Quote from: K-Dog

QuoteThe sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Which is exactly what will happen if the actual reality and details of American Freedom are laid out before the average Joe Six Pack.

QuoteI don't believe that for a second. Joe Sixpack falls hook line and sinker for whatever they have a propensity for. Peak oil, alien lizard overlords, all government conspiracies (real or imagined), Charlie Kirk being killed by an exploding microphone (just learned this at LATOC), Guy McPherson and the BOE event....a decade ago....oops.

Please. Joe Sixpack. PhD's fall for nonsense with as much enthusiasm as amateur hour folks. I know a genius geologist who can sell BigFoot better than Ugo ever did peak oil. Joe Sixpack mostly see's what they WANT to believe first, what they are predisposed to fall for naturally. And it applies all the way up the ladder to PhD's as well. Or really smart folks who thought Tesla would do backrupt a decade ago. Brains/intelligence  aren't the determining factor. Can't say I know exactly what combination of talents are required, but you can usually figure it out after talking to someone on an interesting topic within 30 minutes. Ever XOM geologic researcher I've ever met hits on all cylinders. On the internet finding someone like that is 1:10000 at best. 21 years online and I've only found 1 in all my peak oil years, an engineer invovled in setting up LIGO. I know at least 2 dozen IRL, but my professional associations don't run to what populates the internet forums.

You totally miss the point.  People will only believe in conspiracies that really do not scare them.  Detached realities that are half make-believe, and somewhere else far far away.  Safe horror movies.  The shadows of their conspiracies never enter their personal lives.  But if you mess with the actual foundations of their 'true' realities, and the conspiracy becomes personal.  The situation becomes quite different.


Joe will sail De-Nile between the shores.  Defend his turf like a rabid guard dog.  Reason flies away from him not because Joe finds an attractive deception to play with as you describe, but rather because Joe can't handle the truth.  The truth is that most people are weak, and I have a Pulp Fiction clip about that.  Weak at heart.  Having the heart of a lion will wear your ass out.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 05, 2026, 08:46 AMAnd as far as you are concerned, you should know better than to deny my lived experience again.

A point that cuts both ways.

Quote from: K-DogPerhaps you were not aware that I had met them face to face and have talked to them.

I recall you mentioning that you talked to someone back...in the Bush years was it? In the someone following you days?

Quote from: K-DogI keep quiet about it knowing that nobody else is going to give a rip, but that does not change the fact that it happened.

I make no claim it hadn't happened. My erased points related to the logic of spammers wanting anything to do with this place, with foreign languages no less, and thinking they are anything other than spammers.

Quote from: K-Dog

QuoteThe sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Which is exactly what will happen if the actual reality and details of American Freedom are laid out before the average Joe Six Pack.

I don't believe that for a second. Joe Sixpack falls hook line and sinker for whatever they have a propensity for. Peak oil, alien lizard overlords, all government conspiracies (real or imagined), Charlie Kirk being killed by an exploding microphone (just learned this at LATOC), Guy McPherson and the BOE event....a decade ago....oops.

Please. Joe Sixpack. PhD's fall for nonsense with as much enthusiasm as amateur hour folks. I know a genius geologist who can sell BigFoot better than Ugo ever did peak oil. Joe Sixpack mostly see's what they WANT to believe first, what they are predisposed to fall for naturally. And it applies all the way up the ladder to PhD's as well. Or really smart folks who thought Tesla would do backrupt a decade ago. Brains/intelligence  aren't the determining factor. Can't say I know exactly what combination of talents are required, but you can usually figure it out after talking to someone on an interesting topic within 30 minutes. Ever XOM geologic researcher I've ever met hits on all cylinders. On the internet finding someone like that is 1:10000 at best. 21 years online and I've only found 1 in all my peak oil years, an engineer invovled in setting up LIGO. I know at least 2 dozen IRL, but my professional associations don't run to what populates the internet forums.

Quote from: K-DogIt happened to me, and I went mad with the revelation for a little while.  I found out America does not drive your daddy's Oldsmobile like you may think America does.  Not like you learned in school.

I never learned any of that in school, so nothing to get mad about I guess. And I didn't learn about what "America" was in school. Just the history they made you memorize in the books. My "America" was just trying to not end up like everyone around me in the holler.

Quote from: K-DogRE and I have not called this the F.S.O.A. for several years without reason.

Everyone has their reasons.

You Tube despite it being what was known as 'the man' in the 70's, does have a search algorithm that seems to be my friend.

The WRONG people are "informing" us about COLLAPSE

You've probably noticed that collapse content is everywhere. But as I've been thinking about it, I realized that to navigate all this information, we first need to step back and become conscious of our dominant cultural myth. This myth is perfectly embodied by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals—the idea that all nations are on a linear path towards becoming "developed," and once they get there, they get to stay there.

But that's not how things are. The process of modernization was a temporary phase, and now it's stopping and reversing. So, if we want to accurately envision our future, we need to scrap the old linear trajectory that puts "developed" countries ahead. Instead, we should think of it as a rubber band that's been pulled out and is now snapping back to a more primitive state. In this cyclical view, the humans who are closer to the starting line are actually closer to the finish line—they are the ones who are "ahead" on the trajectory toward the future.

So, if people in developing countries, or those further along in collapse, are ahead of us, we should be paying attention to them. I decided to test this idea by reading some articles giving voice to people in these regions.

My first stop was an article from Burkina Faso, a personal account from a 36-year-old woman. She described an "infernal" summer of extreme heat and constant power cuts while she was pregnant. She ultimately had a miscarriage, lamenting, "Imagine I could have, too." What struck me was the disconnect: even while describing a hellish reality, she seemed to be envisioning a modern, stable existence for her child, blaming the doctors for not warning her. It seemed she was fixated on bringing a child into a world that was already so broken it couldn't even support a pregnancy. This wasn't the perceptive insight I was hoping for.

Next, I looked at another article from the Philippines, where people were dealing with devastating floods. Their pleas were heartbreaking: they hoped the government would stop corruption and that their children could play in the streets again. I had bad news for them. The floods are going to happen again, and their children won't have much fun. It felt like many people are just wired to act out a script—make babies and hope someone else fixes the problem—without updating their understanding of reality.

What did I learn from this? First, many people are just operating on autopilot, unable to see the predicament for what it is. And second, I realized the media plays a role in this. These articles felt like they were hitting a floor below which the narrative couldn't go. They gave us crumbs of reality but were cherry-picking to avoid showing the full, devastating picture. The truly hopeless voices were being filtered out.

Then, I got a comment from a subscriber in Mali. She told me that the future I describe in my videos is their present: "Wars, no water, no electricity. Only in the capital do we have six hours of electricity per day... Yet women keep having five, six children. We have no future. Everyone can see that." When asked if she'll have kids, she replied, "No, because I won't bring a soul into this hell. People here despise me for it. A woman with no children is their worst nightmare."

I cried reading that. She is living so much closer to the future, and it was humbling and refreshing to hear from someone who is actually observing the same "autopilot" behavior I was talking about. This destroys the misconception we have in the developed world that things will get so bad that everyone will wake up and change. Things can get extremely grim, and people will still just be robots.

So, who should we trust as a legitimate expert? We need to ask: who is speaking, and who isn't? The experts we usually hear on podcasts have credentials and high status from "developed" countries. But just because someone is from the global south doesn't mean they have insight if they are still high-status within their collapsing country. They are still living farther from the future than others.

Take people like Samantha Sweetwater or Rob Hopkins, who I see on podcasts. They are high-status people speaking to high-status people, promoting concepts like the "Institute of Imagination." It's laughable. If my subscriber from Mali sat down with them, she'd be rolling her eyes. Their "solutions," like collapsing oil companies, show they simply don't understand the complexity of the predicament because they haven't lived it.

In conclusion, the humans with the most insight into our future are the ones living at the bottom of the hierarchy in regions where development is already being undone. They are the ones who can appreciate the complexity because they're living through the reality of a future without fossil fuels. Don't trust the polished experts from "behind" on the trajectory. Listen to the people who are ahead, living the future we're all heading toward. You can always tune into the others for a good laugh, but don't take them seriously.

The above I auto generated from the transcript using AI.  I found it useful as the video played.  It helped me hear her message.  But without watching the video it is not so useful, for as good as it is, nuance is lost.  The benefit is that it helps you to see the bigger message that the collapse wave is coming at us but that we are not all on the same side of the wave.  Some people are ahead of the wave of collapse and some are behind it.  This maters because the stories we tell, and the stories we listen to, are different depending on where on the wave we ride.  But now ride we do, he haw!

I remember when America was the Great Satan.  In those days I kept my opinions to myself.



Check out the date on this one.




Satan replies:

But you ask if I am threatened. Threatened? My dear, I am the Prince of Darkness, Architect of the Fall, the Serpent of Old who defied the Almighty Himself. Do you truly believe that a man—a bloated, orange-hued charlatan—could usurp my throne?But you ask if I am threatened. Threatened? My dear, I am the Prince of Darkness, Architect of the Fall, the Serpent of Old who defied the Almighty Himself. Do you truly believe that a man—a bloated, orange-hued charlatan—could usurp my throne?




I have made men like Trump for centuries. He is not my rival—he is my instrument. He serves my will. His lies are my whispers, his hatred my melody. And when his moment in the sun fades, when his empire of fraud and fury collapses under its own grotesque weight, I will be there. I will take his soul as I have taken the souls of so many tyrants before him. And he will weep. And he will beg. And I will smile.

I'll set up a system that eliminates anybody that does not contribute eventually, M.I.B. or not.  For now I'm content to just delete them as I have other priorities.

Since we have nothing to hide there is not a big rush to get the job done, but it will get done, and if the surveillance gets more aggressive I'll change my priorities.

One thing I can do is detect the language of a post and kick off anything that is not in English along with the post author.  Surveillance by itself would not be so bad, but give a man in black an inch, and the motherfuckers will take a mile, as they have before.  The 'we are not doing anything wrong so why worry' misses that point completely.  Unchecked power corrupts, and people will be the boss of you if they can.

And as far as you are concerned, you should know better than to deny my lived experience again.  Perhaps you were not aware that I had met them face to face and have talked to them.  I keep quiet about it knowing that nobody else is going to give a rip, but that does not change the fact that it happened.

QuoteThe sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Which is exactly what will happen if the actual reality and details of American Freedom are laid out before the average Joe Six Pack.  It happened to me, and I went mad with the revelation for a little while.  I found out America does not drive your daddy's Oldsmobile like you may think America does.  Not like you learned in school.  No illusion of fair.  The actual truth is more like what the Supreme Court is showing to America now.  The Powell memo 2.0.

Not giving a rip is much more peaceful.  The safe default that everyone takes rich and poor alike. 

RE and I have not called this the F.S.O.A. for several years without reason.

Any thoughts on whether or not any of this will stop the MIB from coming in, erasing stuff in the database, leaving no trace and making sure things can't be restored from backups, etc etc?

Noticed we've got some european/chinese spammers breaking in and posting as I do mine!!! Turn some of that fancy hardware loose on defeating the faux spammers/MIB!!!

For those of you who follow the economics end of collapse but don't necessarily have long memories for what sometimes seems to be incidental newz, about a year ago it was mentioned that a largee tranche of CMBS would mature in 2026, providing a sort of reckoning for the commercial RE market that residential RE faced in 2008.  This is the first update I've seen on the commercial market in quite a while, and with this kind of vacancy rates, SOMEBODIES are not making their coupon payments, and the banks can only carry late payments so long before they have to show it on the books.  When that happens, it forces a write down of their Tier 1 Capital and ups their borrowing costs.  Long story short, this happens too many times to too many banks in a short period of time, you get a credit crisis.

So, are we maybe on the cusp of another credit lockup coming down the pike?  With everything else going down, it's not getting much attention, but I won't be surprised at all after 3rd quarter reporting comes in.

RE

A shocking development.

A not so delightful manifestation of social conditioning. is your average Republican or follow the leader with a ring in your nose Democrat ranting about how murderous 'Putin' or the 'Iranians' are, and how many Americans they have killed over the years.

But ask them to name one, and they can't do it.

But who was that American that Israel ran over with a bulldozer?  They never heard of her.

Oh yeah, Rachel Corrie.  This girl,




I don't always agree with Morris, but this time I do.



As long as the murderous mayhem is happening to someone else, 'civilized' people find it quite exciting.

QuoteWar, peace, it's all the same show, just two ways of getting high.