As long as they can feed and house their serfs and provide them a greater degree of safety and security than they would have not living under them in the compound, they can maintain it for a while.  Eventually of course if they don't run their city-state well, they'll be overthrown as leader.   I doubt Elon would last long leading his survival clan of supermodels, tech bros and mercs for instance.  lol.

RE

QuoteI doubt Elon would last long leading his survival clan of supermodels, tech bros and mercs for instance.

Exactly, none of our billionaire class has it in them to be a charismatic or competent leader.  They should pick me as guru while there is still time.

Sadly, anyone who would be a good Guru doesn't have the necessary funds, and anyone with the moolah would make a lousy Guru.  They are mutually exclusive sets, there's no intersection.

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 05, 2026, 09:34 PM

QuoteI doubt Elon would last long leading his survival clan of supermodels, tech bros and mercs for instance.

Exactly, none of our billionaire class has it in them to be a charismatic or competent leader.  They should pick me as guru while there is still time.

Well, once this site had all sorts of folks stopping in, discussing most anything, it was great entertainment. RE's early sites had even more followers. That might have been guru level leader status I suppose. But guru's being in charge of collecting followers....first his went....elsewhere....some then came here...and then they went.....I would say guru skills are having opposite consequences of what gurus do. Followers aren't supposed to be dropping like flies right? Everytime I get banned for whatever the reason djour guru ranking for whomever drops like 33%.

Quote from: TDoS on Jul 06, 2026, 05:25 PMWell, once this site had all sorts of folks stopping in, discussing most anything, it was great entertainment. RE's early sites had even more followers. That might have been guru level leader status I suppose..

The reason I had a following was because I Blogged.  I no longer do that, so the people who liked reading my take on history, economics, anthropology, politics, energy, futurism and my autobiographical material have drifted away.  I no longer have sufficient energy to sit at the keyboard to write at the length I used to.  I also no longer can keyboard anywhere near my old speed.  I'm down to one hand hunt and peck typing.   My old blogs would usually range from 5-10K words and I could crank them out in a day.  Today, one of those blogs would take a month.

I wish I still could blog.  There are some ideas and topics I either never thought had relevance to collapse or are so controversial I didn't think it wise to publish while still alive so I didn't write about them.   I have no desire to be martyred for having wildly unpopular opinions and end up in prison. lol.  At this point though, prison would not be that much different than my current accommodations, though I don't think they let prisoners have unrestricted access to the internet, which thank god I still have.

Anyhow, now all we do is chronicle the newz stories which are relevant to the topics I used to write on at great length.  It's not enough to develop or retain a following.  I'd like to do video again, but I've been waiting for Kdog to set up a better platform than what I used to do with Skype and YouTube.  Hopefully he'll eventually get around to that.  I can still talk well enough unscripted to do an entertaining show.  Maybe I can still be a Guru. lol. 😀

RE

A nice read as always.

How long do we have, nobody knows. The best we can hope is to muddle through the crises that await us - breadbasket failure, coastal flooding, heat deaths, fascism, genocide, war. Sometime soon, the global population could be under 1 billion. I don't know what the end state is. Half a billion? A million? Zero? Regardless of the end state, the transition - already underway - to get there will be terrifying.

The "end state" will be Zero, but it's likely to take a long time to get there.  It's the kind of decrease best measured in Half-Lives.  We could drop out of the Billions after just a few years or perhaps decades, but the rest of the trip down through widely scattered Millions in different geographical locations probably takes Centuries or more.  At some point it could stabilize and even rebound, but "civilization" as we know it won't exist.  When we reach Zero isn't very important.

The next decade will be Interesting Times.

RE

A half-life scenario makes sense through the initial crisis period when social equilibrium and support totally falls apart.  But after chaos and starvation and other death drivers have done the work the initial conditions will have changed.  A handful of resourceful people selected by Darwin's filter could remain.  Things would stabilize somewhat  There would be tribes and kings and chiefs.  Artwork will be expressing on hand made garments.  Strange taboos will dictate how technology is used in a new religion.

After a few centuries the descendants of the resourceful ones will read and write again.  Those left will be smart enough to breed people who can do that beyond text representations of grunts and groans.  Go here, do that but never wonder why.  Screen flies will be the first to go when door-dash goes offline.  Nature has a way of cleaning out overshoot debris.

The video shows s group of people who perhaps will be rejected by Darwin's filter.  But I could be wrong about that.  Collapse may not favor the ability to think for yourself.  Blind-faith followers unable to deal with factual reality may be the ones to see the promised land.

Quote from: RE on Jul 06, 2026, 10:44 PM

Quote from: TDoS on Jul 06, 2026, 05:25 PMWell, once this site had all sorts of folks stopping in, discussing most anything, it was great entertainment. RE's early sites had even more followers. That might have been guru level leader status I suppose..

The reason I had a following was because I Blogged.  I no longer do that, so the people who liked reading my take on history, economics, anthropology, politics, energy, futurism and my autobiographical material have drifted away.

One possibility, and a completely predictable one you would claim. There are at least 2 others I can think of.

Quote from: REI no longer have sufficient energy to sit at the keyboard to write at the length I used to.  I also no longer can keyboard anywhere near my old speed.  I'm down to one hand hunt and peck typing.   My old blogs would usually range from 5-10K words and I could crank them out in a day.  Today, one of those blogs would take a month.

I was perusing the old Wordpress one a couple days ago. Indeed they were voluminous.

Quote from: REI wish I still could blog.  There are some ideas and topics I either never thought had relevance to collapse or are so controversial I didn't think it wise to publish while still alive so I didn't write about them.

And perhaps an introspective on why things didn't turn out the way you thought they were going to go in the old days?

Quote from: REI have no desire to be martyred for having wildly unpopular opinions and end up in prison. lol. 

That isn't where Ruppert ended up. Or Heinberg. Or the academics on TOD. No one got martyred or sent to prison, but they all basically had to do SOMETHING to maintain a tenuous hold on their popularity and later their credibility after their voluminous deep thoughts on a topic revealed how little deep thoughts mattered, in a topic they had no experience with. For Ruppert it was suicide, being discredited but deftly changing the subject worked for Richard. And the academics just floated away and went back to their worlds of pretending that having a big brain and a PhD was enough, having demonstrated that basic real world understanding of the system they were playing in was wrong.

Quote from: REAt this point though, prison would not be that much different than my current accommodations, though I don't think they let prisoners have unrestricted access to the internet, which thank god I still have.

Yup...if, towards the end there is at least entertainment...things can't be all bad.

Quote from: REAnyhow, now all we do is chronicle the newz stories which are relevant to the topics I used to write on at great length.  It's not enough to develop or retain a following.  I'd like to do video again, but I've been waiting for Kdog to set up a better platform than what I used to do with Skype and YouTube.  Hopefully he'll eventually get around to that.  I can still talk well enough unscripted to do an entertaining show.  Maybe I can still be a Guru. lol. 😀

RE

Keeping yourself in high spirits is a good thing, having something to do, regardless of what it is.

You should get back to posting on reddit with Dave, he posts quite a bit of content, certainly nothing about the old ghosts in the closet that never worked out, but good stuff on collapse now, collapse tomorrow, collapse next week. Been keeping it going for a long time now, plus he puts all the doom he can find into a single document which is really cool. You can find out all the claims of doom today, doom tomorrow, doom next week all in one spot.

As usual though, after reading it for awhile, and the kind of dooms discussed, and years going by, I presume folks finally ask themselves the same question they did 5 years after Thanksgiving Day 2005. "What the FUCK happened to my endtimes! I bought that hunting cabin and started a garden.....then the wife wouldn't go out into the woods, the kids wouldn't help me plant the garden, no one wanted to practice building homemade claymores to protect us from the MZBs, and SHIT what am I going to do with all that ammo?"

QuoteFor Ruppert it was suicide,

So, you don't think the men in black had something to do with putting the idea in his head.  Some do.

Some people seem to make an extreme view work for them just fine.  And I have to put it to you straight.  They bring something to the table, their personalities are interesting.  What do you bring.

Those people deluded and misled, me not.

Without ever making a case for the me not part.  That is not a very interesting point of view.  And they don't hide under a rock like you do.



The Battle of Seattle ------ Richard Heinberg was there.  What were you doing back then, stalking somebody?

Suicide is a very valid choice these days.  The world is a very depressing place to live overall.  The environment is going to shit, fascism is on the rise, homeless people are everywhere, food is dangerous to eat, Chump is POTUS...it's actually hard to find a decent reason to live besides the entertainment value of watching a disaster unfold.

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Aug 04, 2026, 01:39 PM

QuoteFor Ruppert it was suicide,

So, you don't think the men in black had something to do with putting the idea in his head.  Some do.

Some do. But he lacked CFS between his ears. From the moment he lied about being a police detective he was marked for exposure. Put the idea of offing oneself into any normal person's head and they laugh. But he might have been more than a little psychologically susceptible because of what appeared to be one hell of an ego wrapped in one wanna be famous person.

Give a known drunk a taste of celebrity and fame....and then take it away. It sent a known heavy drinker/mary jane fan spinning down into homelessness, having lost all the attention he collected prior to losing that lawsuit in Oregon for sexually dancing in his underwear in front of one of his employees. Oops. See where weed and booze gets you? Then, after being suspected of trashing his own office in Oregon he fled to Venezuela. The story is he got rolled by females in a bar (bad place if someone is an alkie I imagine) for his gold. Then he got a tummy ache that their free health care couldn't help him with, so he came back from that socialist paradise, and checked himself into Belview. A few meager attempts at getting back the fame even as the oil powerhouse that was the US could be seen not on the horizon, but steamrolling the peak oilers into squashed bugs.

Yeah....no MIB required here.

Quote from: K-DogAnd they don't hide under a rock like you do.

I stand up in front of crowds, national conferences, colleges, professional meetings and don't hide from any of my work. Stalkers use their IT people to hunt me down using my IP address, collect published works, pass them around among the moderators. I walked up to RE and said hi once. Hardly hiding, he could have dispatched Dave or Monsta or John or Wendy to track me back to my car if he had wanted.  They were all there.

Quote from: K-DogThe Battle of Seattle ------ Richard Heinberg was there.  What were you doing back then, stalking somebody?

I stopped in to see Richard once. Took the kid with me. He wasn't around unfortunately. Hoped to see Matt as well, back when he was doing the palm reader/magazine publisher thing. I did a proper writeup for Richard here. Did it survive the usual backlash after displays of "outstanding insight and blinding brilliance" that were listed on the ban notice?

Quote from: RE on Aug 04, 2026, 02:44 PMSuicide is a very valid choice these days.  The world is a very depressing place to live overall.  The environment is going to shit, fascism is on the rise, homeless people are everywhere, food is dangerous to eat, Chump is POTUS...it's actually hard to find a decent reason to live besides the entertainment value of watching a disaster unfold.

RE

"Hanging around for the apocalypse like it's the season finale."

CoPilot came up with that one!