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.
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 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.
I don’t usually work on Sundays (the day of rest and so on), but the recent news about heightening tensions between two nuclear powers have been alarming. No, not the war in Europe, or the slow boiling in Middle East. I am talking about India and Pakistan. Here is what I get from the non-mainstream news/commentary streams I follow.
Negligible Chance of Mushroom Clouds
Apparently, there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir where 26 Indian tourists were killed. This region has been contested by Pakistan and India for decades and occasionally, a war has flared up. India blames the attack on Pakistan, which claims innocence. Regardless of truth, the relationship between the countries tensed up, as in India giving 48 hours for all Pakistanis to get out of the country, whereas Pakistan closed Indian borders and Pakistani airspace from Indian airlines, while revoking visas from Indians and telling the Indian government to reduce their embassy size to 30 people, no military attaches allowed. India informed that they will no longer recognize the Indus River Treaty, which allocates the rights over this common river between the two countries. This is very important, because Indus river waters about 80% of Pakistani farmland, and if India were to block the water, it would create a famine that would collapse Pakistan. Pakistan has informed that if India messes with Indus river, it will be an act of war. Presumably, India has already been accused of flooding some Pakistani villages along Indus tributary. The same podcast claimed that there has been clashes along the border, not just small arms fire but actual artillery shelling. This is before the formal declaration of war. The Indus river question is an existential threat to Pakistan, which is estimated to have at least 170 nuclear warheads and has a first strike policy. India is estimated to have over 160 nuclear warheads and if things escalate, we could see mushroom clouds, though this is still a very small possibility.
A Podcast that YouTube recommended to me says that the magnetic field of the Sun is weakening. Apparently, this may be somehow connected with the likelihood of big earthquakes. Sun’s magnetic field weakens and strengthens by 11-12 year sunspot cycles but the peak magnetic field has been weakening over the latest solar cycles (data starts in 1970s, so we don’t know how things were earlier). This presentation fits the hypothesis that solar weather including sunspot activity triggers earth quakes that has been making rounds around interwebs for some time, except that in this presentation it is the weakening solar magnetic field that creates sunspots and correlates with the frequency of big earthquakes.
The earthquake – sunspot connection has been explained by the effects of space weather on telluric currents, i.e., the electric currents going through Earth, telluric currents being stronger along fault lines. Living within a walking distance from Hayward fault, I have been interested in earthquakes, waiting for the Big One.
Sometimes, the conspiracies of the West like chemtrails or other forms of weather modification and QAnon become boring and it is fun to look at the conspiracies in the East.
One of the more intriguing conspiracy theories (to me) is the claim that China has way fewer people than the official 1.4 billion.
I first encountered this claim some years ago, but did not pay much attention to it. The message sounded too crazy and was promoted by Falun Gong, which has a real reason for a grudge against the CCP government. I am also pretty convinced that part of the anti-China messaging is or was funded by US government as a psy-op against a competing power.
However, while the figures as low as 300 to 400 million Chinese left (in the Peoples Republic of) seem extreme, I can believe fewer than 1.4 billion, probably no more than 1.2 billion, possibly below 1 billion.
3) Mass immigration has generated a global population of hundreds of millions.Many of these individuals are undocumented, which I presume are still in citizenship lists of their home countries while being part of the head count in their current locations. I remember an apocryphal story in Europe about people getting paid social security by two countries, presumably being counted as part of the population in both. I do not know if this inaccuracy includes dual citizens or just undocumented migrants. In case of China, I think their hukou system is pretty water tight within China’s borders, but I also think that millions, maybe tens of millions of Chinese have slipped over the borders, all over the world. These Chinese exist, but reduce the population at home.
4) Chinese population policies have been a demographic disaster. One Child Policy meant that many of the Gen-X were not allowed to be born, reducing the population growth rate. Now there are too few Millenials and even fewer Gen Z and the young people are too stressed to reproduce. Yet, China’s population was supposed to have grown during the 1970s – 2010s, though at least the recent year’s have officially had negative population growth.
Therefore, even if we don’t go with the active depopulation hypotheses,
I don’t think the current global population exceeds 7.5 billion, and would not be hugely surprised if it were as low as 7 billion people.
A Nature paper by Ito (2023) estimates the global termite methane production 2020 as 14.8 +- 6.7 Tg per year from estimated 122.3 Tg termites (dry weight). Termite biomass estimates range from 40 – 200 Tg (dry weight), and their methane emission estimates vary even more, but by Ito’s estimate, termites produce about 2% of global methane.
The global annual methane production is estimated by IEA to be about 580 metric tons, and Ito’s maybe ~15 metric tons would be on the ballpark of 2.6% of that.
These farts are actually produced by termites’ gut symbionts, complex communities of microbes that help termites to digest lignocellulose and contribute to nitrogen metabolism.
Termites evolved some time during Mesozoic from gregarious cockroaches that ate rotting wood with changes in gut symbiont microbiota, diets and eusociality. Today, termites are important in carbon cycle (and other nutrient cycles).
I was trying to find some papers on their role in Phanerozoic carbon cycles but with poor success, though it could be said that termites (plus their gut symbionts) are currently quite significant decomposers of plant cellulose, and there apparently has been enough of them already 150 million years ago that a mammal species had evolved to eat them.
In other words, there is still a niche for people researching the effect of termite farts on global climate – past, present and future. Assuming the atmospheric carbon question remains politically and culturally relevant (for dissenting voices, see, e.g., these articles in Science of Climate Change and The Daily Sceptic).
Most people find his similarities spurious and consider his theories false. Nevertheless, I am going to use an analogous methodology to prove that The Republic of Finland is actually The Republic of Fairyland (the Fairy Kingdom having been annexed first by Sweden and then taken over by Russia.)
The name Finn was weird to me when I was growing up – why couldn’t the foreigners call us suomalainen as we called ourselves? The origin of Suomiis unknown, and many theories have been floated (of which I vaguely remember suomu = scale, somehow indicative of Finns predilection towards fishy things; suo maa = bog land, a very good description of terrain that is 30% bog or swamp). I would consider Suomi among the same group of names as Sápmi (land inhabited by the Sámi people) and Sumy (a city in Ukraine) and leave the mystery as is.
However, I later learned that Finn, as used in Elder Edda, such as Völundarkviða, could mean either Sami or alfar (elf). The etymology of word finn could be derived from Norse finnr / finna (spelling varies depending on source, but the word is usually translated as finder, hunter-gatherer). However, I would also consider possibility of celtic fionn / finn (fair, blonde).
If we go with the meanings ‘elf’ or ‘fair’, a Finn could be translated as ‘a person of fair folk’, or fairy for shorts.
Thus, using the Wettenhovi-Aspa approach, it can be proven that The Republic of Finland actually should be called The Republic of Fairyland.
PlanktonPunkt 