boscohorowitz
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There seems to be some confusion (or obtuseness) here regarding things like pos/neg-entropy and how they factor into the human will to live. It’s not a thing for political sermons or Sunday school lessons (for that, see song about a little stream).
1) ‘The tragedy of existence,’ explained some eskimo to his son in a book long ago, ‘is that souls live by eating souls.’ I call this the most essential existential fact of conscious will. It can be ignored but not escaped. It is conjecturally possible that we could learn to nourish ourselves by synthesizing food without killing animals or plants, but that’s a helluva development curve, tech-wise, and would require huge energy reserves to do so. And we kinda burned through them awreddy.
2) There’s only so much of everything, period, per the current Standard Model of Physics. There may be a secret cornor of the galaxy where God secretly pours more stuff into the cosmos, hence the dark matter/energy quest to keep the Standard Model from falling apart as conflicting data accrues. But most everybody here knows entropy so enough on that.
3) Putting aside the horrors of how we extract and process ‘resources’ these days, let’s note that even if Point # 1 were not true and no one got hurt in order for someone else to live, Point # 2 highlights a tragically insane aspect of modern civilization: it is extremely wasteful.
I will use just one example to illustrate what most of us here already, or soon will, know.
We bring homre stuff from the store. It involves excessive amounts of packaging because almost all of it is made elsewhere and shipped here, the packaging being necessary because:
a) shipping wants transport, and transport needs goods to be bundled lest they not survive the trip,
b) since human labor is expensive because slavery has briefly been mostly removed (thanx to oil providing 4.5 years of human labor per barrel, and how this can drive steam, intrernal combustion, and turbine engines in turn producing electricity which energy form can be sent 100s of miles with minimal energy loss thanx to that Tesla dude), all the portion-for-sale packaging is done at the factory where labor costs can be most cost-effectively controlled, and this discourages the use of recyclable packaging for all kinds of reasons. It’s not like they do with oil: one big tanker, one big pipeline, refinery time, then shipment by truck or rail in containers the size of small swimming pools before being pumped into large tanks and then directly in the car. (In that sense, petro-industry is extremely non-polluting.)
c) since it costs money to recycle but people have to be convinced to do their part in getting recyclables to the recycling stream for recycling to be reasonably profitable, honest recycling doesn’t happen except in large dense slow-moving garbage streams like your typical junkyard. (Portland Recycles is practically a city motto but if you see it first-hand — and I’m only talking about how people put out their garbage and how that affects the collection and recycling thereof — you can see it’s costing an awful lot to pretend we’re recycling. The people don’t give a shit, don’t separate their stuff; and one can’t blame them because they’ve gotten so many conflicting signals. Garbage, btw, is another universal global problem that doesn’t get fixed because we can’t cooperate unviersally and globally. ) SO…
d) this happens: all kinds of toxic packaging material from plastic to broken glass to whatevs, goes into the main garbage stream, where it may or may not be removed by sophisticated expensive and only semi-effective monster machinery. Somehow, mysteriously, it ends up in the environment, often 10k miles from its dump point, swirling in the ocean after previously being shipped another 10k miles from another dump point because we like to ship our garbage to third world nations desparate enough to call destroying their environment a way of making a living. All of this costing money that someone, maybe us, maybe Martians, pays for. Mongo no know.
But (and this is the best part), the good stuff: urine & feces via toilet plumbing, much food waste via sink-drain garbage disposal units — the stuff we want to collect, properly fester, and then use to enrich soil depleted by the last resource extraction aka agricultural harvest, doing so that we may again harvest more resources, isn’t recycled. (Ain’t gonna talk here about pesticides, GMO, and our dependence on Haber process nitrogen fertilizer, but that elephant is also quite hefty.)
What do we brilliant monkeys do?!?!? We dump it into the place we get our drinking water from. You know, the same place we dump so many toxins from manufacturing, mining, and other resource extraction/fabrication processes. Some cities have systems that collect some of this organic waste and treat it to make fertilizer of it, but basically, we just like to shit into our drinking well.
MInd you, we consume 100 million barrels of oil a day to do this. 100 million A DAY. Each barrel is like having 1 slave work 365 days for 4.5 years. In one day. On the big screen, it’s 100 mill/brls/day equals 164,250,000,000 slave labor days. That can’t be right but it’s a simple linear equation with no variables and even I can do that math with a calculator. Still, that can’t be right.
This, btw, is a sweet peek sideways into the global climate change thing: a common remark about anthropogenic climate change is that humanity, powerful as it is, can’t influence something as huge as the global climate machine. But this isn’t 7.7 billion homo saps. This is 164,250,00 (plus 7.7 billion if you insist) homo saps cranking away, energy-wise. As a rude analogy, imagine the CO2 output of 173 billion homo saps* working their tushies off every day for a few decades. Tell me that doesn’t have the power, yea, the likelihood, of bumping the global climate machine, which is a very delicate multi-compound gyroscope with leviathan inertia. Once you bump it, the shivers travel throughout the sytem. Kinda like how a suboceanic earthquake manages to bump the ocean, really give it a thwack. No biggie. The energy is hidden in size of the ocean, and would gradually dissipate if it didn’t run into anything. You can hardly see the thing. Until it runs into resistance, at which point all that inertia rears up and swallows a coastline.
And then, and then… there’s the fact that we are running out of oil and can’t possibly sustain 7.7 billion people without it.
Do I have resource extraction issues? No more than anyone else, just maybe more cognitively and conscientiously.
* yes, we’ve reduced wild megafauna doing so… and replaced them with massive livestock numbers in systems that make enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.
So, when does ther singing start? 😉
Srsly: pretty good, Holding the vamp while simultaneously thinking on soloing is much harder than it sounds, especially on guitar compared to piano. Once a person learns to use their hands separately on a piano, well, then, they’re separate, and since most of the work neatly splits between left/right hand, with a little overlap here and there, you can think as bicamerally as you can play, and your brain can more easily separate comping from soloing and therefore (and maybe ironically) interweave them better.
On a guitar, it’s more of a 4-way split because both pick and fret hands have to work together just to make a sound. Both hands have to bring their comp/lead voices together with the other hands comp/lead voices.
I remember seeing Emily Remler holding forth on this in a youtube video.
WHoa. I gotta get back to Mrs. Butterworth and friends, but this is an honor and a treat, Arttua D-2. (Sorry. I play with names. I have Dubya disease.) I will isten later. I love the real thing: people giving it their best.
“Well only one number then. 20M is NY Metro, and now we’re in all 50 states. So any common-sense estimate? 120M?”
Mongo no understand. 2.4 mill is total USA reported figures, using tests whose accuracy I do not know. We’ve been in all 50 states for awhile, and the 2.4 fig comes from whatever reports we get from whatever states. Some experts, whose expertize I cannot vouch for, guess the real number could be ten times as much, for whatever that’s worth.
What the hell a “common sense estimate” is in such a GIGO environment is literally beyond my conception to imagine except as some guy burping stale beer while throwing darts at a bingo board with numbers like 10 mill, 500 mill, 77.3 mill, pi squared yo mama.
We don’t know, see? We only know how such pathogens studied to date tend to replicate under various circumstances, and what methods have reliably worked in the past to curb their spread.
That’s about all we know statistically, other than the uncontestable fact that Fauci is a dickweed, and the undisputable truth that our government is a lobotomized magic schoolbus turned on its back to have its belly rubbed, both of which can be precisely measured as Ick 3,000 and poopoo gazillion.
DoIng kitchen work (I am der hawss buttler, I iz, and a well-known racial steroetype to boot despite being all white and shit), I saw that the new bottle of Mrs. Butterworth was looking uncomfortable about being so dark, seeing as how her good friend Aunt Jemimah got ousted from her lifelong home for being same.
So I poured half of her out into the vintage syrup dispenser what our Aunt Ruthie dun give us, and now she’s as white as me… from the waist up.
Stealing the melody from Come On In My Kitchen (most of us know it as the acapella intro to 49 Bye-Byes by CSN):
I was born-n-n-n
A po black child
But my skin’s all white now…But Mrs. Butterworth is a little too white. She’s gone transparent. I better pour some milk in and top the bottle off.
“In retrospect, it seems a miracle that the disintegration of the USSR did not lead to terrorist possession of single nuclear weapon.”
I hadn’t heard that EUromerica/Eurasia had retired their nukes. 😉
“However, it seems you’re against resource use, and therefore extraction, you are against life itself. There is no life without neg-entropy, drawing energy and inputs to yourself and pushing waste and entropy away.”
THat’s is among the more bullshit statements I’ve read from you, Doc, and I;ve read quite a few stunners already.
I just understand that just as a man has to accept his limitations, so does a civilization. I’ll bet even your love doll is made of straw.
Sorry. No respect. You’ve burnt yours.
Reading through the rest, yup. Straw men straw men straw men. None of them follow from what I’ve stated but twist off a corner and call it the whole, like the lbind men describing tghe elephant. Those straw men breed ticks, you know.
It gets wearisome.
As for Bruce the article writer: NEVER trust a midwestern businessman. Get a contract and tell him about your fetish for Louisville Sluggers.
I just canceled my patreon acct with Medium (I wasn’t hardly using them anymore; only went there for a certain science writer), and then it all behaved proper like.
Yeah, a friend told me that checques have been ex-chancellored over there.
I have zero retirement except the tiniest SSI you can imagine because I worked so little, and so often under the table, in my wayward life. Was briefly redneck rich but not no moah.
True story: when I was briefly redneck rich I intended to send you $1K. But things were really chaotic at the time. I was kinda beset on all sides, and money evaporated before I got to you. But I did manage to give away quite a few $K stateside, and it was great fun. I still manage to get a few $20 bills out the window to homeless souls every month.
Raised a Mormon (I survived), I grew up on the flowwing musical nugget. The performance here has a tad too much saccharine around the edges despite obvious talent by both performers, but it’s still a lovely evocation.
I love how the seams on the sliding mirror doors kinda look like a stripper pole.
Give, I say. The bastards are gonna come and get you one way or another no matter what. Don’t leave ’em nothing left to steal but a fat happy conscience.
“Tastes like chickenshit.<>That’s why people should wear burka/face masks.”
*snicker*
I set ’em up, zero knocks ’em down. Hey, Abbott!
Ere I leave to be a responsible monkeyshine, I feel compelled to show here why Miles Davis was such a star, not to mention Cannonball Adderly. Coltrane is a tad off on this session, which is probably why it didn’t make the original album cut. Evans is at his best, uncommonly spare, more rhythmically than harmonically adventurous, painting on rice paper rather than dense canvas.
“I think that there has never existed so many people that has had such a good life.”
Hail Atlantis!
When Hillary was running against Trump in 2016, I called it ratshit (Hillary) vs batshit (Trump).
This time, I call it dumbnuts vs numbnuts… and am not sure if I can tell the difference enough to knoiw where to stick the labels.
And, just for fun:
There. I canceled my paypal account and now it let’s me use paypal.
That’s logical, right?
Digidollars sent.
And online sales are booming. Godamighty.
FUck it. YOu’re stuck with a check in Brooklynn, Raul. I managed to do it online last time, but not now.
Nope. “This email already has a Patreon account.”
We are so screwed. Even our payment methods are vapor.
I’ll go find the TAE “store” and do it that way.
Well, Patreon of course immediately made it fucky-dumb to do a monthly sub: “You already have a goodle account”. Well, then, apply it here, fuckwits. But no option avails. But I did get to see a picture of Raul, and he would be a good co-conspirator in a drinking binge back in the day, I suspect. 😉
Oh well. I’ll fill in the fields manually and see if it works.
Stupid robots.
btw, anyone here following Dmitry Orlov’s blog? Is it worth re-subscribing to finish his articles? He’s a brilliant analyst/thinker, but in person I’d probably wanna pound sand up his nose. Still, an amazing thinker with a shrewd perspective. Is he still earning his keep? Should I add to his pay sheet?
That reminds me: time to send Raul money for his Save the Goldfish campaign. Sorry, I have to joke about starving people. It hurts me.
Well, with eyes like those, who would?
I only went on FB (around ’09, I think?) because it was the only handle of contact I could find for a childhood friend who I’d learned through a google search had gotten in a jam.
FB of course sucked up all my email and bookmarks, etc.
That connected me to a wonderful vast social world based on the sucked-up pesonal data. For awhile I was hanging with Hopllywood insiders and journalists etc. FB algorithms brought us together. It was awesome even though I knew my underwear was being scrutinized by NSA et al.
Over time I sadly learned how morally flaccid and intellectually hidebound these so-called liberal cognoscenti were. I went from having a maxed-out follower base to almost none per my own excisions.
I hung on during 2016 simply to give Bernie a boost. One day I used the word nigger, placing it in the mouth of a Simon Legree type of public personality. FB suspended me for a few days. I closed my account. Search Robin Morrison Spokane and you should find my FB account. I was as much a blabber mowf there as you see here.
The guy who wrote the articles that inspired the Mister Rogers movie spoke sagely of how social media has let us discover what our neighbors really believe and endorse, and how we are horrified by what we’ve learned about each other.
While I think a hostile foreign entiry would be shrewd to, say, crash our cellphone GPS or something similarly surgical and strategic, it would be foolish to shut down our internet.
We’d then have to talk to our neighbors, find out how horrifying (or delightful) we are to each other, but be forced to deal with it like socially responsible adults and practice something like egalitarian democratic solution-seeking.
While I personally have been immeasurably enriched by the internet, which made me not as isolated and alienated as I was before, and expanded my already broad cognitive horizons, it’s like tv: great potential for a species enlightened enough to employ it wisely, otherwise, just another mind-control advertizement for Pharaoh.
zerosum: I suppose that by next winter, burkhaism will beging making its early mainstream foray.
A picture tells a 1,000 words. WHat this one is saying, and in what language, is unknown to me, but it says something, I’m sure:
Uh, Doc, the 20 million figure is the ten times number: “The US has recorded 2.4m confirmed infections and 122,370 deaths.”
Carlos, maybe ten years ago, when I still did Facebook, I made a House Negro remark. Man, did I get pilloried.
Being an unrepentant bastard, I called ’em all a buncha lousy wiggers… er, I mean, wegroes.
““It’s important to realize that overall, the mutation rate of this virus is not particularly high (in line with other coronaviruses, actually).”
THanx for fixing that misinformation of mine.
“The mutations which are deadlier to the host may tend to die out sooner (along with the hosts). The coronaviruses which are “kinder” to humans (like those which cause the common cold) may stick around a long time, continuing to mutate.”
It’s the MIddle Way (not too lethal, not too benign) that seems most apt to produce long wicked fat tailed evolutionary developments, it seems.
“Crystal ball fogged up before revealing the answer.
🙂”MOuth-breather. 😉 Gotta hold your breath in suspense if you want an answer.
SInce it occurred to me just now, and some folks here are interested in these things, anyone notice that the literal version of the Noachian Flood has God exterminating nearly all wildlife because humanity is a shit stain?
I believe there were post-glacial floods in the Mediterranean (I’m from Missoula flood territory, so I’m very familiar with the kinds of mega-floods glacial dams can create), as some researchers hypothesize. And physics and the geological record make it plain that a global flood couldn’t and didn’t happen.
It amazes me how people interpret this weirdly grand old holy book with such credulous literalism. Most people didn’t even know there was a global world back then thoose myth were written into record. The Mediterranean WAS the world to them. I can certainly conceive of some Noah building a bunch of vessels and putting in breeding pairs of animals become symbiotic with the people. And glacial floods do indeed kill an awful clot of life. Hell, they tend to sweep the soil down to bedrock.
But I’m amazed and appalled at how most of Xtianity never seems to think of the appalling injustice and cruelty of God wiping out almost all of an entire planet’s biosphere because He doesn’t like how his favorite monkey people are acting.
Too funny. If we don’t want to be cyclically ravaged by a steadily mutating flu virus, we may have to learn to actually eat simply and healthilyy, and work mostly outdoors as in yore.
A question: any ideas on whether a rapidly mutating virus, in response to which our bodies seem to fail at producing lasting immunity, allowing this rapid mutater to git us agin an agin, will itself become more adept at defeating what antibodies our bodies produce? Darwinian adaptation making the virus stronger in relation to us.
But for awhile there, if you had enough money and the right skin and could ignore the constant screaming in the distance, life in late-stage Atlantis was wayyy cooolllllllllll……………..
“Financialization, they have spent 40-60 years specifically arranging tax, tariff, trade, and worker laws to drive U.S. production overseas on the basis of saving the a) worker, b) environment c) safety d) regulation. Therefore no choice is possible to buy American or local, because it is de facto illegal and to do so would bankrupt you shortly. Many Americans or American businesses have tried since 1980 and failed.”
This is true as far as it goes. Too often, a crisis produced by a previous generation’s greed is addressed, is “solved”, by avoiding the problem. So we shipped nasty industries overseas to pollute their country, not ours. Safety regulations are expensive because too much of modern industry is ridiculously toxic or dangerous unless carefully controlled. etc. etc. Rather than pay the true cost of the many goods we consume, we passed those costs onto others… not without incurring an ultimately unaffordable cost to ourselves. How do we pay ourselves to consume resources that others produce? Hmmm….
All of this to make sure consumption didn’t decline, because the only way the creeps allegedly in charge have power is in taking a bite of most consumption, whether on the production end or sales end. If USA had found the political will to solve its crises at home without resort to foreign escape, globalization, colonialism, what have you, it would have driven us into a democratic socialism based on acknowledgement of our limited resources.
We would have had to work together to solve our problems, not try and get as rich as we can (the American dream). We can’t do that when we’re bound together in massive populations of many millions. We especially don’t do that when we have so much available fossil fuel/hydroelectric energy that we can afford to fuck each other over and over because hey, there’s plenty more and tomorrow’s another day, may the best man win, and remember, Things Are Always Getting Better (despite recurrent setbacks and a gas gauge moving toward effective zero: there’s gas in the tank, but it takes so much energy to run the fuel pump the engine can’t turn over).
There was nothing wrong with trying to protect the environment, the worker, and forming a basic regulatory structure by which these things could be mediated and executed. But doing so EFFECTIVELY would have required us to tighten our belts, at least for awhile, and while we the people sometimes will voluntarily submit to that, we usually won’t, and elites just about never will.
A basic unwillingness to be self-reliant is a self-explanatory basis for unqualified failure in life. A basic unwillingness to be self-reliant has been the basic definition of any expanding empire, as we have been until contraction recently set in. Thieves are not self-reliant any more than ticks are self-reliant. THere has to be something to steal for a thief to thieve. There has to be an available host body for a tick to feed. While ALL acquisition is a form of theft, especially any acquisition involving killing a living thing to eat it, but also any resource extraction, since nearly always there’s some other animal that called that resource home or local larder until one dug that well or tunneled that mine or plowed that field or cut down that timber, there is a) acquisition with intent to build and increase life prospects and comfort while minimizing positive entropy(increasing disorder), and b) there is acquisition like that of the locust: eat all you can, breed all you can, and don’t do anything to increase negative entropy(reducing disorder).
We have amazing skills that could let us enjoy life far more efficiently, less wastefully, if we could be patient and respectful of each other and our shared environment on a finite planet. Since we’re not a closed system but instead are supplied with fresh new energy every second by our friend the sun, we could create a roughly steady-state civilization. But we prefer being locusts, I guess.
For some time, we’ve been spending our resources faster than we can replace them. We’re going physically broke. It doesn’t matter who has the jobs now (jobs are stupid anyway, wage slave hamster cages). No matter where you look in the world, even ye olde Russia, it’s locusts locusts locusts all the way down.
We’re victims of our own extravagant success.
locust-swarms-are-driven-by-salt-and-cannibalism
History, btw, tells us that until about 100 years ago, salt was as important a resource as wood and slaves, although water has always ruled the resource list.
Back in the 80s when merger mania began and outsourcing, downsizing, etc. became household words, I watched americans buy foreign products and move iondustries overseas and thought: We vote with our dollars.
Now you’re venturing into the mystical, quaasi-Biblical: “No man can look on the face of God and live.”
You’ve crossed over into bogeyman territory.
Putin is very elite. He is nobody’s drone although he has to cooperate, i.e., make himself useful in a broad enough way, not to be majorly challenged.
He rules by the sword via an electoral process of middling integrity (better than ours, I’ll wager). He isn’t hiding. He’s taking photo-ops bare-chested on horseback.
Elites have no special power. Hiding means one cannot stand the light of day. Hiding is not a show of strength.
Some will hang onto some of what they’ve got. I daresay most of Russia’s oligarchs will hold onto theirs, because Russia is not running out of nearly so many necessary things as we are. (Also, after some initial disruption, global climate change will probably be their friend.)
But Russia is out of the crash loop. Russia already did its jubilee after its crash, has paid off those debts necessary to retain street cred, told the Euromerican banking establishment to piss off, and is in far better shape than any other nation to go through this amazing historical extinction event in relative comfort. It’s oligarchs are not hidden, and no one p;ulls their strings from some inviiiiisiiiible power like Mental Moonbeam Magic.
This worhip of mere fat cats is ludicrous unless one wants to make a mystery cult about some superpower they alone possess. (Which is possible. David Icke may be right.)
ALso, this inane obsession we have with money. Money long ago became primarily a weapon of mass destruction that has destroyed human civilizatin even as it grew it to enormous globalized size.
(“The LOVE of money is the root of all evil,” said a Jewish wag. Not money, the love thereof.)
Anyway, it’s like obsessing over having enough nuclear weapons in a post-nuclear apocalyptic world.
This is not just another political milieu. This is the end of an empire that makes Rome or even Khanate China appear both tiny and sticks’n’stones primitive. This is a fall of a very large body (7.7 billion people) from a very large height.
We are obviously not running out of money. W are running out of things. If not so, we’d be complacently performing our drone duties for Pharaoh like a mule pursuing a carrot held before its nose. The rich would become increasingly wealthy/powerful and it would be much like Orwell predicted with his infamous bootheel remark.
But we ARE running out of things in a system designed to be ruled and exploited by the elites via selling things to us and taking a bite out of every manufacture and transaction.
I don’t mean to be mocking, but it seems almost superstitious, this blind faith we have in the creeps allegedly in charge. Whether we’re trusting sheeple or skeptical wolves, virtually everyone seems hypnotized by Pharaoh as something like unto God.
I’ve seen pictures of Trump and Soros. Gates and Musk, Pelosi and Lindsey Graham. Not gods. Not even impressive humans except Nanci was cute in her day and has an impressive rack.
“Only some of the elites will get to keep their Patagonian National Parks.”
I say more like the younger lieutenants of said elites. WHo wants to feed a useless old fuck when his power is gone? HIs money, old or new, is useless at that point. The world wants young strong backs, certain kinds of expertize, reliable water, lots of timber, tillable soil under a moderate climate, reliable defense methods that don’t involve blowing up the stuff you want to defend or commandeer…
The elites inability to manage affairs for anyone’s benefit but their short-term own, makes them useless to anyone including themselves when the consequences of their destructive selfish nonsense can no longer be forestalled or passed on to others.
Why does everybody opbsess on the creeps in alleged charge so much?
THey’re fucking useless to us, and focusing on them renders us useless to our children and grandchildren.
There is no longer even thinking/acting inside/outside the box: the box is gone. There is just thinking/acting.
“Otherwise the system crashes and the elites will not allow that kind of destruction upon themselves.”
THe system will crash, jubilee or not. THat large a bubble has a life of its own. Money veolocity will go Sargasso. The elites are as fucked as anyone, but being obtuse self-absorbed privilegati obsessed by covering their ass while stuffing their faces, they don’t see it.
Oh, they’ll pull a jubilee, I would think. It just won’t work. It will be like standing in a giant’s toilet and pulling the flush handle.
It occurs to me in an Alfred E. Newman epiphany that I don’t recall reading here, or thinking myself, that perhaps the main logic behind official responses to covid is the same as most official responses to anything in recent years: cover up as many glaring official blunders and dire official crimes as possible.
We all know that was what drove the Impeach Trump spectacle.
To cite a little known Brain Wilson song:
“Not lately… Austin got a makeover. All of the productive and blue collar jobs have gone to Spanish speakers”
True here in Portland, too, altho not as much.
“(YOU, Out Of The Gene Pool!)”
U funnee man. 🙂
“John-grows-vegetables”
My tribal name is Robin Makes the Coffee.
“Elected officials from both parties joined together in recent days to push back against the Trump administration’s intention to stop funding seven Texas coronavirus testing sites at the end of the month.” (itals mine)
It seems Trump feels that reportage of rising covid in his core state will hurt his reelection prospects?
***
In which many things are made adamantly concrete, including the fact it isn’t really happening until the banjo kicks in:
In which is it further demonstrated that even the banjo steps back when the bass decides things need to get down (3:16):
***
“For who’s gonna mind the 400 ticking time bomb-nuke plants ’round the world without a complex society?”
Some of those time bombs may falter from neglect, but I suspect most of them will be managed and worked hard. Energy is energy. Russia isn’t going to collapse from covid, and Russia has an expanding nuclear industry. I think the expertise to maintain existing nuke plants will be available.
“Slavery and oppression will have to constantly downsize with the general positively entropic flow.”
While slavery and such will increase per capita, per capita gonna shrink.
Regarding the benefits of community: the inability of a deeply hypnotized populace to do anything but what they’re told (and as little of that as possible) precluded the inability of most people to adjust to covid in any but a bipolar way: run inside and hide from the Black Death! vs. Fuck that shit, I’m going swimming!
All it required was for our bozos-in-charge to tell people to wear face masks, anything, a fucking scarf, practice rigorous hygiene, and some major but simple dietary recommendations while allowing therapies like ancient malaria drugs to be used.
People could have still gone to church and any other group function that didn’t crowd people next to each other, especially when they’re stupid drunk and seriously dehydrated.
But that would’ve required there to be some genuine morally mature grownups in significant office, and they seem to have run out of those. It’s like a Marx Brothers movie without a script.
But that’s the thing about collective sociopathy: it can only agree on who to rob or kill, not much else.
