how to save the world

Links of the Month: January 2026

Posted on January 14, 2026 by Dave Pollard

In January 1933, Hitler is appointed Chancellor despite only minority support in the election. A few months later, he becomes dictator and all opposition parties are banned. Image via Anne Frank House from Bundesarchiv, 146-1972-026-11/ photograph: R. Sennecke. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Rights: CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE

Word of the day is ‘latibulate’ (17th century): to hide in a corner in an attempt to escape reality.
— Susie Dent, from the memebrary

It really does seem as if the American Empire, with the complicity of both US parties, most major corporations, the corporate-owned media, and the cowardly, appeasing leaders of the other countries in the larger White Empire, is hell-bent on emulating the ‘rise’ and world domination aspirations of Germany in the 1930s. The parallels are now too overwhelming to ignore.

Independent Canadian journalist Tod Maffin likens the behaviour of the US Administration to that of a school bully. The analogy is perfectly apt. The UN and the courts are the hapless school authorities. The Canadian/European/Australian ‘leaders’ are the bully’s terrified ‘allies’ and apologists for the bully’s behaviour, out of fear and incomprehension they will be next. They’re fine with the brutality and theft as long as it’s the poor, weak kids getting beaten up and robbed, not them. I suppose we hope that the bully will ‘graduate out’ of the school in the next US election, and the problem will magically disappear. That’s what the world figured in the early 1930s about Germany.

In the meantime, Canadians are now at least talking about the probability of annexation, military intervention, economic sanctions (sieges) and other hostile actions threatening our sovereignty.

It is absolutely conceivable that the carnage will continue until all of the Americas, and the entire Middle East, has been declared the bully’s territory. The bully will continue his behaviour until he stops getting exactly what he wants and demands. Just like in the 1930s. ICE killed 32 people last year, and has over 68,000 locked up, mostly without charges. Just like in the 1930s. Their target is “100 million”, to enable an Aryan US Empire “no longer besieged by the third world”. Just like in the 1930s.

First they came for the Communists…

COLLAPSE WATCH

photo via Bill Rees’ blog, by Emre Ezer on Pexels, free to use

Is the looming financial collapse behind Trump’s war-mongering?: Tim Morgan poses an interesting thesis: If as most believe financial ‘assets’ are ludicrous overvalued (especially AI ‘assets’), and if (see Lawrence Wilkerson’s article linked below) the massive government and private debt that has been created to try to keep the economy pumping is basically un-repayable when it comes due, then this suggests that countries dependent on financial ‘wealth’ (the US, and Europe to a lesser extent) are facing catastrophic economic collapse and contraction, while countries that rely on their material resources (China, Russia, Canada, Venezuela, Iran) should be able to weather the storm relatively well. What’s a resource-poor, finance-dependent country to do? Well, obviously, steal the resource-rich countries’ resources (oil, land, water, minerals) to lessen the blow.

Why collapse is inevitable: A 3-part essay from ecological economist Bill Rees. Bill’s summary:

Part 1 argues that modern humans are maladapted by nature and nurture to the world they themselves have created. Our paleolithic brains are befuddled by the sheer scale, complexity and pace of change of both our socio-cultural and biophysical environments.
Part 2 suggests that much of our befuddlement is due to unfamiliar behaviours and circumstances that emerge from the internal machinations of large-scale societal organizations and their interactions with the biophysical systems that contain them. Our Paleolithic brains are not up to the challenge. Socially stable, eco-compatible large-scale societies cannot emerge from these turbulent confrontations.
Part 3 makes the case that what does emerge is something else altogether—gross societal malfunction-to-collapse—which may be at least partially explained by pan-cultural ‘psychopathy’.

This month in collapse: Erik Michaels provides a comprehensive and compelling summary of the best new writing on collapse, every week. Definitely worth subscribing or putting in your RSS feed. His latest includes this remarkable paragraph from ecologist Lyle Lewis:

We often end [discussions about extinction] with reassurance; with the idea that we can still choose how deep the crater goes. But history offers little evidence that we can. Knowledge without the capacity to act is irrelevant, and our species has always followed the same imperative: to consume what sustains us until it’s gone. The truth is that this extinction isn’t a problem we can solve; it’s a process we set in motion simply by being what we are. All that remains is to bear witness; to understand what it means to live in the final stages of the unmaking of the world. In truth, every hominin of the last 2.5 million years has lived somewhere along this descent; life will go on, but not the life we’ve known. We’re simply witnesses to its undoing.

Orange rivers as the permafrost melts: A new NOAA study reveals how quickly the Arctic environment is changing as polar temperatures rise 3-5x faster than they are on the rest of the planet. And in the process Canada is quickly and irreplaceably losing its glaciers.

LIVING BETTER

via Stephen Abram, originally from a pro-vaccine site

It starts with humility: Those of us privileged to have obtained advanced degrees and high salaries and powerful-sounding titles can easily begin to believe our own press — that what we have to say is important and invariably right. It came as a shock to me when I retired to discover most of the stuff in my professional bio was just self-serving crap, and that I really had not accomplished anything of enduring value. And that all the people I worked for and with likewise had not accomplished anything of enduring value — and the more they had been paid and the ‘higher up’ they went, the more that was true. Not because any of us were/are dumb or incompetent (though some were), but because that’s not how sustained, lasting change happens in complex systems. It sounds like Mark Eddleston has had a similar epiphany, and he’s written an articulate and achingly humble book about it. First chapter is here.

Seven ways to make housing affordable: Now that Vancouver housing prices have stabilized, there’s a new opportunity for governments to help residents cut the absurd cost of housing, that apply just about everywhere. “Letting the market” solve the problems has never worked.

Getting religion out of the health care system: Finally, BC’s courts have been forced to confront the absurdity of publicly-funded hospitals dictating health care policy based on religious orthodoxy.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

produced, apparently by accident, by AI (not my prompt); out of the mouth of bots

Patrick Lawrence’s eulogy for the rule of law as the world descends into chaos: Patrick’s a wonderful writer, and his three latest essays should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening in the world. I’m providing multiple links to try to skirt the paywall (let me know if you can’t access any of them), and have asked him to ‘package’ and release them for wider distribution:

1. Free Speech and It’s Enemies: What we’re able and competent to say and write has a powerful impact on what we’re able to conceive and think. (CN copy.)
2. The Coup: The American Empire baldly announces what has been its covert modus operandi for decades: It claims the entire Western Hemisphere (and the Middle East) as its territory to deal with as it chooses, and recognizes none of these nations’ sovereignty. (Alt Substack copy.)
3. An Abyss of Lawlessness: In the words of Trump cabinet minister Stephen Miller: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. The “rule of law” is one of those “international niceties” that has been completely discarded. (CN copy)

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

Lawrence Wilkerson predicts that $3T in US government debt imminently coming due will bring down the US economy, and Trump’s military adventures and thefts are all desperate smokescreens to try to cushion the collapse. Quiet backroom deals with China and Russia will be needed to prevent it turning into a global economic collapse.
And in a related vein, the inevitable shift to a multipolar world is explained by Arnaud Bertrand.
Indrajit explains why the likely reason China and Russia aren’t doing more than condemning the most recent US atrocities is because they’re smart enough to realize that those atrocities are backfiring (citing Napoleon: “Never interfere with your enemy when he is making a mistake.”).
Israel bans Doctors Without Borders and dozens of other humanitarian organizations from Palestine.
The brutal War in Sudan is a civil war between two greedy militias; just follow the money.
Indrajit Samarajiva’s clever analogy to the US/White Empire going “white dwarf” as it explodes and then collapses.
The son of a Chilean Nazi, who’s also an overt supporter of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship, has won the presidency of Chile.

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Mossad, whose agents are deployed in large numbers in Iran, and whose infiltration inside Iran crippled the country’s response to last summer’s US/Israeli bombings, is actively involved in fomenting violence among the protestors demonstrating against shortages in that country, with the goal of turning the protests into anti-regime demonstrations, trying to trigger a violent response from the Iranian government to enable new planned US/Israeli bombings and regime change operations. The western press continues to ignore and censor reports of Mossad’s active involvement in creating a smokescreen for another war against Iran. But some “third world” countries are reporting on it. Here’s a report from India on Mossad’s activities. And of course Caitlin is also all over it. And Larry Johnson has an update. And Moon of Alabama says the pro-government protests now dramatically outnumber the anti-government protests.
How the US/Israeli propaganda campaign deliberately exploits public confusion, exhaustion, and disbelief, while sowing fear of daring to protest throughout the west.
Jeremy Corbyn laments Starmer’s continued abject submission to the US on its recent war crimes.
The US/western media refuse to call Trump’s attack and war crimes in Venezuela “acts of war”.
Dozens of western media used the identical headline terms in response to the Bondi shooting: “The globalized Intifada comes to Boston”. Coincidence?
The NYT continues to report on the US/Israeli genocide in Palestine as acts of “law enforcement”.

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

A Goldman exec explains how they encourage the ‘pump and dump’ scam to exploit uncertainty over the economic situation, and to make a quick buck on AI.
How to deal with corrupt corporations, and how to fix unions that discriminate against new members (very different problems).
How the ‘financial industry’ is just a casino: “In our society the classic three ways of making a fortune still apply: inherit it, marry it, or steal it. But for an ordinary citizen who wants to become rich through working at a salaried job, finance is by an enormous margin the most likely path. And yet, the thing they’re doing in finance is useless. I mean that in a strong sense: this activity produces nothing and creates no benefit for society in aggregate, because every gain is matched by an identical loss. It all sums to zero.”
The Skeena Resources mining company offered $10,000 bribes to First Nations members to approve the mine’s reopening.
Cory Doctorow explains in detail why he thinks it’s so important for our economy and for tacking inequality to repeal the “anti-circumvention laws” most countries have agreed to sign as part of trade agreements, which funnel staggering amounts of money to giant US corporations for doing essentially nothing, and hamper national innovation in the process. Not an easy read, but this is important to understand.

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

The US CDC has slashed most of its recommendations for childhood vaccinations, based entirely on RFK Jr’s ideology, and contrary to all established science on the benefits and risks of these vaccines, putting millions of children at risk.

Department of Health Prevention: Short takes:

As a result of the aforementioned RFK Jr incompetence, the public health community has rallied in support of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which continues to advocate for a full slate of safety-proven vaccinations. Many US state health organizations are also supporting them.
The brain-wormed Health Secretary has also turned the ‘food pyramid’ of foods recommended for a healthy diet upside down. Red meat and dairy (the country’s largest Big Ag lobbies and biggest sources of saturated fats) have been elevated to the wide top of the pyramid, and whole grains and nuts apparently demoted to the very bottom. In delivering its confusing, anti-science, ideological message, the deranged Kennedy said that the stuff at the bottom is also important, but that’s not how the bizarre diagram reads. Absolutely appalling, but fortunately most Americans ignore ‘food pyramids’ anyway; we can only hope they will continue to do so.
Influenza cases and deaths in the US (and likely Canada) have reached the highest levels since CoVid-19 years.
Soaring health care insurance costs in the US are forcing some Americans to marry their housemates.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

from the memebrary

Does a mirror reflect a past version of yourself?: Yes, says Hank Green, scientifically that’s true. But actually “your self is an illusion, a fake idea created through a process of natural selection to successfully pass on its genes to the next generation… Your body is a prison”.

The curious case of Earl Mardle’s cow: The cow’s behaviour suggests an odd mix of instinctive and ‘judgemental’ reactions to a challenging situation. The long and complex story is worth a read. It just might contain clues to whether cows do or don’t have “selves”.

Vancouver’s soaring vacancy rates: It’s perplexing — the city is one of the world’s most popular places to live and retire, and among the world’s most expensive, but its rental vacancy rates have jumped from near-zero to 40-year record highs. Why? Not government policy or increased supply, say the experts. The Tyee reports the real reasons: Reduced demand as rental prices stayed high and renters’ disposable income dropped (so renters doubled up or moved away). A sharp drop in non-permanent residents, as Canada fell in line with Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric and cut quotas. And “a sluggish retail market” as owners who’d bought properties to speculate on continuing price rises gave up trying to resell them and put them on the rental market. That’s not just true in Vancouver, I’d venture to say.

Rick Beato’s personal favourite songs of 2025: Taste is so tricky to understand. Rick is an expert, and I do like his choices better than the actual top sellers per Spotify (except for Die With a Smile, which IMO is already a classic). But otherwise, my favourites didn’t overlap at all with either list.

What do you mean by ‘India’?: Indrajit Samarajiva provides a fascinating explanation of how most people’s sense of ‘where they live’ has nothing to do with what politicians talk about or where mapmakers draw the lines.

What reading does to your brain: OK, so there’s the orthodox view on this, how reading makes you think better and improves “attention, memory and empathy”, which this video covers. (Thanks to Liz ‘Oofdah’ for the link.) But I don’t think the author realizes that reading crowds out a lot of other potential uses of your brain’s capacity (and no, it’s a myth that we only use 20% of our brains). And reading can also lead to groupthink, acceptance of propaganda, and entrenchment of beliefs that are simply not true. So much depends on what and how you read.

The “impossible” machines that manufacture the world’s most advanced computer chips: Were it not for these machines, decades in the making against high odds and doubts, Moore’s Law would have broken by now, and our computers would be much slower and bulkier.

The arrest of Mark Carney will bring peace and prosperity: A clever satirical ‘editorial’ that draws whole sentences from the official text of Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro, to propose that the Canadian PM likewise be ‘arrested’.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

from the memebrary — apparently a collaboration between those cited at bottom

From a transcription of Trump‘s press conference after kidnapping Maduro and bombing Caracas and its port city (thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for telling us what he actually said, rather than what they think he might have meant):

We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago… We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground, and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.

We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so… We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world…

We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in… We’re not afraid of boots on the ground. And we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high level.

[to Fox News] This incredible thing last night… We have to do it again [in other countries]. We can do it again, too. Nobody can stop us.

From the speech by Venezuela’s VP and now de facto President Delcy Rodríguez, immediately after Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro and the bombing of Caracas and attempted theft of its oil (via Moon of Alabama; once again, you won’t find much mention of this in western media):

The objective of this attack is none other than to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, in an attempt to forcibly break the nation’s political independence. They will not succeed. After more than 200 years of independence, the people and their legitimate government remain steadfast in defending their sovereignty and their inalienable right to decide their own destiny. The attempt to impose a colonial war to destroy the republican form of government and force a “regime change,” in alliance with the fascist oligarchy, will fail like all previous attempts.

From Hank Green: A couple of clever remarks from recent Vlogbrothers videos:

AI is Wealth’s attempt to gain access to Skill while preventing Skill from having access to Wealth.

[Too much of social media is] grievance-based-attention farming.

From Dorianne Laux‘s The Book of Men:

DARK CHARMS

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Leave a comment

The Ikigai Game

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Dave Pollard

This is a work of fiction. Note that if you’re reading this in an e-newsletter, the table in this story might be hard to read. You can always read the copy on the blog.

“Uh oh. Cat’s up to something crazy again. OK, so what’s this — a map for solving all the world’s problems?

“It’s a game board, Dev. I’ve invented a new game based on ikigai. It can be used as an ice-breaker, to help people who don’t know each other discover things they enjoy in common. Or it can be used by people who do know each other to learn more about each other, and see how well they know each other.”

“So… an ice-breaker or a relationship-breaker. Sounds very dangerous.”

“Maybe if there’s things that are important to someone you love, that you’re completely unaware of, it might be better to know about them than remain not-so-blissfully ignorant? But the main purpose of the game is to have fun. It’s based a little on the old party game “Would You Rather?”, and the more recent “Personal Preference” game but this has important differences. Want to know how it works?”

“Sure. One of the things on my ikigai list is making the women I care about in my life happy. Go for it.”

“OK, so, this game can be played by any number of players, but this layout you see represents four players. Let’s assume they’re people who don’t know each other that well, like the people at our monthly Vegan Potluck coming up this weekend, since that’s when I thought about introducing this game.”

“With you so far.”

“The game consists of a fixed number of rounds, let’s say 24 ‘cause it divides evenly into lots of different group sizes. Each round consists of one player reading out a sentence that starts with ‘Would it bring you joy to: [A]___ [B]___ [C]___?”, where A, B and C are three roughly similar activities, at least one of which the questioner really likes — maybe something from their ikigai list. So for example: [A] have a bubble bath by candlelight with someone you love; [B] spend time in a hot tub with a group of friends and a bottle of wine; [C] spend time in a sauna with three friends giving each other massages. And then using tiles with zero, one, or two stars printed on them, each player puts a green tile with the appropriate number of stars on the card in front of them, face down, under each of the three letters, to indicate whether they wouldn’t get joy from that (0 stars), would get a little joy from it (1 star), or would get enormous joy from doing it (2 stars).”

“Ooh. Some of those things would merit five stars from me.”

“And then, each player (other than the questioner), uses the same scoring system and the blue tiles to guess what the questioner’s own preferences for those three things would be (also face down). Your answers can all be two stars, or all zero stars, or any combination of stars. (Except that, if this is the questioner’s own question, rather than one from the ‘starter’ deck, then at least one of the questioner’s own preferences has to be two-stars, something on their ikigai list.)”

“What if options [A], [B] and [C} are so different that they’re not comparable, like if in your example [B] was eating raspberries and [C] was skydiving?”

“That’s why this game is better than the binary-choice ‘Would You Rather?’ games. They don’t have to be comparable, though I think it makes it more interesting if they are. What’s important is that the choices have to be concrete and realistic, not theoretical, impossible or silly. So no “Walk on the moon” options or “Find a million dollars on the sidewalk” options. These are about real things that you could quite conceivably do.

“So now, the questioner turns over their green tiles, and then each person in order, around the circle, turns over their green and blue tiles. The key part of the game is now the conversation that ensues about why people answered as they did. And perhaps some expressions of astonishment about what some of us would realistically love the chance to do.”

“I can see this working for people who have explored the ikigai idea and put together a list of the things that bring them joy. But what about for people who’ve never thought about it?”

“Two options: Either have a ‘starter’ deck of options for the questioner to ask about, at least until players learn to come up with their own, or alternatively have a ‘learn about your ikigai‘ session before you play, to allow players to come up with some real ikigai options of their own that they can then use in the game.”

“I love it, though it’s going to raise eyebrows among those who don’t know about ikigai, and who maybe even don’t know what really gives them joy. They might think this is too much brain challenging work and not enough fun. Same for people who don’t have very good imaginations.”

“Absolutely true. That might make this whole idea a failure. But I think the ‘starter deck’ of questions, if it’s well-done, might get them over the learning hump. Here’s my first cut at some questions for the starter deck:

A	B	C
Lie on the beach in the sun all day	Play in a volleyball tournament on a tropical beach	Beachcomb for shells, fossils and driftwood
Learn to pole dance	Dance naked in the pouring rain	Take Latin dance lessons
Talk with friends about politics	Talk with friends about favourite characters from novels	Talk with friends about philosophy and science
Tell ghost stories by a campfire	Roast chestnuts on a hearth fireplace	Attend a bonfire party
Drink matcha lattes	Drink egg nogs	Drink hibiscus tea
Use a weighted blanket for comfort on a cold night	Snuggle with a platonic friend on a cold night	Snuggle with a cat on a cold night
Walk on a swinging (suspension) bridge	Participate in a ‘Deep Time’ walk	Walk alone in a tropical rainforest
Get a deep tissue massage	Spend time in a sensory deprivation tank	Get an Ayurvedic oil massage
Flirt with someone from a very different culture	Engage in a ‘speed dating’ activity just for fun	Spend an entire day with someone without using any form of language
Play a collaborative board game — one with no winner	Dress up and engage in ‘furry’ play with friends	Play a GPS scavenger hunt game
Listen and dance to EDM music	Attend a choral concert	Listen to K-Pop music
Engage in clever banter at a party with a group	Find one interesting new person at a party and spend time with them	Ditch the main party activities and play with the host’s cat instead
Play laser tag	Play Escape Room	Play Fortnite
Write short stories	Write essays	Write poems
Compose music	Sing in a choir	Play in a band
Watch murder mystery TV shows	Do Sudoku puzzles	Do crossword puzzles
Fish	Stargaze	Birdwatch
Learn to make your own clothes	Learn to mend your own clothes	Learn to fix your own bicycle
Make pottery on a wheel	Paint with acrylics	Weave on a loom
Go canoeing	Go spelunking	Go parasailing
Eat a fudge sundae	Eat vegan ice cream with raspberries	Eat a S’mores crepe
Participate in a yacht race	Participate in a polar bear swim	Go up in a hot air balloon
Visit Paris	Visit New Zealand	Visit China

“And I also hope that the learning and discovery about one’s own joys, and others’, will more than compensate for the mental energy the game demands.”

“Yeah, because we have such ‘thoughtful’ friends, I think it might work well for them. So… scoring?”

“That’s the coolest part. I have a blank laptop spreadsheet that handles it all. Key in the questions in the first column, and everybody’s ‘green tile’ and ‘blue tile’ answers in the other columns, and the spreadsheet automatically computes two things: (1) How well each player did at correctly guessing the questioners’ own answers, and (2) How well each player’s own answers correlate with every other player’s answers. And displays that information as running totals as the game progresses.”

“Uh, oh. So what if Lissa’s answers and mine correlate 96%, and yours and mine only correlate 75%. Does that mean I’m hanging around with the wrong smart, beautiful woman?”

“Maybe. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know? Maybe if hers and mine also correlate very highly, we should just consider including her in some of the things we do, for everyone’s happiness. And maybe it means that Lissa and I should organize some canoeing trips together and leave you on shore to make our favourite dinner and have it ready when we finish our trip.”

“That sounds good. But the candle-lit bubble bath afterwards might be a bit of a squeeze for three.”

“That’s OK. I happen to know Xan loves bubble baths, and he’s vegan like you. So you can bathe with Lissa and I can bathe with Xan. Come to think of it, I think he has a hot tub too!”

Posted in Creative Works | 1 Comment

Under the Veneer of the “Affordability Crisis”

Posted on January 9, 2026 by Dave Pollard

“GOT MINE!” — An AI depiction of corporatism and ‘private equity’ as vultures; my own prompt

Politicians’ current blathering about the “affordability crisis” is basically an attempt to re-characterize the accelerating global political and economic collapse as a ‘hiccup’ in the current system that merely requires some expert managerial and financial tweaking.

It’s a deception in two senses:

It attempts to divert attention from the understandable outrage of citizens at the current chaos, massive and soaring inequality, overt corruption, and staggering incompetence of our ‘leaders’, by reframing citizens as mere ‘consumers’, who should not worry their pretty little heads about matters of state, but instead focus on how they can buy and spend more.
It conceals the large-scale theft of money and public resources by a small group of rich, powerful, insatiably rapacious, egomaniacal, terrified billionaires, from the rest of the world’s struggling citizens. Without this monstrous diversion of wealth from the poor (and the public purse) to the private pockets of the ultra-rich, there would be no (immediate) “affordability” crisis for the billions of victims of this larceny.

A recent article by Evelyn Quartz explains that this deception (and note that the perpetrators of it are often themselves victims of it) stems in part from “a political class that treats politics as a financing and management problem rather than a question of democratic control”. By this thinking, government (ie taxpayers’) money should be used primarily to “incentivize” the private sector to do things (by giving them tax breaks, loans, outright gifts, subsidies etc), rather than to actually provide goods and services directly to the citizens footing the bill.

This is not just an abrogation of responsibility (and arguably a fraudulent one), it is an acknowledgement that politicians have given up on the idea of government doing anything competently, so instead of administering a huge public service providing absolute essentials cost-effectively to citizens, they’re shrugging their shoulders, giving all the money to private interests, and hoping those private interests don’t just take the money and run. Which is, for the most part, exactly what those private interests have done — just look at “private” colleges, “private” ‘health care’, and “private” equity.

This private sector avarice and incompetence then requires the political class to engage in a relentless program of “perception management”: Government and the entire public sector needs to be portrayed as inherently and necessarily inefficient and incompetent, so that giving public funds and wealth to private interests can somehow be seen as wise. And the private sector, of course, then kicks back money to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, writes flattering stories about them in the corporate-owned media, and ghost writes the laws in their favour for the politicians to present as theirs, so that the corruption is guaranteed to continue and worsen.

The struggle of most people to put food on the table, pay the rent or mortgage, and deal with falling wages and lost benefits as the prices of essentials soar, is not an “affordability” problem. The problem is that far too much of the wealth being produced by the rest of us is being siphoned off by a tiny ultra-rich minority, and that our utterly oil-dependent economy is now in permanent decline even as the human population and its demands on the economy continue to soar.

The simple truth of increasing numbers and increasing demands in the face of declining capacity to provide even as much each year as in the previous year, means that there is no longer nearly enough to go around, and the situation is rapidly and inexorably worsening.

This tiny minority siphoning off everything they can get their hands on is completely aware of the accelerating collapse of our economy and what it bodes for the world in the coming decades. They’re hoarding for the collapse, exactly as the alpha rats in lab experiments do when food supply is increasingly constrained.

If there is an “affordability” problem, it is that the cost of extracting the increasingly-expensive and heavily-depleted hydrocarbon resources that have provided 100% of global economic growth for the last two centuries is now beyond what the users of those resources can afford to pay. In economic terms, the supply and demand curves no longer intersect, and the inevitable consequence is collapse. This is not an affordability problem, it is an affordability predicament. It has no solution. Collapse cannot be avoided.

But of course the citizens don’t want to hear this, so the political class won’t tell them. It would reflect badly on the political class’ ‘management’. Instead, the political class will play the blame game. They will invade oil-rich countries and steal their wealth. Or they will stall off the outrage of citizens by saying it’s just an “affordability” problem, and, with citizens’ continued, patient support, some technical solutions will soon “fix” it.

Eventually, as the precarity and scarcities get worse and worse, even our dumbed-down, lied-to, propagandized, deceived citizens will wise up to the con.

And then, watch out.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 1 Comment

Signs of Collapse: A Strategy of Deliberate Incoherence?

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Dave Pollard

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the fourteenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.

For over 20 years, a British filmmaker named Adam Curtis has been producing an odd series of breathless films, mostly under contract to the BBC, consisting of a blizzard of collages of news headlines, speeches, stills and short video clips, with Adam’s background narration of ‘what it all means’.

And what it all means, he claims, is:

For decades, western leaders, unable to present a coherent explanation of the state of the world (both because they don’t understand it, and because they lack the language and other competencies needed to articulate it), have been managing their societies by describing a “fake”, hyper-simplified world.
These leaders, the administrations they front, and the compliant media their corporate sponsors have bought, now issue an endless barrage of conflicting statements, contradictory policies, and incoherent rhetorical claims, that are designed to confound any understanding and hence any rational response to what these administrations are doing.
The citizenry is hence controlled by the paralysis this confusion produces, by fear of what ‘really’ might be going on beneath all the confusion, and by the manufacture of deliberately overstated, ambiguous and oversimplified threats they feel compelled to try, hopelessly, to counter.
So the utter incoherence of what is coming from our leaders is not ‘just’ incompetence and inarticulateness, but rather a deliberate strategy of obfuscation and disorientation to maintain a dysfunctional, desperate and corrupt status quo; it is a ‘feature’ and not a ‘bug’ of our current political system.

Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we should never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.

So what are we to make of this? The staggering level of incompetence evinced by our current crop of ‘leaders’ is pretty hard to deny. Is Adam seeing an (admittedly uncoordinated) conspiracy where there isn’t one?

Looking at the complete state of disarray of citizen opposition to the growing political chaos and irrationality of those with the wealth and power to drastically affect our lives (invariably for the worse), this ‘strategy’ of incoherence, if there is one, would seem to be working remarkably well.

After all, suppose you’re the elected ‘leader’ of a western government as the world accelerates into an increasing state of anxiety, instability, and ‘permanent’ economic and ecological decline into collapse. You want to stay in power, because you quite fervently believe that the opposition parties, with platforms driven by stirring up anger, hate and fear at seeing everything falling apart, will ‘manage’ your country even more incompetently than you, the incumbent, has.

But how do you stay in power when all you have to tell the dumbed-down, scared electorate is bad news they don’t want to hear, and when your opposition is stirring up that fear, angrily promising simplistic, impossible, ‘if you can’t fix it smash it’ (or privatize it) solutions to Make Your Country Great Again?

If you pull a Biden-Harris and claim things are actually going well when any fool can see that for most citizens they aren’t, you’ll get what you deserve. But what’s the alternative?

Most people, brainwashed with the myths of exceptionalism, progress. and endless unlimited opportunity for the hard-working, are simply not ready to hear the truth of the inevitability of accelerating chaos and inevitable collapse, and the misery that will accompany it.

So instead we get lies, meaningless promises, ‘performative’ politics and elections that mostly resemble beauty pageants, and fear-mongering of the opposition parties, regardless of who is in power and what the equally bewildered opposition is. Because there is no platform to address collapse. All we can do is wait and see how it unfolds, and deal with it as best we can. There’s no planning for it. Nothing any ‘central’ authority can prepare for (especially since these ‘central’ authorities will be the first to fall).

This is what chaos looks like, the last, astonishing, awful chapter of human ‘civilization’ before its final and total collapse. And how could our response to chaos be anything other than incoherent?

Thanks to Graham Stewart for provoking this post.

image by AI; my own prompt

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Time to Bury the Internet?

Posted on January 5, 2026 by Dave Pollard

drawing by Chaz Hutton

Now that the internet has degenerated to a sad mishmash of spam, scam, propaganda, disinformation, useless ‘apps’, and commercial fraud, with a new overlay of AI slop, the question becomes how to best get what we used to get from the internet, through workarounds. Preferably before the stench of the internet’s rotting corpse gets too much worse.

Of course the tech bros and their billionaire buddies and corporate oligopolies have thrown everything they can in our paths to prevent this. Through the now thoroughly-documented process of enshittification, they suck us in and lock us down, making it almost impossible to escape their expensive rent-seeking flea market without also losing our links to friends, family and networks, and our held-hostage libraries and content. So what used to save us time, now consumes hours of wasted time navigating the junkyard of sites and apps littered with unwanted, deceptive, and totally fraudulent crap.

As someone both fascinated and appalled by AI, I wondered whether this new ‘tool’ might not just flood the pathetic remains of the internet with additional oceans of garbage, but also, just maybe, provide us with a way to work around it, to get what we want without having to actually go into it. Let the AI do the garbage-scouring for us.

The possibility for this started to become clear as AI quickly challenged, and then largely rendered obsolete, the enshittified search engines that served as our main ‘portals’ into the internet. Why use the ad-cluttered, disinformation-ridden, almost-unnavigable search engines satirized in the image above, when AI will (1) give us what we’re looking for much faster, more easily, and more accurately, and (2) cite the sources for its answers so we can check out AI’s veracity directly without having to search for it.

The big corporations and purveyors of disgusting and lying ‘marketing’ crap are absolutely terrified just of this development. The SEO vendors have slued furiously to abandon attempts to ‘influence’ (ie bias and misinform) search result rank, and are now developing tools that ‘optimize’ their corporate customers’ appearance in AI results. If we’re not careful, and fast, they’ll get away with that, and AI query results will quickly be enshittified to be as horrible as search engine results.

But, at least for the moment, the open-ended nature, and immense power, of AI tools might offer another opportunity.

Suppose we developed ways to use AI to curate our networks and feeds and summarize them, with supporting links, so we completely avoid ads, clickbait, and misinformation — so they just deliver to us, ‘clean’, exactly what we want, and nothing else?

So AI could maintain a personal, editable, categorized list of ‘trusted people’ and ‘trusted information sources’ for us, and use it as a filter for all our AI queries. So that if I asked the AI tool “What are my closest friends up to?”, or “What do my trusted sources say about the situation in Sudan (or about the subject of free will)?”, or even something subtler like “Any health issues among my family or friends?” or “What are my trusted sources, and my friends’ trusted sources, saying about whether multipolarity and the end of US hegemony, and the end of USD dominance, are actually happening, or are just wishful thinking?”

The AI could then scour the wasteland of social media, all the blogs, RSS feeds and other sources for us, and just give us what we’re looking for — in seconds. With links if we wanted more right from the ‘horse’s mouth’. Never again would we have to enter the polluted waters of Farcebook or XTwitter. Put your update on your own site, anywhere, and everyone who you want to find it, and who wants to find it, will find it.

To use an analogy, AI hence becomes our ‘shopper’ not just our ‘delivery service’. We don’t have to deal with the flyers, the salespeople, the ads and marketing hype, the mis- and disinformation, and all the clutter of online ‘billboards’ trying to sell us crap (products and ‘what you need to know’ lies). Our AI ‘shopper’ takes our list, asks clarifying questions if needed, navigates the horrors of the web, and returns to us with just what we want.

Or, to put it another way, we can re-disintermediate the internet (as it was originally designed to be) by using our own intermediary to sidestep all the rent-seekers, profit-seekers, and deceptive ‘marketers’ of everything standing in the way of, and all around, what we actually want to see.

Sabine Hossenfelder has a new video about the ‘dead internet’, explaining what’s happening as the internet becomes more and more focused on producing content for use by ‘machines’ (AI etc) and less and less focused on producing content for use by people.

I think the curation-and-re-disintermediation idea is an interesting possibility, but we should recognize that this will just be another skirmish in what is likely to be an extended war. Most (but not all) of the current AI tools are owned by rent- and profit-seeking private corporations, most of them desperately unprofitable and not long for this world if they can’t monetize their staggering investments. They are going to fight this with everything they have, including putting ads on and in AI responses, and restricting what we can ask ‘their’ AI agents to do for us that might restrict their buddies’ profits.

But this current crisis is the perfect metaphor for the collapse of our entire civilization. The internet has become increasingly dysfunctional and useless as it’s grown larger and more complicated and corrupted. If it’s not dead already, it soon will be. The question is, will we be able to salvage what’s useful in it, and ignore the graveyard of corporate and political and AI garbage and mountains of clutter? Or will we just walk away from it and leave it to rot?

It’s going to be interesting to watch.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Using Weblogs and Technology | 6 Comments

Make-Believe People

Posted on January 3, 2026 by Dave Pollard

image by AI; my own prompt

Often young children, puzzled or distressed by the behaviour of their peers and the other people they know, invent imaginary friends — characters who share their joys, who understand and reassure them, who have interesting things to say, and who it seems are just more fun to be around, much of the time, than ‘real’ people.

It’s a way of making sense of the world, carrying on a conversation with oneself from a position of shared context, curiosity and understanding. A way of imagining the world as a healthier, happier, more compassionate place. A way of filling an empty space inside.

Writers of fiction are engaged in a very similar exercise. They invent characters, and make them say and do funny and obvious and quirky things. Sometimes those characters represent aspects of the writer that the writer wants to express and explore. Sometimes they are characters the writer wishes they were more like (or perhaps less like). Sometimes they are characters the writer wishes existed in real life.

These characters are not so different from the imaginary friends that young children invent, that their parents and their ‘real’ friends later ridicule as childish. So young children will often then ‘put away’ their imaginary friends, and will talk with them only when they are alone. Or not at all.

We writers have no such shame about our characters, and may even employ them in a whole series of stories, and even include ourselves as the stories’ narrators.

The characters in my stories have lives that extend far beyond the page. I sometimes hear them talking to me when I’m thinking about some particular problem, or just daydreaming. They are my delightful, quirky, imaginary friends, my undemanding, wise, lifelong companions, and I don’t know what I’d do without them.

We are conditioned to think that we can ‘know’ another person, and hence we are often shocked when the behaviour that person exhibits seems completely ‘out of character’. But what we think we ‘know’ about other people is no more real than what we ‘know’ about our imaginary friends or the characters in novels, plays and songs. We make it all up, entirely from our imagination.

No one really knows who you are either, or how you think or how you feel. We don’t even really know ourselves. All we can do is try to make sense of our bodies’ behaviours, look for patterns, and construct them into the ’story of me’. And that story is just as imaginary as the stories we tell ourselves, and others, about who they are. And just as imaginary as the young child’s stories about their make-believe companions.

And because we don’t want to appear foolish to others, we nod and agree that these stories we tell and hear are true. We pretend to know ourselves and other people, pretend that we know who we are and who they are, when we’re just making it all up, and looking for confirmation that what we’ve made up is true, especially the ‘story of me’ we’ve made up.

Part of what we love about inventing imaginary friends, and story-writing, is the feeling of control we have over our invented characters. And part of it stems, I think, from the despair we feel about our ‘real’ selves and other ‘real’ people not being quite up to what we imagine they might or should be capable of, when our imaginary characters can be and can do anything. They are ‘perfectly’ who we imagine them to be.

Our education system, our workplaces, our political and religious ideologies, and our peers, all pressure us and tell us we can and must be and do better, that we can be and do anything if we strive hard and long and intelligently enough (and stop ‘daydreaming’). And Hollywood and literature sell us heroes who can do anything, and people who are our ideals of who we want to be, and of who we want to love. They keep us unhappy, desperately searching, hopelessly striving, and obedient.

And it’s all just stories, stuff made up in our, and others’, imaginations.

What if we could ‘park’ our unhappy ’stories of me’ and recognize them as the absurd and impossible fictions they are, and refuse to ‘own up’ to them?

What if we could set aside our stories of who and what others we think we know are, or could be, and just be with them, if that brings us joy, and not be with them, if it does not, without judgement? What if we could just be the wild creatures we remain, underneath all our stories, underneath the fictional ‘story of me’? (The cats and dogs we love might remind us how.)

And what if we could shamelessly and happily imagine new characters, dream or write them into being, characters that bring us pleasure and joy, even though they are not ‘real’, because they fill a little empty space inside us, and help us see through the bewildering and exhausting fiction of our own and others’ stories? Why should small children and writers have all the fun?

Our imaginations can cripple us, terrorize us, bleed us dry with regrets about what might have happened, and with dread about what might happen in the future. Many unhappy people are telling us now that we (and this ‘we’ is never defined, but it presumably includes you and me) have to “create a new story” to replace the simple sad truth of what is happening in the world, and then we have to work furiously to make this new story ‘real’.

But this is just another prescription for our continued enslavement and immiseration by stories of what “should be” and “could be”, a prison of impossibilities.

Instead, perhaps, our imaginations might liberate us from these terrible stories, by letting us see them for what they are — total fictions, shit made up in our heads, not to be taken seriously.

Perhaps we could rediscover what small children and fiction writers know — that our imaginations can let us create a world of remarkable, delightful characters of our own invention, through whom we can co-create new and wonderful stories, stories that are fun, invigorating, inspiring, joyful, comforting, relieving, entertaining — and, like all stories, completely, perfectly, untrue.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

I Didn’t Do It! (songs about No Free Will)

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Dave Pollard

image by Suno AI — its suggested ‘cover art’ for the Yacht Rock song below

Several new friends and acquaintances have asked me to explain what I mean when I say we have no free will. It’s hard to explain in words, and pretty much impossible to do so briefly. So I thought I might get some inspiration on how to convey it by drawing on real-life examples of things we do that we think are our decisions and under our control, to illustrate how they are not. Never provide a powerpoint when a story will always work better.

And what better way to tell a story than to do it through song? So, feeling especially lazy these cold, wet winter days, I gave Suno AI a one-paragraph subject prompt, and asked it to create some stories for me, and then set them to music. No pre-written poetry this time — I’m making AI do all the work. To get some different perspectives, I asked it to produce songs in a variety of genres, to see if the stories the songs told varied significantly by culture.

I confess at the outset that the music it produced is significantly better than the songs’ lyrics. My best (IMO) music has come when I’ve provided Suno with solid lyrics, and then, somewhat surprisingly, given it the absolute minimum guidance on the music — what voices, what instruments, and generally what genre I want, but not details on structure, composition, time signatures, chord sequences, or anything about the flow of the piece. It doesn’t understand your explanations about that stuff, and I’m starting to realize I don’t know much about it either.

But when you just give Suno a sentence or two about the song’s subject, and make it produce the lyrics and the music, as I did here, expect that the lyrics will suffer the most.

Although it did produce some duds, the following selections, I think, are good enough to make a discerning popular music listener’s library. Even if you do think we have free will.

Here’s the best of these songs [Suno version includes lyrics; SoundCloud version loads faster]:

K-Pop Song — Free Spirits
[Suno] [SoundCloud]

— “No free will” means never having to say you’re sorry. “I’m just a domino, push me once and watch me fall.” The music is fun, the harmonies excellent.

Zouk-Kompa Afro-Caribbean Song — Out of All Control
[Suno] [SoundCloud]

— Strong voices. Great rhythm and harmonies. Interesting instrumentation. Awesome instrumental outro. Totally danceable. Some pretty amazing lyrics! “We’re out of all control | Don’t you put that weight on my soul | Wired to the rhythm, Locked in the roll | Heartbeat marching to a story foretold | We’re out of all control So don’t blame me” and “Got these ghosts in my DNA | Got this script I didn’t write today | You want a choice where the wires all cross | You call it freedom but the coin’s already tossed”. My favourite of these songs.

Yacht Rock Song — No Say In The Matter
[Suno] [SoundCloud]

— I have a soft spot for Yacht Rock. Rich lush harmonies. A little sentimental. Good chord progressions and nice fills. Could have been a Fleetwood Mac song. Outro has me playing air guitar and has a sweet finish. Lyrics meh but I’m singing along to it every time I hear it.

Pop-R&B Song — I Didn’t Do It
version 1: [Suno] [SoundCloud]
version 2: [Suno] [SoundCloud]

— Just fun, both versions. Remarkable harmonies and vocal fills. Lots going on musically here in every line, not just routine verse-chorus stuff. “I didn’t do it, I swear it wasn’t me | Blame it on the cosmos, baby, blame it on the chemistry | If every move is written then I’m just following the script | I didn’t do it but I’ll take the benefits”.

So, in two senses, whether you’re surprised or appalled by this music — I didn’t do it!

Beyond a vague one-paragraph prompt, these songs — composition, lyrics and music, arrangement and performance — are all just AI looking for patterns that seem to please human listeners and readers, and feeding the results to us.

And, since I have no free will in any case, even the prompts, and the ‘decision’ to write this post, weren’t ‘mine’.

I hope you had no choice but to find them as interesting and fun as I did.

If you’re interested in hearing more of ‘my’ music, you can find it all on my Suno page (slow loading but includes lyrics), or my Soundcloud page (faster loading, no lyrics). ‘My’ six best (IMO) songs, with all music by AI based on my prompts:
1. After Us — a song about my feelings about civilization’s collapse, and what might come after (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
2. If It Wasn’t For Words — a song about how human life might have emerged on Earth if we’d never evolved language (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
3. Everything Is Fine — a tongue-in-cheek ‘protest’ song about our denial that everything is falling apart (lyrics mine, AI assisted)
4. Only This — a song about radical non-duality and a ‘glimpse’ of the absence of a separate self (lyrics entirely mine)
5. Rise and Shine — a K-Pop girl group style song on women achieving equality (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)
6. She Knows — Celtic-style song based on the maiden-mother-crone triple goddess myth (unedited AI lyrics based on my prompt)

Just to reiterate what I’ve said on my previous AI-inspired posts:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-conceived, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it, smartly and cautiously, while you can; it will soon be gone.

Posted in Creative Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | Leave a comment

The Tragedy and Beauty of Humanity: The Whys and Hows Don’t Matter

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Dave Pollard

This is #49 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.

my stitched-together 180º panorama view of half the lights around our local lake; right click and open in new tab to see full-screen

It’s hard not to be depressed, looking back at the past brutal year and ahead to the fraught one to come. Easy enough to find someone to blame, some ‘other’. Easy enough to say ‘I told you so’. Easy enough to shrug it off as being the inevitable trajectory of a species that seems far too smart for its own good, and for this planet’s good. Easy enough to say we have no free will, so it’s silly to fret about or lament or dread what’s done or what’s to come, since it’s the only thing that could have happened, or will happen. Easy enough to find any of thousands of popular salvationist groups who’ll tell you Everything Is Fine. (Or will be, once X takes control of things and “saves” us.)

The reason I describe our species’ history as a tragedy is that it seems pretty obviously an unavoidable disaster. Our species’ emergence was so novel, and it has produced so many absolutely wondrous things, that the fact it has now evolved to wreck the planet and inflict such untold misery on every species it shares Earth with, seems to me the very definition of tragedy. We’re like the child prodigy whose life ended quickly in addiction, violence, murder and suicide. We seemingly held such promise.

This is what I think about as I wander through my lovely sodden community in the early dark (“It’s 4pm. It’s already dark again. Who’re they ‘saving the daylight’ for?“) and the rain (local rivers flooded, water pooling everywhere), among the mostly very unhappy holiday shoppers.

Our beautiful world, full of people struggling to do their best, full of hope and anticipation, is now seemingly full of hate and rage at exactly the time we most need to trust each other and act together to cope with the enormous hardship and suffering that the accelerating collapse of our civilization is wreaking on all of us. I keep asking “What is the matter with us?” and simultaneously answering “There’s nothing wrong with us; we’re doing the best that we can.”

If civilization is indeed a “disease” it seems to infect us at a quite early age, and to set in more and more as we age. Do we ‘catch’ it from each other, or is it built into our bones, and our brains?

I’ve spent lots of time trying to understand the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of our emergence on our little planet, and our ruination of it — where we ‘went wrong’. I’ve theorized that it stemmed from the entanglement of our large brains, an evolutionary misstep that disconnected our innate sense of being part of everything, of all life on Earth, and consequently made us terrified of all the suddenly-separate ‘others’, and hence deranged us. Nothing to be done about that.

And yet. And yet…

As I wander around the lake with its million-light display, watching the ducks paddling around, the dogs sniffing everything, the delighted little kids staring in awe at the lights and displays, my dark winter blues are imbued with a growing sense of astonishment and wonder.

Ultimately, the reasons why and how we became what we’ve become as a species don’t matter. We can never know, and we can’t undo the process that made us who we are. We are the overseers and chroniclers of a world in the process of horrific, global, violent collapse. It will not help us to know how or why that came about, if we were even capable of comprehending that. I explore it simply because it seems to me to be a necessary part of chronicling this collapse, and that’s my self-assigned task in my final years of life. But I don’t pretend anything we ‘know’ could change anything. The hows and whys are all just stories, anyway.

I look at the staggering beauty all around me, and ask: Where does our perfectly reasonable sense of despair and fear and helpless rage come from? It comes, of course, entirely from inside our heads, where it is manufactured, in many ways, “to order” — to make sense of things as best as our brains are capable of, and also through our conditioning, as our cultural influences, both well-meant and malevolent, struggle with our biological imperatives, to determine what we do.

As much as I’d like to believe we can, in some ‘mind over matter’ process, quieten the Machine in Our Heads [This essay by Glenn Parton remains one of my all-time favourites; it’s part of John Zerzan’s monumental compilation Against Civilization], I’ve come to believe we are at the mercy of this endless buzz, and only in moments not of ‘our’ own choosing are we briefly liberated from our sense-making stories, and hence able to see the world as it actually is.

I’ll take those moments as they come.

I’m walking in the local park, around the lake, in the grey and the pouring rain. The adults seem miserable, the winds collapsing their umbrellas and soaking their clothes. But the children seem enchanted, and oblivious to the weather. One little girl is shouting excitedly to her parents “Let’s go see the secret door! It’s over there!” and running ahead along the path, urging them on. There is indeed a little miniature ‘hobbit door’, locked of course, in a hillock beside the path, bathed in soft light. There is probably nothing behind the door. Unless you have an imagination.

I crouch by the duck pond, where half the ducks are half-asleep (one eye open and one half of their brains alert), chortling quietly, while the other half of them dart around, turning upside down and digging in the shallow pond-bed for morsels. They seem quite intrigued by a relatively recent addition to the holiday light show on the lake — two wood-and-steel brightly-lit miniature pirate ships — but unfazed by everything else, including rambunctious kids and dogs:

I look at the water-speckled leaves of the trees and plants at the water’s edge, and marvel at the miracle of photosynthesis, which evolved, likely by sheer accident, 3.5Bya, and whose bacteria produced so much oxygen that it choked the atmosphere and caused a massive extinction event 1By later. It took another 1By (until just 1.5Bya) before chloroplasts evolved (apparently also by fortuitous accident) restabilizing the atmosphere, allowing fungi to evolve. But land plants took another 1By (until just 0.5Bya) to evolve — they’re newcomers, and there’s no clear consensus on how or why they evolved. So, strange as it might seem, sharks appeared on Earth before trees.

As I flee from the rain, headed towards the café, I almost bump into two people walking in opposite directions, being walked by their dogs. The dogs abruptly stop, tails wagging furiously, to greet each other, causing a minor pedestrian traffic jam at the street corner. The people involved look at each other rather helplessly and shrug, waiting as the dogs complete their greeting. I wonder whether the dogs have learned that this shrug is human body language for “OK get on with it we’ll wait for you”.

A moment later, I see two kids, a boy and a girl, deliberately splashing water on the sidewalks where it’s pooled. They wait patiently for the adults to pass, and then resume the play.

Inside, three young women are, quite obviously, flirting outrageously with the male barista. They are speaking Farsi, which I don’t understand. But they are also speaking a universal language that anyone can understand.

At one of the tables near me, two teenaged girls seated opposite each other are meticulously gluing tiny plastic coloured beads (called “drills” I am told), in precisely the same pattern, to the covers of two identical softcover romance novels. It’s the latest ‘friendship’ activity, they tell me. They draw the beads from a shared, sorted-by-colour plastic container with 60 compartments, each containing 1,000 beads. They glue them in tandem, one bead at a time, and chat and laugh and sip their lattes as they do.

On the way home, I listen to some of my favourite music on my headphones, including, these days, several of my ‘own’ songs. It’s not unusual nowadays to see me dancing and singing on my walks. It’s OK to be eccentric when you’re old. When my head is full of good music, there’s no room for those oppressive thoughts — regrets and nostalgia about the past, or dread and fears about the future. And people smile and nod when they see this old geezer happily shuffling along the street, sometimes grinning, and sometimes crying. And sometimes both at once.

What I am witnessing, it seems everywhere I turn today, at least when I am paying attention, is people having fun in the moment, freed at least briefly from the negative thoughts that weigh so heavily on most of us, or, in the cases of at least some of the littlest people and most of the wild creatures, un-afflicted by them. Free, at least for a few minutes, from all the thoughts that prevent us from just seeing, and just being, in the moment. All these thoughts are, after all, just stories, fictions. Shit we make up in our heads.

Because that’s how our culture conditions us, because we have the grey matter that permits it to do so. To keep us in line. To try to keep us safe, or to manipulate us, or to sell us something, or ‘for our own good’, or to keep us obedient to those with wealth and power. To perpetuate the human tragedy.

But that’s OK. The plot thickens. It’s just all unfolding the only way it could. Get ready. Here comes your cue!

It doesn’t have to have a happy ending to be a really, really good show.

Posted in Month-End Reflections | 6 Comments

Paralyzed By Complication: Our Broken Systems

Posted on December 23, 2025 by Dave Pollard

cartoon by the late Michael Leunig

There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.

There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have not prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.

There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.

There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.

There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.

The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great violation of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.

— David Ehrenfeld, Beginning Again (1994)

My friend Paul Heft sent me a fascinating video about all the problems that have arisen in our current public education systems, and why none of them is the ‘fault’ of teachers. It’s an interview with C Derick Varn, a much-travelled poet, philosopher and educator well-versed in issues of pedagogy.

The problem (actually the predicament) is that all human-made systems, as we try to scale them to accommodate more people and more diverse needs, eventually become so complicated that they become unsustainable, and become first dysfunctional, then sclerotic, and finally collapse of their own weight. We see this in our political systems, in centralized economic and financial systems, in our transportation, education, ‘security’, health ‘care’, in large corporations, institutions, and ‘administrations’, and every other system that was designed, with the best of intentions, to effectively and efficiently provide public services and goods. Back in the days when we were citizens, not mere ‘consumers’.

In recent years these systems have been bandaged together, subject to innumerable management consultants’ “process improvement” processes, made even worse by being even more centralized, opportunistically “privatized”, offshored and outsourced to save money, and, most recently, automated, using “self-help” replacements for irreplaceable human functions, and technologies varying from canned videos to AI “assistants”. Each of these bandaid solutions has made these systems less functional, less effective, harder to navigate and maintain, and ultimately even more expensive. Most of these systems are now in various stages of sclerosis and collapse.

But it is not in our nature, or within our competence, to just let them collapse and to invest instead in new, small scale alternative systems that revisit and reflect the original needs that the collapsing systems were designed to meet. We just can’t admit that these broken systems cannot be “fixed”. We can’t admit that all this fantastically expensive infrastructure we’ve invested in over the years is ill-suited and mostly useless for what is needed now. We (mostly progressives) can’t admit that government no longer has the resources to continue to bandaid the broken systems, that these bandaid fixes increasingly don’t work, and that throwing more money at them won’t help. And we (mostly right-wingers) can’t admit that privatizing them usually makes them more bureaucratic and much more expensive, less responsive to real needs, and more dysfunctional as their goal becomes maximizing investor profit, not meeting needs.

This disastrous situation has resulted because all human-designed systems are inherently complicated (massively so). Like an automobile, they require tons of maintenance (more and more as they get larger and older), and inevitably break down and finally collapse when it becomes impossibly difficult to fix them reliably. Complicated, human-made systems have very little resilience or redundancy. They’re unintentionally built to fail, and these days they fail sooner and sooner. Not deliberately. That’s just the nature of complicated systems.

Nature, by contrast, has evolved organic complex systems. They have evolved over millions and billions of years of trial and error to be massively resilient and contain multiple levels of redundancy (eg the number of seeds a plant produces to reproduce itself). We humans are intellectually incapable of designing truly complex systems — we haven’t the millennia of acquired ‘knowledge’ to learn how to respond to the untold number of circumstances that such systems have evolved to respond to. And we don’t have the resources (material or financial) to actually construct such a system, even if we had the competency. And AI systems, like other human-designed systems, are inherently massively complicated (essentially digital and electromechanical). They are not complex, and will merely exacerbate all the problems of our collapsing human-made complicated systems, not ‘solve’ them.

The above-linked video is a perfect case in point of how massively-complicated systems reach the point at which they will inevitably collapse. It explains how our public education systems, despite tons of competent, earnest, diligent, dedicated teachers, are now in the advanced stages of collapse. They cannot be ‘rescued’ by privatization (that will just make things worse, as the atrocious ‘for-profit colleges’ have amply demonstrated), or by pouring more money into them to ‘reform’ them. These systems cannot be fixed. Like with a broken-down old car, we have to let them go, and find a new way to meet the needs they once served. But we are so utterly invested in them, financially, emotionally, structurally, and philosophically, that doing so is almost unthinkable. With all of civilization’s systems in collapse, we can’t afford to abandon them and create something new, for a start, even if we could figure out how to do so when these systems are inextricably linked to all of our civilization’s other teetering, increasingly dysfunctional systems.

The collapse is therefore inevitably going to be awful. As they inevitably fall apart, the most likely replacement for these systems, when we walk away from them, is nothing at all. When we realize that our public education systems have devolved, despite educators’ best efforts, to being merely useless and expensive baby-sitting services, they will simply be abandoned. Eventually, after our economic systems have all collapsed and cities and other useless constructions of our civilization have been abandoned, we will need to find effective ways to teach and learn and mentor the essential skills needed by post-civ societies. We can’t begin to predict or even imagine what those skills will be, since we don’t know where we will be and what will and won’t be available and needed when that time comes. Forget ‘designing’ them, as much as humans love to design stuff. They will evolve, driven by the local needs of the moment, not be designed and built.

Some of the key points Derick makes in this video that reinforce this grim reality:

The decline in learning in public education is an international problem, especially in affluent nations. It’s not correlated with prevailing national education ‘principles’, or teacher quality, or education system budgets.
It starts with students, their upbringing (less literate parents produce less literate children), their plummeting attention spans (from average 30 minutes in 1950 to average 2 minutes today), commensurate inability to concentrate and focus, declining cognitive and critical thinking ability, social fragmentation, lack of motivation, less participation in interactive learning experiences outside of school, and widespread distrust of everything students are told.
Adults now have an average of a 7th-grade level of literacy, and a median 5th-grade level. That’s down two grades in just a generation.
Because honest assessment of learning would produce massive ‘failure’ rates that would hopelessly clog the system, ‘passing’ standards have plummeted, all the way up through university, and even valedictorians now often lack the literacy skills once possessed by most graduates.
This is worsened by growing admin bloat as systems get ever-larger, by increased use of heavily-marketed, ineffective and misused tech tools in the effort to cut costs, and by increasing diversion of funds to for-profit ‘private’ and religious schools.
AI is increasingly being used and promoted as effective and cost-saving (when it’s not), especially to right-wingers who have been propagandized to distrust teachers. AI tends to flatter users, does not allow development of nuanced and critical thinking, reduces conversational and interactive learning, and is often deployed as a cheap teacher substitute for poor and marginalized students, while elite schools move back toward ‘analog’ teaching, increasing the chasm of stratification between elite students (who are also in much smaller classes that allow more individual attention) and everyone else.
Political polarization is leading to ever more watered down curricula, book bans, and parent-imposed ‘opt outs’ of critical learning subjects, so that children are not exposed to any challenges to ‘established’ thinking.

If you buy his assessment of the current state of the system, it’s pretty obvious that privatization is not the answer, that simply throwing more money at the existing system is not the answer, and that the system cannot be ‘reformed’ by tinkering or even overhauling it. The problem is not with the schools or their curricula. The entire system is broken.

As with all the other collapsing systems, the ‘solution’ the rich and powerful are trying to sell us on (with some success) is to dismantle it (privatize it, undermine it, starve it), so the “government” can wash its hands of it, and all the problems it faces. (There’s a direct parallel in their ‘solution’ to the health care crisis.)

So the rich and powerful will be able to buy their children (and themselves) a quality education, quality health care, quality transportation, and all the other quality services and goods that were once available to almost everyone through functioning public systems.

As for the rest of us, when you’re on a sinking ship, it’s everyone for him/herself, dontcha know? In our land of unlimited opportunity, if you’re not rich and powerful and smart enough to avoid drowning, it must be your own fault.

Couldn’t be the system, could it?

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 4 Comments

Humanity’s Six Foundational Technologies

Posted on December 20, 2025 by Dave Pollard

AI depiction of Neanderthal woman making a carrier bag; my own prompt (and yes, I know the question of Neanderthals’ skin colour is controversial); the depiction is a photoshopped and AI-altered version of a ‘reconstructed’ image of Homo neanderthalensis, in the Neanderthal Museum, from wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 4.0

A recent Vlogbrothers video described the staggering impact that the invention of cordage and textiles has had on human development. The video features a fascinating interview by Hank Green with Virginia Postrel, author of the book The Fabric of Civilization. The interview reveals some amazing facts about this technology, such as:

A single pair of blue jeans contains about six miles of thread
One skilled spinner in pre-industrial India needed ~100 hours just to spin enough cotton for one pair of trousers
Silk is not made of short fibres but one continuous filament that can be miles long and which must be carefully unreeled from the cocoon
The earliest known string is about 50,000 years old and was likely made by Neanderthals; it was clearly ‘manufactured’—twisted and then plied in opposite directions for strength and durability
The sail for a Viking ship took more total labour to produce than the ship itself
Textiles were once the most commonly stolen items, serving as an alternative underground ‘currency’ in many cultures, and until the 20th century clothing was the most expensive line in most people’s household budget

Here’s an AI synopsis of the conversation that I thought captured its main points well:

1. Textiles are a foundational human technology—on par with agriculture

Virginia Postrel argues that fiber, cordage, and textiles are among humanity’s most important technologies, emerging before or alongside agriculture, and possibly enabling it. String-making predates farming and is at least 50,000 years old, likely developed by Neanderthals. Once humans could make cordage, they could create nets, bags, baby carriers, sails, and tools—making textiles a general-purpose technology essential to civilization.

2. We suffer from “textile amnesia” because of its modern abundance

The interview emphasizes that today’s extreme abundance and cheapness of clothing has made textile production largely invisible. Earlier generations routinely learned about spinning, weaving, and fibers in school, but this knowledge has nearly vanished in Postrel’s lifetime. This invisibility obscures how labor-intensive, innovative, and central textiles once were to everyday life and economic survival.

3. Textile labor shaped daily life, gender roles, and economies

For most of history, a huge share of human labor went into textiles. Spinning alone occupied vast amounts of women’s time across cultures and social classes. Spinning was nearly universal female labor.

4. Textiles drove trade, wealth, crime, and power

Cloth and garments were among the most valuable and portable forms of wealth. Theft records (such as those from London’s Old Bailey) show textiles as the most commonly stolen goods. Textiles were also central to long-distance trade, imperial expansion, and industrialization—often determining who held economic and political power.

5. The Industrial Revolution begins with spinning, not steam

The mechanization of spinning—especially cotton spinning—was a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. It triggered cascading effects throughout agriculture, manufacturing, global trade, and labor relations.

6. Innovation in textiles is incremental, disruptive, and cyclical

Textile history shows a pattern of slow improvements punctuated by sudden leaps (e.g., spinning machines, power looms, Jacquard cards). These innovations often initially provoked resistance, riots, and fear before frequently being adopted by the same workers who initially opposed them.

7. Aesthetic innovation matters as much as functional innovation

Postrel highlights that people have always cared about beauty, color, and meaning—not just utility. The global, independent discovery of indigo dye and the labor invested in decorative cloth thousands of years ago demonstrate that aesthetics are a driving force of innovation, not a luxury add-on.

8. Textiles connect technology, culture, and language

Textile metaphors permeate language (“thread,” “fabrication,” “on tenterhooks,” “shuttle”), reflecting how deeply textile processes shaped human thinking. The word “technology” itself shares roots with textile terms, underscoring how woven material culture underlies modern technological concepts.

9. Archaeology and history have systematically overlooked textiles

Because textiles rarely survive archaeologically, and because scholars long underestimated their importance [perhaps because most scholars were men], much textile evidence was ignored or destroyed. This has distorted historical understanding—despite the fact that many ancient records (such as the 3300 ya Linear B stone tablets) focus heavily on textile production. The evolution of textiles provides one of the clearest, longest-running case studies of how civilization is literally—and figuratively—woven together.

In his notes on the interview, Hank acknowledges that he now must add cordage and textiles to his list of the ‘foundational’ technologies of our species. His list now includes:

Language
Agriculture
Cordage and Textiles
Cooking and Fire
Containers
Stone tools

Hank was likely inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s work to include ‘containers’ on his list. Her argument was that the earliest critical invention of humans was not weaponry, but the carrier bag, needed to transport just about anything from place to place. Its “tie-in” (if you’ll excuse the play on words) to agriculture and to cordage and textiles is obvious. All these foundational technologies are tightly interconnected.

The subsequent invention of things like paper and the printing press and the computer and the electric light and antibiotics and vaccines and Haber-Bosch-process fertilizers, for example, have of course been important in the evolution of our species and its cultures.

But we probably could have made do without them.

Not sure about art and music. It’s pretty foundational to who we are, and predates language. Who/what would we be without them?

Just to reiterate what I’ve said on my previous AI-inspired posts:
1. I have a love-hate relationship with AI. When it’s used properly and carefully as a tool, as an aid to learning and creativity, I believe it can be very useful, and enormous fun. But most of its large-scale applications (like replacing jobs and facilitating wars and surveillance) are ill-considered, immoral, incompetently designed and conceived, vastly overreaching the actual capabilities of AI, ecologically disastrous, socially disruptive, and extremely dangerous.
2. The staggering amount that has been invested in AI has absolutely no viable business case to justify it. It represents possibly the most astounding squandering of money based purely on imagined and improbable future developments and blind faith, in history. Those who have studied this have concluded that this massive bubble will soon burst, and those who’ve invested in it will lose their shirts. At that time, the window to use AI as a learning and creativity tool will quickly close forever. Our playing with these essentially-free tools now is not going to aggravate its abusive uses, nor will it have any impact on the timing or extent of the coming AI crash. So my view is: use it, smartly and cautiously, while you can; it will soon be gone.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Links of the Month: January 2026

The Ikigai Game

Under the Veneer of the “Affordability Crisis”

Signs of Collapse: A Strategy of Deliberate Incoherence?

Time to Bury the Internet?

Make-Believe People

I Didn’t Do It! (songs about No Free Will)

The Tragedy and Beauty of Humanity: The Whys and Hows Don’t Matter

Paralyzed By Complication: Our Broken Systems

Humanity’s Six Foundational Technologies

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