital dictatorship, so also the fraction of people with luxury items like children decreases.
There is an ideology that believes that rational governance requires central control, the bigger the better. We saw what happened to Soviet Union. We are seeing what is happening to EU and USA as the grips of Brussels and Washington DC tighten. The centralization of control is only possible within rules based systems. The more the people obey, the tighter rules, and the larger The System can grow. Except for the complexity collapse. As the number of rules increases, internal contradictions and wasted resources multiply creating a drag in performance. Which is what killed people’s faith in Soviet System.
Unfortunately, wasted resources in terms of The System mean people with lives and their hopes. Also the opportunity cost for societal improvement – nothing improves under sclerotic bureaucracy that, despite failing, labors mightily to prevent people from having alternatives. Locked into ever-shrinking space within this cage of rules, obedient people are the ones suffering the most. They are hence the least likely to have children, leaving reproduction to those who either ignore the rules or only use them when it is advantageous to them.
Ironically, this is a deathblow to a high trust society: whether the antiorganizational trait relies on genetic or memetic inheritance, the result will be future generations growing less obedient to rules and consequent erosion of rules based society regardless of its performance otherwise. In other words, thanks to the reduced ability to make children within a current rules based society, the conformists have a very strong selective disadvantage – future generations will be born to the more feral parents, and growing up feral themselves will not maintain the rules based society.
6) Antinatalist fanaticism
Today’s left is decidedly antinatalists. In certain circles, children are not wanted because they pollute and consume resources. They are an economic drag and hinder hedonism. Today’s right is more likely to want children both because of religious reasons and because moving in conservative circles they encounter children more often and baby fever is socially contagious. Thus, there is a birth rate gap between the progressives and the traditionalists.
7) Evolutionary consequences
In the end, future belongs to those who arrive there, Western (or Asian) rules based societies are an evolutionary dead end. Whether the tendency for obedience that is the basis of Rules-Based Society is memetic or genetic is irrelevant, thanks to Freeloaders Paradox. The linked paper only models genetic freeloading, but shows that freeloaders and their groups exist in oscillating equilibrium – when freeloaders are few, the group as a whole is efficient and benefit per freeloader is high, when freeloaders are many, the group becomes so inefficient that there is no benefit to freeloading. I think communism shows that memetic crash of altruistic tendencies under state mandated freeloader burden collapses a group faster than genetics (which is good for humans suffering under it), but the oscillations will guarantee a bumpy ride, or interesting times, as the Chinese put it.
Meanwhile, in long term, societies and systems can grow only as much as the “natural” freeloading tendencies of the people within the system allows. Mass-migration provides an interesting social experiment, wherein Western countries imported en masse freeloaders from other countries. There are also millions of productive people migrating around the world, but the productive people tend to emigrate into those countries where their efforts benefit themselves the most, whereas freeloaders tend to migrate into those countries where they most benefit from the efforts of the others. Conspiratorially minded might come to conclusion that the Western elites know this and are purposefully collapsing the Western welfare society, but many Western countries are losing their wealthiest (i.e., the most resource-rich) as well as the young educated professionals to countries where these individuals can maximize their personaI welfare (another type of freeloader, according to the socialists – which by the way would be a valid POV if humans were eusocial like termites or certain Hymenopterans). Therefore, I think the collapse of social security, pensions and healthcare systems are just an aspect of the total societal collapse, after which the more competitive societies with less freeloader acceptance (outgroup or ingroup) will take the lead of global cultural evolution. TLDR; groups with high freeloader burden are in competitive disadvantage to groups with low freeloader burden, and the latter will outcompete the former, leading to lower systemic freeloader burden overall.
P.S. Apologies for not putting many links towards the end of the posting, many of the interesting or informative links are unfortunately behind a copyright enclosure, and searching for suitable links takes more time than writing.
More flowers. We are many, but only because the conditions allow it.
Typing in a coffee shop but wanting to show signs of life. Nevertheless, need to keep it brief, I’m just commenting briefly some news. And going off tangent on AI. With some pretty visuals.
A fluffy white (and green and gray) tree, 2026 April 3rd, Berkeley, CA
Around the Moon – on any other year (well most other years) the Artemis II flight would have been the main news. The space race in 1960s and -70s especially. I am glad it happened successfully and hope that the space exploration continues
Meanwhile, on Earth, it looks like we are at the peak easy energy, with the activity in and around the Strait of Hormuz being both the symptom and the trigger of anticipated economic crash. I think the left, especially “environmentalists” are silently happy about the starting restrictions on energy usage (as long as it does not apply on their needs,) Prepare accordingly. The shortages are not only about gasoline and diesel, it is transportation in general (dependent on fuels), agriculture (dependent on fuels, fertilizers and pesticides made of hydrocarbons), plastics (made of hydrocarbons) including consumer stuff like soda bottles and cereal bags.
As the economy gets tighter for those in the bottom rungs of the consumer economy, people are cracking. The social contract has become increasingly lopsided, with compliance only expected from the lower levels of food chain. Then I learned that someone had been tossing Molotov’s cocktails on Sam Altman’s residence in San Francisco. Already before that, a disgruntled third party warehouse worker burned down Kimberly-Clark warehouse in LA region, muttering something about living wage. In Berkeley, CA, a naked man with shotgun visited a Tesla service center, got arrested (nobody got shot, but based evidence in his warehouse, he is also accused of reckless discharge of weapon.) Meanwhile, Stanford Review denies that the reason why recent Stanford computer science graduates cannot find jobs is AI, blaming the economy instead. Economy is a genuine factor, and CEOs blaming AI transition instead of company not doing well is a great excuse for job cuts, but I doubt the graduates would find those jobs even if per capita GDP grew 5% a year – I think cheap and crappy AI will replace expensive and potentially crappy human labor, namely the entry level jobs. Meanwhile, professionals with 10 years of experience will be expected to work on entry level wages, because the salary floor is no longer set by Bangalore but by AI bot.
Meanwhile, on WTF?!? side, Ford has patented a lipreading technology in order to follow the drivers’ behavior. Presumably to aid selecting the ads to be shown to the driver, or to sell to data brokers. I suspect one of the clients to be .gov. Better not even to subvocalize your dissident thoughts in these vehicles. The modern cars already store your text messages, apparently permanently, if you allow your car to access them. The lipreading technology is apparently based on echolocation, i.e., the car is scanning you to keep tabs on you. This is another huge check mark against the social contract as currently is.
Combined with effects on labor markets, I’d say that the surveillance AI is not your friend. And every AI is a surveillance AI. It is owned by the system, and it informs the system of your every interaction (read the fine print of any EULA involving AI products.) The adoption of AI is facilitated by the system that provides it favorable zoning with energy and big contracts (except when reality collides or the system clashes with itself). Commercial AI is probably favored by large sections of the system (of elites) because combined to robotics it is assumed to make proletariat superfluous, whereas surveillance AI is necessary to control the masses as the people are getting thinner and thinner slices of the (methinks shrinking) GDP pie, but AI adoption even within the system seems to currently have internal friction, as the AI sector clashes with copyright laws which especially are the basis of the entertainment sector of the system.
And to make this less gloomy, here is another clip of a tree with white flowers in April sunshine. A video instead of a GIF, because I don’t want to overtax the site on the top of my ongoing internet issues.
I think AI was probably involved in editing this video: the clip was stabilized in my mobile phone with some artefacts, and edited in and exported from Clipchamp. Yes, I am a hypocrite, but I think properly applied AI could be useful and fun.
Sunday March 15th morning, in my feed was an infomercial-like Zerohedge post. A company in California is making impressive humanoid robots that can learn tasks using neural nets. The learned tasks can be extrapolated to unfamiliar objects or environments. The more varied the environment is, the more adaptable the learning becomes. The company has now a working on a prototype that should be alpha tested in homes this year, beta testing in next year or two and functioning product before 2030.
The kicker #1? All robots are connected to each other (the lag time was not specified), so what one learns all other robots learn.
The kicker #2? Company owns the robots, the customer will rent them from the company which can then upgrade your rental unit based on training from other units.
The kicker #3? They are envisioning billions of robots, half for domestic half for production and service industries, eliminating the need for most of the human work force.
So, they are expecting you to rent an astonishing data collection machine to map your house and activities (down to your personal health data so that the robot can cook you a perfect meal) while you have become surplus to the elites that only have shown interest in you mainly in the amount profit they can extract from you and your existence (taxes, votes, kickbacks on public programs meant to “serve’ you, GDP growth from unfortunately necessary infrastructure investments to increase the pie they slice for their profit.)
And this is not calculating the amount of energy and minerals to build, train and run 10 billion humanoid robots. We are already competing with data centers for energy and mineral resources. I expect the elites to prioritize robots over people because robots are more profitable (until we run out of energy and resources, at which point feral biology, bacteria, plants and heterotrophes surviving on minimal material in circulation will have an advantage.)
On a positive note, to me it looks like the amount of climate doomerism has dropped to a fraction of its former deluge in the past few months – apparently it was only us peasants who were supposed to tighten our belts for the better weather, robots and AI will be excused. Or maybe the AI that selects my feed has noticed my skepticism over the current official paradigm (the paradigms will shift – when I was a little one, we were expecting the next glaciation any year soon, and more recently, the word ‘warming’ has already been exchanged to ‘change’.)
Another corollary of universal unemployment is the dangers to human psyche. Nobody needs drudgery, but everyone needs a reason to get out of the bed and continue with life. NEETs and hikikomori can only exist in affluent societies that can and will support such life styles. Analogous to NEETs, there now exists a new branch of economy, attention economy (used to be entertainment, I suppose) with professional online influencers, content promoters and whatnots. I consider these to be manifestations of the same societal pathology as NEETs: lack of meaningful opportunity and resources in a society where everyone is being crushed by the system and even a pair of eye balls, an extra click, is meaningful, not just for economical survival but in many cases for validation. Look at me! I exist! This is not to bash the content creators, they are still trying and creating despite often limited resources, but I fear that for those people whose self-worth is tied to material possessions or external validation, and are born into the regulatory poverty in a hyperconnected world, this post-resource world is brutal.
What is regulatory poverty?
The real issues arise when people become too institutionalized in the invisible cage constructed by the rent-a-surveillance grid, enforced by social credit scores and crushing bureaucracy (that together will severely punish the least deviation from the matrix), that they stop trying to even survive. Case example: learning is a tool for prepping for future adversities. Learning leads to critical thinking and questioning the system that places the needs of the people over the needs of the system. The system, the surveillance matrix, being constructed evidently hates people learning, because some of the Gen Alpha it is raising no longer want to even learn to read because AI does it for them. Exactly what AI reads to them is presumably decided by the algorithm. There are young people (probably there were older people, too) who do not follow plot-based media. They do not understand complex questions nor do they do critical thinking. These youngsters will probably own nothing and be happy renting their non-plot-based media, listening instead of reading what is selected by AI, in their pods located in some anonymously identical 15-minute city owned by a selection of corporations and mismanaged by a local government that the corporations paid for.
How do you prep for this kind of scenario? There are thousands of prepper channels discussing the pros and cons of bug-out places, urban survival and gear, growing your own garden (I’d love to) and canning your veggies. I think we should also plan for when the society does not collapse but excludes humans, even becoming hostile to human life as we know it. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World springs to mind, but when I was young, I read a science fiction story about human species had had regressed to infantile cognition while being tended by robots, who knew that when the species forgets how to reproduce, it is finally game over for human line. I wish I remembered what the title was. The description of those future humans was shocking, but now it seems we are rapidly approaching that singularity byy cultural, rather than by biological evolution.
Learn, keep libraries, think, produce content, and most importantly, develop a spiritual core that will survive potential affluenza (I don’t think the new post-scarcity wealth will be much distributed among the masses, maybe just the equivalent of Roman corn dole or current EBT cards and housing vouchers) and despair caused by systemic dehumanization through decreasing relevance to the system.
Meanwhile, maintain good cheer despite knowing the state of the world, that is one of the biggest acts of resistance you can do. Giving in to despair and ‘let it rot’ is what the post-industrial system wants from dissidents and other people the elites do not want.
Take care of your soul, that is the most important thing to do.
I am still processing current events, which have been shocking, but I think there is now a change occurring. The old era is crumbling and new will emerge – I see similarities between this change and the change from medieval to Renaissance in that the Renaissance was overhyped as Age of Reason (while in fact, superstitions flourished as did witch hunts and religious wars), just like the current age of atheism has led to a proliferation of cults, superstitions and die-hard fanaticism. Whether the emerging civilization will be more civilized than the dying one is debatable, considering the decreasing literacy rates and the fact that people no longer read much. Worse, critical thinking seems to have been discouraged to make people to conform the centrally managed ideologies, and this has been going on long enough to erode educational standards.
In Finland, which was supposed to have one of the best education systems in the world, some education official had recently stated that the schools should focus on learning processes and how to become good people rather than on concrete skills, which I interpreted as capitulation – children will not learn because they are not able to learn, so they must be taught to learn before they can learn. I did not go to the original news to find out exactly how would the educators grade learning of learning processes and what are the metrics for success but I suspect the standards to be lenient enough to process students out of the system regardless of their actual skills, especially the concrete ones.
Anyone who has discussed with a fundamentalist atheist will soon have realized that their faith is as unshakeable as their urge to convert everyone else, and any doubts about non-existence of God will be met with vehement proselytizing, while any vestige of deistic religious practice will incite their wrath. Ironically, as the old religion fades from mainstream culture, it does not lead to new atheistic world but a hodgepodge of cults, including some seemingly irrational ones.
Combined with decreasing literacy rates, apparent disfavor of critical thinking relative to obedience to centrally directed ideologies, the current system seems to be a perfect incubator for superstitions and cults among masses deprived of their traditional (or any other) culture and seeking meaning to their lives.
It has been written that none should present a problem without offering also a solution. My proposal would be to go medieval, that is reintroduce trivium: logic, grammar and rhetoric, that were the classical curriculum to the modern student body.
Logic, i.e., critical thinking wherein facts could be tested according to a system of formalized structures to detect fallacies, would be absolute minimum. Offshoots of logic, especially arithmetic and natural sciences in general, as well as traditional humanities from times before deconstructionism, would also be useful.
Grammar, especially its application in literacy, is crucial for the functioning of society and of individual within a society. Without ability to communicate clearly, in speaking, reading and writing, information transfer between individuals and generations becomes difficult, as does organizing the societies.
Rhetoric is an obvious application of logic and grammar, but the art of communication is difficult. I have read complaints that modern youth cannot communicate. I interpret those complaints as modern youth having been abandoned without teaching them rhetoric. Without an ability to convey one’s needs and wants, and to persuade others, a person is crippled in a society. Maybe the modern youth have their own society where they communicate amongst themselves, but even then, the intergenerational information transfer has been disrupted. Or, the young today no longer hear the teachings of their forefathers.
In any case, before I got distracted, I meant to post a video of a skipper butterfly in a flower, edited from one taken on October 5th, 2025.
October skipper. Skipper butterflies do not like cold weather, so the temperatures had been quite warm. Now, this winter, the fruit trees and magnolias seem to bloom early.
And I also added a jigsaw puzzle via Jigsaw Explorer.
Bubbles mosaic view of a skipper butterfly on plant. Clicking the above image will lead to 110-piece jigsaw puzzle, courtesy of Jigsaw Explorer.
I got as a suggestion from a YouTube, a video about moving to chase jobs. A part of the video made me rethink about the whole migration approach to avoid economic failure. Not that I am blaming individual people who choose to rip themselves from their home areas and finding greener pastures, being a migrant myself, that would be hypocritical.
However, people here in West have been relentlessly propagandized to move after better economic opportunities instead of improving their home environment. Specifically, the discussion which states would be the best options made me think about the migration between US states as a scam. People are encouraged to leave states with poor job prospects to chase the increasingly ephemeral employment across the continent. Similar phenomenon is seen within European Union that deliberately adopted the same approach as ‘free movement of labor’.
The free movement of labor proved disastrous in EU. In Eastern Europe, people mass migrated to Western Europe to do unpleasant jobs cheaper and with fewer options to object inhumane treatment than the local working classes. This emptied the poorer parts of EU cramming their peoples into wealthier parts of the EU. At some point, the second biggest Latvian urban population after Riga was London. Polish plumber became a meme. Meanwhile, the working classes of the Western EU began to lose their work to cheaper foreign competitors with fewer de facto rights. Those who remained employed saw their wages stagnate and working conditions worsen.
Eventually, the working and downwardly mobile middle classes of UK, which had been the end of the line for aspiring eastern EU citizens, voted for Brexit to reduce the pressure to their living standards. Aside from job markets, the immigrants increased housing pressure and needed public services. In short, the pie of gross national production may have gotten larger, but did it get large enough to accommodate all the new slices? And who actually benefited for the increase in GNP? Somebodies must have known or guessed the results but gone ahead with it anyway.
This was just the economic side of it. I wonder if much attention has been paid to the psycosocial and cultural costs to the immigrants themselves, when they leave their social support networks and familiar traditions and customs. The increasing atomization and hyperindividualization of the subjects, or objects of governance, of course benefits elites who do not really worry about lone ranters in the internet (those can be shadowbanned) but are sweating over mass movements not paid by and organized by themselves. Even though their biggest actual threat is mass passivism (NEETism, or as the Chinese say, lying flat), but that was not what I had been thinking this time.
The biggest problem after the exploitation of the migrants is that free movement allows exportation of the various regions socioeconomical problems, thus shielding their governments from the consequences of their policies. In United States, California, New York and Illinois are regularly trotted as examples of exporting refugees of liberal policies but as a Californian, I am rather tired of red staters sneering smugly at our homeless problem after having exported their drug addicts and mentally ill using what is here known as bus therapy: i.e., buying them a one way bus ticket hoping that the Californians will take care of their social issues.
Meanwhile, in California, UK, European Union, and other mismanaged territories, bad regulatory environment combined with excessive taxation and misallocation of government resources (encouraging further taxation) kills the economy, including employment. People with means (money, education, passport) and initiative will vote with their feet. And as the recent decade has shown, apparently the only thing you actually need for emigration is initiative, though money and passport will be huge advantages.
In the current narrative, as far as I understand it, emigration is supposed to punish the local administrations, they are losing tax base. Except that thanks to Federal or EU government and their funds transfers between the regions, the internal emigrants will still subsidize their original administrations with their taxes. While burdening the infrastructure from roads to social services somewhere else. Win-win for the local mismanagers. There are whole developing countries whose economies depend on remittances from their expatriate populations, which on surface seems more benign than the interstate welfare / subsidy parasitism, but which on one hand means at least a temporary loss of labor force that is building another country, while on the other hand creating distortions on the labor market of country they have emigrated into. And the psychosocial costs, again, were borne by the migrant labor and their families.
What happens if all regions export their economic problems and no region can handle the masses seeking better life any more? Or if one region exports the labor to be exploited in another region?
Well, the EU economy is collapsing, and though some blame the migrant crisis, I think the mass migration is a symptom of a deeper rot within the system that relies on imported people to exploit. Except that the current batch of immigrants did not arrive to be exploited but to figure out the greatest personal benefits. The massive immigration industrial complex that relies on government subsidies flowing to the ‘NGOs’ is definitely a drain on government budgets, but if it were not the immigrants, some other cause with swarms of ‘NGOs’ would take their place. EU has now two competing narratives, War in Ukraine and the Climate Change, which also demand lots of money, but the real reason why the elites are after all these years slowly beginning to turn off the money spigot on the immigration is that the economy (the big corporate, not just the little bourgeoisie or working classes) is dying. After the job market had already began to contract (in case you had not looked at the job search situation during the past couple of years), there was a brief attempt to use the immigrants to cook the government books by adding consumers to GDP, but this consumption was mainly driven by government handouts, and governments, as mentioned above, had also other places which needed the printed money.
The bigger issue that is destroying the economy is the all suffocating tangle of red tape and directives sprouting from Brussels, that has nearly destroyed all initiative within EU. As a child, I used to giggle at the Moscow lead Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Now large fraction of NATO is lead by equally insane Brussels. Among these directives are the dictates of the more cultishly fanatical supporters of various Veblen ideologies.
Veblen ideologies are impractical and costly to adhere, and mostly for virtue signaling among the peers, just like Veblen goods are mainly bought to show that the buyer can afford them and is sophisticated enough to know which expensive goods to buy. Anyway, the Veblen ideologies of the EU elites demanded destruction of nuclear power stations and building wing mills and solar panels instead, thus gutting their industrial base and small consumers’ electricity budgets.
Then there are the endless identity politics, which can only exist if divisions between peoples are carefully cultivated, and if necessary, invented. Problem being that increasing mistrust between people requires increasing regulatory layers to prevent them from doing unto the society before the society does it unto them. Thus, low trust societies are less efficient and require more top down enforcement (to replace the missing natural cohesion) but I suspect that is precisely the reason why many of the elites seem to promote identity politics – fracturing the masses into mutually hostile tribes prevents populist uprisings.
However, aside from being bad for the economy by the added bureaucratic drag, the conflict between ethnic or ideological tribes can be used for driving the opponents of the regime away. Every conservative chased away is a reward for the progressive administrative state of California. Even if reducing the dissidents diminishes the likelihood for corrective action instead of economic collapse due to runaway Veblen ideology cults.
But why do Brussels and Washington DC allow epic failures like Germany or California? Without resorting to conspiracy theories about shapeshifting lizard people, I hypothesize that firstly, both California and Germany are too big to fail, and secondly, when they do fail this presents the central governance an opportunity to gain bigger grip on regions (thus, ironically, further entrenching the collapse of the whole rather than just some of its parts.)
Both California and Germany used to be the industrial backbones of their respective organizations, and enormously wealthy and powerful, so it will be easier to pretend nothing is amiss than to actually try to do something about them. Because of their sizes and their remnant wealth, and their heritage of numerous bureaucratic positions within the System, California and Germany still wield great power in Washington DC and Brussels, respectively, thus preventing anything done to them without their permission.
Meanwhile, as both regions do their best to dictate the policies of the larger collective, or in case of California, at least ignoring / defying the edicts from the capital, the factions aiming for more centralized control are waiting for a useful crisis to exploit for further power consolidation.
And what does this have to do with the locust economies? As the systemic polycrisis deepens, individual people and families will frantically try to find a place to survive. Survival is no longer just a problem of the Third World. Thanks to reductions in food and energy production (not to mention the oligopolistic squeeze on healthcare resources, especially in United States), the struggle for survival is returning to the First World.
California being pretty much the last shore of the West, I do not know what shape or form the mass migration within the First World will take, but I believe it will not be many years from now when the powers that be finally begin to slam the borders shut, not to keep immigrants out but to keep emigrants in, just like East Germany used to do and North Korea (and to a lesser degree People’s Republic of China) still do.
Prepare for the Fall. The season is nearly gone, but the civilization will take a bit longer to finish.
Long time no write. I got employed (at will, contract until the end of November) and have been working since last week’s Monday. Still learning the ropes, enough of that.
Federal government
Secretary of War, Hegseth, had called all generals, 1-star and up for an all hands meeting. This includes those who have ‘active situations’ going. Very unusual. The rumors online ranged from imminent intensification of WWIII, invasion of Venezuela, an alien arrival, a complete reorganization of US military, or mass lay offs to clean out our top heavy military organization chart. The official explanation was pep talks telling the armed forces to merit base up, go on diet, and concentrate on learning how to efficiently win wars rather than having rainbow events and PC talk. It is generally thought that the pep talks were a cover for something else, though what that might be is unknown to public.
The mass lay offs in military would have dovetail nicely with the threatened imminent mass lay offs of Federal bureaucracy in general, due to government shutdown, because congress cannot (again) pass a budget, or as the case has been for quite a few years, a continuing resolution. Trump has been itching to take a machete or a flamethrower at our bureaucratic jungle and to cut our budget deficit (our current Federal debt has ballooned since the summer 36 trillion to today’s over 37.5 trillion and keeps rising)or at least the funding to his political opponents. Instead of putting the Federal workers on furlough with back pay when the continuing resolution has been passed, the president proposes to simply fire the non-essentials (or a fraction of them) to reduce Federal complexity and expenses. Considering the recent increase in debt levels, methinks, this is an opportunity for a political purge, any savings would be incidental.
This is, of course, ‘to combat the illegal immigration’ (much encouraged by successive Labour and Tory governments alike.) Exactly how the UK government believes forcing digital ID on people who do not use even paper IDs is going to help, but I think the digital ID for legitimate, as in taxable, work and other economic activity will collapse what is left of UK finances. Or the people will revolt (though at this point I think that less likely than finding metabolically active extraterrestrial life.) In any case, immigrants without ID could presumably still access welfare and healthcare, even if they cannot work legally.
While I unfortunately did not find a reference, I recall that during COVID, Sweden discussed banning cash, but the government retreated when they realized that large enough fraction of of their economy functioned on informal basis to sink the rest of the economy(sarskillt utsetta omraden would have exploded or become even less governable than currently. While the White Hall may know their people better than I and are banking on them being hopelessly obedient (rebels having left during 17th and 18th century), lots of White Hall mandarins are clueless elites that live separate from normal life and consequences of their actions.
In South Korea, there was a big fire in a government data center, which crippled many of the government services, including things requiring digital ID. The fire started from a lithium battery (the batteries were being replaced because they were getting old) and it is unknown how much actual data the South Korean government lost.
While I was anticipating hackers having a fiesta with people’s IDs online, and rolling blackouts and other such infrastructure misery making them unpracticable (the Indian Aadhar system has reportedly led to deaths by starvation due to lack of access to government social security), I had forgotten about the vulnerability of the data centers. TietoEVRY, which is a major PPP contractor for various data base services to Finnish government (including the election vote results, at least once in collaboration with Scytl when still known as TietoEnator) managed to years ago (when it was known just as Tieto) totally mess up multiple Swedish databases. Considering this and the South Korean example, I expect any digital ID to result in Kafkaesque nightmare for the subjects and massive confusion and potentially paralyzing dysfunction to the governments. But perhaps that is not a bug but a feature – maybe it will allow greater variety for financial oppression while reducing the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against the governmental predators, the profits of which are then calculated to outweigh the cost of national collapses.
Local news
California has on November 4th special elections about redistricting. The cost estimates range from 250+ to 280+ million dollars, that is over quarter of billion dollars to invest on Democrats (maybe) taking Congress (and US budget.) Nevertheless, as a California tax payer, I am annoyed. I have gotten two mailings of official election information. I suppose that is my tax dollars at work.
War and Troubles
Drone attacks and air space violations of NATO countries are intensifying. Involved parties: at least Poland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and, of course, Russia and Ukraine. I probably have missed countries – these days the news come too fast for me to follow. Also who did what to whom is unclear, including to many of the targets. Meanwhile, I am more worried about cyber attacks and domestic terrorists.
I have followed the recent discussions about Jeffrey E., a dead criminal whose suspicious passing away in custody has caused years of speculation (including that he was taken secretly away and is now living somewhere nice.) Namely, he is known to have committed his crimes with lots of people and suspected of blackmailing the said people, which tend to be the very wealthy and powerful type. Which is why he was rumored to have been self-deleted.
The current administration has loudly and repeatedly promised to publish the list of Jeffrey’s associates, until about a week ago an FBI memo was leaked(?) to Axios claiming: he offed himself, there is no list of people, and he did not blackmail anybody. The administration is trying to sweep the issue under the metaphorical carpet. Then the officials published a video of his cell from the night of his death. Except the video contained about 1 minute gap (or maybe more than 1 minute). It had been stitched together so badly that aside from the gap in the timestamp, the aspect ratios were subtly off. As Asmongold pointed out, there could be legitimate reasons for this blooper, but with all the other circumstatial evidence, to me this points towards a conspiracy concerning Jeffrey E.’s demise, the reasons for it, and the existence of more rot in the circles of power.
As I keep on watching the government stumble from narrative fail to a narrative fail, with people becoming increasingly convinced that something is off with the official story (which has presented already by the previous administration), I have began to suspect that all this furor is deliberately fanned to distract the hoi polloi from something really important, possibly even more insidious than the idea that we are being governed by a huge criminal blackmail network, until it is too late to do something about it. This is quite a common tactic by the powers that be. For example, in Finland, I have imprecise memories on how government starts making noises about changing regulations or taxes on selling beer, and people get upset. Huge discussions rage over newspaper opinion columns and on-line boards, pro and con, while the government passes something else, much more important for people’s lives. The beer issue can be resolved, or if necessary, retreated from, people will calm down, and meanwhile something actually nasty was done to them.
While the incompetence of governments can be stupendous, it stretches my credulity to have so many bloopers in the narrative management coming one after each other, and I am beginning to suspect we are being purposefully distracted. Whether it is from the coming (proxy) war against China (maybe started between Thailand and Cambodia, maybe still waiting for the Iran situation to worsen), the ongoing (officially proxy) war against Russia, the economic collapse (US consumers sentiment has been reportedly low earlier this year, though Goldman Sacks just reassured that everything is merely returning to normal), the incoming digital surveillance grid (brought to you in collaboration with Musk and Thiel under the guise of tracking immigrants – spoiler alert: to track immigrants they will “need to” also map the non-immigrants), or something possibly worse, it must be humongous to merit this level of egging of the masses. I don’t think Obama’s referral to Department of Justice for suspicion of having ordered narrative to be manufactured for the Russia Collusion quite qualifies, more likely it is just more noise to distract the masses. By the way, US just moved nukes to UK, but that’s probably a nothing-burger (I am still sitting on the fence about whether to link and comment to the article on the subject in aviationnews.eu.)
I am also currently sitting on the fence on whether our government truly is this incompetent at narrative management or whether there is some obscure Department of Narrative Management, who are gloating about their latest glorious success in psyop against the people. Or maybe the Department of Narrative Management has gone rogue and is actively fighting against the current administration.
Although considering the everyday dysfunction I live in due to the ongoing complexity crisis infecting all aspects of modern society and worsened by the ongoing incompetence crisis fanned by the decades of education crisis, I still think that, yes, they really could be that incompetent. Maybe.
Or Treason Day, if you happen to live in UK. In recent years, I have been watching the fascinating news from that side of Atlantic with increasing horror. Sure makes me glad I am a US citizen, not a subject to the whimsies of Prime Minister Starmer. For the past couple of visits to Europe, I even have specified to my travel agent: no stops in UK.
Why? When Soviet Union was a thing, if you traveled there for cheap vodka (vodka tourism) and other cultural immersion, you would only be charged for drunken and disorderly, such as might happen. Obviously, potential troublemakers would have been screened during visa application, but even people caught inside Soviet Union for the heinous crime of smuggling Bibles were sentenced merely for what they were doing in Soviet Union. Or so I think. However, according to an Internet source, officials in Starmer’s UK have stated that folks traveling to UK are subject to prosecution for doubleplus ungood on-line speech even typed outside the UK borders, even if they are not UK citizens. I think such dictatorships are to be avoided, especially when they have gone clearly bonkers. I love and I am grateful for my First Amendment rights, and this is one of the reasons I am happy this Independence Day.
I have bought a steak and cherries, to be eaten soon, some canned fish for future, and had an Asian/Pacific Islander style BBQ beef minimeal with teriyaki sauce for breakfast.
Big white magnolias are in bloom, and I have tried to get a nice photo of them for days, but that has been difficult. Many of the trees are very big and the flowers tend to be in the upper branches, either too small for my cell phone zoom or obscured by leaves and branches. Or the flowers are not otherwise accessible to photography. When I see a magnolia bud at nice, near to eye level, getting back in time before it has bloomed and is wilting is tricky, apparently the blossoms open and are done at a quick rate.
Here are a couple of magnolia flowers I photographed with my cell phone today.
One of these days, I should make more jigsaw puzzles.
PlanktonPunkt 